I have received your note of the 18th instant from Paul Smith’s.

I regard your article as being a feat in that kind of work. I cannot tell you how I have suffered during many years through reports based more or less upon interviews with me. On one occasion I met, perhaps upon a street railway, a gentleman and a friend, with whom I had some casual conversation in regard to a public work in which I was engaged. I forgot at the time that he was an occasional writer for a New York daily paper. When I came to read the newspapers at the breakfast table the next morning, I found an article evidently written by him as the result of our conversation the day before, of such a character that it made me so ill that my wife, seeing my paleness, thought I was fainting away and ran to get remedies.

There are one or two things in your article which I wish were not there. One is the statement about the transverse roads, which you made from a recollection of what I said to you of the manner in which the suggestion for these roads grew out of an experience of fire engines running across the park. There is nothing literally untrue in your statement, and yet it is hardly just to Vaux. He seized, I remember, upon my tentative suggestion with the greater eagerness because of his familiarity with some construction partially serving a similar purpose in the zoological garden in Regent’s Park. Another is that I am spoken of as “Editor” of Putnam’s Magazine. Curtis and Dana were the editors, behind the door. They were carefully concealed. All editorial correspondence was in the third person. I was rather the Secretary of the editor. I never appeared as the editor, but only as the broker between the editor and the contributor, printers, etc. I was by no means competent to be the editor.

You say that you are going to Mount Royal. I do hope that you will have a fine day there, for the panoramic spectacle is sometimes superb. You know that there was a bad blundering in the work under our plan there, but I think you will realize that it was the design to preserve and develop the characteristic scenery of the mountain, while securing fairly convenient access to it and exhibition of it, and other accommodations for crowds of people. I hope that you will go to Quebec and enjoy the suburbs as well as the town. It is the most interesting town and neighborhood north of Mexico. In saying this, I refer, among other things, to the old cottages of the habitants, some of which, you will see, for example, in the drive to Montmorenci. From these Richardson took hints, at my suggestion, which he afterwards turned to practical use.

I am going South, to be absent three or four weeks.

Sincerely Yours

[695]

I have yours of the 22nd September.

I am glad to hear what you say of Ulrich. The report about him which I saw in a newspaper was very wicked, and so far specific that I needed some assurance from you to be entirely satisfied that there was nothing in it.

I shall expect to hear from you at Biltmore. It will be difficult for me to come to Chicago in October, but more difficult later. I shall probably be occupied at Biltmore & Atlanta for nearly a month to come. I do not suppose that you will by that time be prepared to enter upon negotiations with the South Park Commission, but it will be full time for some conference on the subject, and it will be desirable that such conference should be held and the policy of the Directors determined before Ulrich leaves, as his testimony may be required as to various matters of detail; in regard to the destruction and removal of trees, for example. If he is going back to California it may be desirable that the legal counsel of the Directors should obtain some affidavits from him before he leaves.

I shall not be able to be with you on the ninth. You say that you will be glad to receive any suggestions that I can offer as to making the best use of “the opportunity to wind up in the proper way for our corps.” You are very much better at that sort of business than it is in my power to be, but I will give [698]you the leading thought which is in my mind at this time on the whole subject of the Fair, though it seems to me that I have expressed it to you before.

In a pioneer condition of society it necessarily occurs that each man has to depend to a great degree upon the application of his own personal knowledge and skill to the meeting of his wants. As to many wants he is at least in a condition but measurably better in this respect than was Robinson Crusoe after he was able to secure an interchange of services with man Friday.

In every old and well organized community, in the degree that each member of it devotes himself to a special field of service to others of that community, and in the degree that he becomes a notably proficient, wise and refined worker in that special field, he becomes useful to the community and by interchange of services becomes prosperous.

What we call the pioneer condition is the antithesis in this respect of an old and fully organized social state. The pioneer condition is a condition in which the elements of a fully organized state of society are not, and cannot be brought together and into co-operation. I have lived in communities in which a farmer not only farmed, but often did the best he could in making his own shoes, his own harnesses, his own tables and chairs, and in which if a shoemaker, a harnessmaker or a cabinet maker by chance strayed he soon lost skill in his calling through disuse of it, and became a make-shift farmer and little better than a botcher at his own trade as well as at all others. Necessarily, in such a primitive state of life, make-shift arrangements are the rule. And if this is true in regard to matters which we call materialistic, how much more in such matters as courts of justice, such matters as banks, and yet more in regard to matters spiritualistic, and yet again more in regard to matters of what we call cultivated life; matters of Art.

The chief historic interest of the Columbian Exposition will be found to lie in the demonstration which it has presented that it had at this period become possible in this New World that those placed in charge of such an enterprise, should be disposed and should be able to find and get together and make work together, such a body of men, each specially apt in a distinct field of refined industry, as have been necessary to the degree of success that has been secured in an undertaking which is so largely of a Fine Art character; to secure in this undertaking, in such degree as has been secured, the primary condition of a work of art, that is to say, the subordinateness and contributiveness of many and varied particulars to a finely effective action upon the imagination.

Without assuming that in this one respect of the most essential quality of a work of art, the Columbian Exposition has as respectable a standing as any world’s fair that has been had in the Old World, I think that you may, without bragging, assume that it stands so well as to make it a demonstration that the United States is well advanced in its emergence from the distinctive necessary hardship of pioneer life.

Possibly the Exposition even suggests that something may have been [699]gained by a vacation of the white races from the artificial and highly regulated conditions to which they have for many generations been subject. I would not say this without distinctly recognizing that the vacation has been taken at considerable cost, as manifest, for instance, in the continuation of Whitecap and Lynch-law proceedings and in the setting of certain currents toward such ideas of commercial exchange and media of commercial exchange as are characteristic of a primitive and childish state of human society.

Faithfully Yours,