There are two reasons why you might decline the appointment. One you mention: that it would tend to aggravate the popular error which confuses the planting and management of trees with reference to timber with the planting and management of trees with reference to scenery. The other: your liability to be absent from town at critical meetings of the Board. Both should have serious consideration.

But, also, it should be considered whether the real question does not come in this way. You have a forester’s knowledge of trees, and, consequently, what the ordinary intelligent citizen has not, an appreciation of the distinction between the planting and treatment of trees with reference to the proper ends of forestry, and with reference to the proper ends of landscape art. Are you in this respect less or more qualified for the duties of the office than the citizen who is likely to be appointed if you decline? The average respectable citizen, according to my experience, knows nothing of any such distinction. And, as business is commonly transacted in the Park Board, it is extremely difficult to get him to pay any intelligent regard to it. He habitually thinks of a tree as a tree; a piece of public property like a wall, a building, a bridge. He does not see a tree as an element of a future landscape any more than he sees it as an element of a forest. It is a piece of goods. It has cost public money. It represents public money. To fell it is a waste of so much public money. He cannot resist any ignorant public clamor against the destruction of it.

Once, as a result of such ignorant public clamor, the Park Board of New York passed an order forbidding me to have a single tree felled without a special order of the Board for that particular tree. There were at the time many thousands of poor, cheap, rapid-growing trees scattered over the Park [890]that had been planted to serve as nurses, and which were then, because of previous neglect when I was absent, overgrowing, crowding and making wholly unfit for their purpose the trees which had been planted with a view to ultimate landscape effect.

You would have understood what I was after when I began systematically to thin out these nurses. The public, the Commissioners, could not.

I am inclined, for the reason thus illustrated, to advise you to take the position. I should so advise you unqualifiedly but for the reason that your professional duties elsewhere may require you to be absent from the city too much. I should hope they would not. But of that you can best judge.

I am inclined to think that it would be an advantage to you professionally. Particularly so if you should be able to make it manifest that you recognize clearly that the proper management of public parks differs radically, on the one hand, from the proper management of gardens, and on the other hand from the proper management of forests. You can hardly believe how mischievous; how disastrous to good results and sound economy in obtaining them, is the inability of most intelligent men to make this differentiation. You would be able to make it. You do habitually make it, as I have seen at Biltmore. And in making it and keeping it, as you would, clearly before your associates of the Park Commission, you would render the city most valuable service. And, confidentially, I will say that no one in the service of the Park Commission is {nearly} as much inclined to make this distinction as, in my judgment, is desirable. I think Central Park is, for this reason, a much less valuable property than it might have been, or than, even now, it might be made.

Possibly it would be well for you in accepting (or even in declining) the position, to explain that it is not to be supposed that your professional knowledge as a forester has specially fitted you for the duty of a Commissioner, but that, in the study of your distinctive profession, you have probably acquired some knowledge of the more important constituents of landscape scenery that might make you useful, etc.

It is of immense importance to New York of the future that the greater parks should at this period of their formation be intelligently administered. You, while a young man, are fully able to see that the policy of management cannot wisely, prudently, {accurately}, be directed simply to producing a pleasing impression upon the ignorant visitor this year or the next. The average Commissioner cannot look further ahead at most than next year.

I am Very Truly Yours