As to the matter of your note to Mr. Codman, there is a circumstance or condition to be taken into account which it is not easy even for those directly handling affairs here to keep as fixedly and clearly in mind as is desirable. It must be extremely difficult for you and all outsiders to do so. It is this: that our instructions from the outset have required us to consider what we were to make here as a Camp to be occupied for a brief period in order that during that period a certain purpose for the time being may be well served. We are held to that purpose. Our work is good or bad as it is adapted to serve that purpose. If other purposes are to be served, fitness for such other purposes must occur incidentally if not accidentally. It is true that the Art Building is exceptionally substantial, but it is so not because the Art Building was required to be fitted to more distant and lasting ends than the other structures, but for a reason similar to that which would operate in the planning of a powder magazine in a Military Camp; namely: the special importance of securing its intended contents from fire or other accidents. In other buildings much less importance was to be given this consideration. No valuable pictures would have been sent to a building not exceptionally secure from injury by fire, tornadoes, mobs and earthquakes.

For such structures as the terraces and other retaining walls, quays and wharves the aim has been to expend no more than was necessary to fit them to serve their purposes barely to the end of the period of the Exposition, and so nicely has this point been kept in view that it is not expected that the structures will everywhere fulfill the condition except by occasional shoring, reinforcements, and repairs at certain points; these points being where it has been foreseen that expedients for the purpose can be used without marring the general effect. Such repairs and reinforcements are even now being made.

Take due account of this “Camp” condition of the problem and of its necessary results and then give a little thought to this other circumstance. Growing more or less indirectly and remotely but surely out of the frontier conditions of life from and through which our present race of Americans has been developed, there is no peculiarity of our National character more marked than that of its propensity to try to make things answer purposes for which they have not been designed, and to which they are but imperfectly adapted; the make-shift propensity. The propensity which is expressed in the phrase “I guess we can manage to make it do.” All that is distinctive in the American variety of Philistinism has its root in this propensity. And naturally the work here had not fairly begun under such instructions as I have stated, before all Philistia was hotly engaged in a hunt for arguments and excuses for trying to make use [574]of the temporary and expediential structures of the Exposition as make-shifts for ends with regard to which they were not designed and for which they are not, and can, by no possibility, be, really well adapted.

All the sounder and more mature civilized sense of the Country should be engaged to contend with this propensity; if it is not very good things are sure to result in very bad things.

To fully understand the situation you must further take into account the fact that much land speculation is concerned and that if the lambs can be made to imagine that these Exposition stage properties that we are making are really what they seem to be and that they can be retained as permanent improvements, the wolves will be happier.

What I have said of the temporary purpose to be served by the structures in general applies to canals and basins more than to anything else. All the surface staff is laid upon a wall of slender piling and planking calculated to be barely strong enough to hold up the banks for about a year. In five years not only will the staff be peeling off and breaking up, as I saw last April that it already was in the structures of the Paris Exposition, but the timbers and planks will be springing out and giving way. In a little longer period natural forces will warp, crack and crumble it, and acting on the timber beneath begin the work of establishing an irregular meandering shore, wholly agreeable as the ground work of water courses in a Park to be prepared with natural motives, wholly unsuitable to anything like formal and architectural gardening.

Remember also that the apparent high grounds of the Exposition are deceptive: mere ridges enclosing great craters which are now covered by the buildings and terraces. There is not one acre of ground now having an architectural aspect upon which a piece of good permanent architectural gardening work could be made, except by a great outlay for grading and great expense for the establishment of fixed and permanent architectural conditions. Looking to the place as the site of a great Public Park for Chicago, in future years, I do not think that it would cost nearly as much to provide conditions of agreeable, natural scenery, as to perpetuate in such conditions as those now to be seen on the grounds.

Yours faithfully,