I cannot without a sacrifice of self respect any longer allow myself to be held responsible for the duties implied by the designation, Architect-in-Chief and Superintendent of the Central Park.

I must apologize for the tardiness of this acknowledgement. It has been owing to the reluctance with which under any circumstances I should leave the Central Park.

If I could be charged with any specific duties of design or of superintendence, or of both, being responsible directly to you and having sole control—the necessary means for a true and honorable performance of those duties—I could no where in the world put to better use such talent as I possess, or live with more satisfaction to my tastes and inclinations, than on the Central Park.

I have no right to claim, nor would it become [me] to request from you, a position more agreeable to myself than that which by your kindness and your perhaps too favorable judgment of my abilities I now occupy.

I am prepared, therefore, to withdraw entirely from your service, and shall do so, whenever it may be convenient for you to permit me, with sentiments of gratitude to each of you personally for which I have never more felt the occasion than at the moment of this writing.

I present my resignation of the office of Architect in Chief and Superintendent, to take effect from the date of your next regular meeting, holding myself [298]in your service, however, until further orders, for such of the duties of my present office as I am able to execute satisfactorily to myself.

From the commencement of the work to this time, there has been a difference of opinion between myself and the Board—between myself and, so far as I know, every member of the Board. There have been various reasons why I have not clearly defined this difference and thrown the responsibility of my acting contrary to my own convictions more distinctly upon the Board. I was called suddenly and unexpectedly to the duties of my office. I was not lacking in the necessary confidence in myself for my duties, but I knew that I was inexperienced in dealing with a great enterprise, and I looked with deep respect upon all of you, gentlemen of the Commission. I have always looked upon you not only as my elders, as my employers, my official superiors, but as men of experience in dealing with large enterprises, as statesmen—bankers, directors of Rail Roads and other great works, and, although with reference to matters of organization & discipline, and in matters of taste, I have always acted confidently on my own convictions, always expressed my convictions distinctly, frankly and confidently, upon proper occasion, I have had too great respect for your several judgments to be willing to express—to urge—almost to hold fast in my own mind, to an opinion upon any broad question of general policy in which I differed with you—with any of you—unless there was a very distinct difference of opinion among you.

I have always nevertheless felt inclined to think that in one respect your general policy was inadequate to the business you have had in hand. I have felt that in certain directions you were unwilling to go far enough.

Recent experience has confirmed and strengthened this latent conviction—has, in my judgment, demonstrated—that at least where I am concerned, in the way that I am, here, that your policy is a wrong one—or rather I mean, and it was this conviction & this only which led to my resignation, that I am not able, that I have not the ability to succeed, to accomplish what is right, what is demanded by the public, what is demanded of my own conscience of a man in my position, under certain conditions which in your good judgment have been necessary.

My own shortcomings—my own inability—was what I most distinctly felt, when I determined to send you my resignation. I had still a feeling that I might have succeeded, that I might still succeed, if you had thought it right to place certain matters on a different footing, but I did not feel disposed, nor did I feel able to, analyze, and lay before you, and argue with you, that you had been wrong—that was not and that is not my disposition. I considered that I had accepted & undertaken a certain duty from you, and upon your own terms, and in that duty I had failed, and under those circumstances, I could not expostulate, or complain.

The President’s request, however, has led me to analyze the impulses of my action, and I can not avoid the conclusion that there has been an error on your [299]part, as well as a failure on mine, and in now endeavoring to show you with entire frankness the causes & grounds of the conviction that led me to offer you my resignation, I shall at the same time freely assert my own judgment in this matter.

April 7th, 1860, you instructed me to present at the earliest possible moment a detailed statement to you of the work proposed to be done within the year, with full estimates and explanations and reasons. The office force I had was inadequate to the duty. It was wrong for me to undertake to prepare such a statement and estimate with the other duties I had. Having undertaken it, I was obliged to depend on the judgment of the engineers more than it was just to myself to do, and was necessarily much longer about it than the Commission had supposed that I should be. Feeling this and seeing also that much important business was delayed pending the report, I was driven to hasten its preparation by every possible means. I at length undertook to have it ready at a certain date when a meeting of the Board was called. To do so the engineers and clerks worked night and day, doing two days’ work in one. When the calculations were complete, I had no time to give them a proper review.

The Board approved the plan and I was ordered to go on with the work proposed. Thus I would seem to have undertaken that certain work should be done within a certain time at a certain cost. To be safe in doing so I unquestionably should have had a clear book account with every section of the work balanced & compared monthly or oftener with the estimate, so that where we have allowed $200 for the spading of an acre, $400 should not be spent on it. This was simply impossible without an immediate increase of the office force. Much work had been sadly delayed by the necessity of urging the estimates—work that could be no longer postponed required all hands. I did propose that the book-keeper of the Main Financial Account should have two clerks at $1 a day and be required to keep an account of the expense of labor at certain points, which with this assistance he had informed me that he believed he could—but the suggestion was not received favorably.

I did not long press it or apply to the Board, because I had good reason for believing that if I did I should be unsuccessful. I had repeatedly during the previous winter urged the necessity, the economical necessity, of an increased staff of Superintendence, without the slightest good effect. I did state to the Comptroller that I considered that the whole work of the estimates would have been wasted, except as a means of getting the Board to act, unless we could be kept constantly informed, with some approach to accuracy, of the manner in which the cost of the work, as it progressed, corresponded with the estimates. I believe that we were both too much occupied with matters of pressing necessity to give much attention to anything which could be delayed, and this statement is true, in my judgment, with regard to the Comptroller and myself, for almost any, and every, day since November 1857. It was however especially the case at the period to which I now refer. The immediate necessities of the work which had been most inopportunely delayed for the orders of the Board—the Board [300] waiting for the estimates—required my constant & entire attention: the engineers employed on the Reservoir estimates, questions of supplies and tools and other pressing matters, the settling with the Reservoir contractors, &c., excluded any questions not immediately pressing from discussion when I saw the Comptroller.

January 22nd, last Tuesday, I found myself standing in this position. The period to which the estimates referred had been some weeks ended. There was no book account, no means of stating accurately how the work stood, but [there was] evidence palpable enough & not to be longer doubted that my undertaking has failed—not nearly the progress of the work which you had reason to expect, and not nearly enough of the $820,000 appropriated for that work left to complete what was left undone of that work. So far was the work behind, and so much had it cost beyond the estimates, that it was clear to me that unless the detail of expenditure could be more closely measured in future and the superintendence could be more thorough, the park would not be completed within the amount which the Commission had pledged itself, confiding in my statements and trusting to my honesty and efficiency, not to exceed. You will at once ask in what particulars have we exceeded our estimates and why? Have the bridges and arch ways taken more money than you voted for them? Those we built ourselves have not. The cost of those built by contract we don’t yet know. Have the roads cost more than we reckoned? They have, a small percentage. Has the embankment material from outside cost more than we estimated? It has not. What is it that has cost so much more and why? That is what I cannot tell you. That is what I want to know. That is what I have no means of knowing, and can only after some time form a trustworthy and accurate judgment about, after a long series of laborious calculations. I had not the slightest idea of withholding a knowledge of this from the Commission or of shirking the duty of making any revision of the plans, or of refusing any duty which the Commission might still have confidence to call upon me for, but I considered that I stood convicted on prima facie evidence either of incompetence or neglect of duty. I was unable to lay the whole matter at once clearly before you with exact calculations, but to at once decline holding any longer than was necessary a position, the very title of which implied duties which I considered that I had not performed, which I was not performing and which, as matters stood, I felt sure that I was not going to perform, I felt to be unjust to you and dishonorable to myself. I was impelled to relieve myself from it without a single day’s delay if that were possible. I am blamed for not advising the Comptroller or the President of my intention—and taking their advice. I know very well what the Comptroller’s advice would be—it would be to wait. I think in a case of this kind my business lay with the Board & the whole Board, & though I certainly should have advised with the Comptroller if there had been opportunity, after I had taken this view of my duty clearly enough to express it to him, I did not feel inclined to delay for that purpose what I deemed a proper official action.

I have said that I was moved to resign not more by the mortification of [301] having failed in my undertaking than because I was sure that I was not going to do my duty as generally understood—by despair of being able to retrieve my position, despair of being able to do what ought to be the duty of a man occupying a position such as mine before the public. I saw that inevitably I was to continue a struggle under difficulties which had already mastered me, and I felt that, with whatever courage I continued it, I had not the necessary strength for success.

To look at the matter immediately before me. Even before I can let the Board know, clearly and definitely, how the work stands, what has been wrong, how far wrong, why wrong, a laborious series of measurements and calculations must be made, and then before I could, if I then should, be allowed to again undertake the responsibility of another year’s work, with the now unquestionable need of a very much more thorough Superintendence—greater directness & efficiency of management—before this, I must have another set of calculations like that of last year, only more full, more detailed, more accurate, an enormous deal of work in them—and here was the winter, to which so much had been deferred because our office force had been inadequate for it hitherto, already half gone. It must needs be got at immediately to be of any good, not to be again a sham and a deceit to the Board and to myself. What was my prospect of getting through with it satisfactorily to myself—honorably—honestly?

Why, gentlemen, I was under peremptory instructions, at that moment, to reduce my force of Superintendence in every department. I had been taken to task, only two days before, and this for the 500th time at least, for keeping so many engineers, so many draftsmen, so many clerks, so many gardeners. In every direction I was told that I had too many and that I must get rid of them, and when I replied that in my own judgment I had much too little assistance, that I needed more, and that I could not go on with less, I had been told decisively that I must get on with less. And when I said that in my judgment the work was a great deal too much for the force I had—that all hands were, in fact, over-worked, very much over-worked—it was answered that that was a matter of opinion & my opinion was to be overruled.

Well, Sir, the next morning I sent for the Superintending Engineer and told him that it was thought necessary that we should reduce our office force. At the same time I intended to have given him instructions for some new calculations which I needed in order to bring the true state of the work before you, but he gave me at once very politely but very clearly to understand that it was useless to ask him to make any more bricks without straw. There was a great arrear of work to be brought up & with a reduced force any additional work was out of the question. In order to see whether it would be possible to task our force any more heavily, I directed a return to be made me of the time each engineer & clerk had been employed during the last 3 months. I find that after an hour’s ride and walk to reach the office, which is a good way up town, they have been, usually, at work 11½ hours a day. This is exclusive of meals & of going & coming. We have required these men all to be absent from home 14 hours a day [302] usually; 15 or 16 on an average, for frequently they are at work on the park 14 & 15 hours, sometimes 16. Who are these men? Why, the most of them, educated gentlemen, with families who have the same social duties, the same family duties, that you have, that I have, and that I also almost wholly neglect, as the Comptroller does too, and for these social & personal & family requirements and for sleep we allow them 8 or at most ten hours a day. It is my opinion that this is too little, that it is not right to require more of them than we do—is not right to require so much of them. Tisn’t right and tisn’t politic—it will be sure to lead to mistakes or trouble in some way, as I think it has been [to] Comptroller Green.

I sent for the Assistant Superintending Engineer and asked him to explain something in an estimate he had given me, something that appeared to me not right. After looking at it a moment, he put his hand to his head and said—evidently with great reluctance, “You must excuse me, Sir, but the truth is, I am quite used up and cannot collect my thoughts sufficiently to understand it now. If you will let me have a day or two’s rest, I think I can explain it satisfactorily.” He is a sturdy hard-headed German, tough as a pine-knot, and able to do more work than almost any man I know. But he was worked out. I sent him home immediately and he was not able to get out of bed for a week. Nothing in the world ailed him but nervous exhaustion, want of mental rest & sleep. I know how it was, because for the last month or two, when I have gone to bed myself, I have often left him at work in the office—and I generally do more work myself at night than by day. Except in an emergency it is not right to require men to work in that way. It is not right & is not safe & is not economical. Except in an emergency it is unjust & cruel—and, in a work so long established as this has been, that such an emergency should occur & be prolonged for months, argues bad management. It is bad management, the worst management, which is thus indicated and I am unwilling to be in any manner longer held responsible for such management. But [it is] not an emergency. It has been so from the beginning.

But that, gentlemen, is not the point. How did I find myself situated on the day I sent you my resignation? I had the knowledge that the force was deemed too large already and I was at that moment under instructions to reduce it. I ask you again, how could I hope to have the work which I saw looming up before me, ever got through with in a manner which would be creditable to me, which would allow me to trust with confidence to the results, to lay those results before you under my hand with a good conscience? I could not do it.

This is the last case, Sir—but, I repeat, Sir, it has been practically the same from the beginning of the work—from the beginning of the work to this day. I have never made a suggestion looking to an increase of my authority in this respect, I have never intimated my real need, my personal judgment as to my needs—as to the needs of the work, in this respect—to the Board or to any single member of the Board, that I have not seen evidence that my statements were regarded with incredulity. I have never ventured to urge my own wishes that I [303] have not found myself in shoal-water, and seen plainly enough that if I persisted I should soon touch the bottom of the Board’s confidence.

I have told you honestly under what feeling I was influenced to resign my office last week. It was the conviction of my own inability to do justice to the work that led me to that step. I was not successful and I had no confidence that I should be successful. I stood confessed as one derelict of duty. And in such a position I am not the man to stand one day. That was my position, Sir, and that was all I had to say. But the duty which you, Mr. President, suggested to me, the task you gave me, has involved much reflection upon the causes of my failure, of my apparent neglect of duty. If I had answered off hand what was the difficulty, I should have said perhaps my broken thigh, the weakness of nerve consequent thereon, or anything else. But upon reflection I see that the particular difficulties under which I have succumbed are not merely temporary & occasional—they are normal & constant—they have existed from the beginning of the work. I have been overwhelmed by this before. They drifted me once close on the edge of a brain-fever, and you were good enough to send me, upon advice of my physician, to Europe on account of the serious illness into which, through the anxiety which they caused me, I once fell. But that did not remedy them. More than once or twice, I have fainted from nervous exhaustion and been carried to my bed, and it was in the same way, sir, from sheer weakness & exhaustion arising from anxiety and doubt & trouble—in matters upon which it is unnecessary & wrong that I should have had any doubt, trouble or anxiety at all—that I fainted in my carriage & was run away with last summer, & so damaged as you know. I would have gone on, Sir, if I could, but it’s as plain to me as possible that if I have got to have such a responsibility on my mind next year—with the same obstacles to my meeting it successfully and satisfactorily to myself—that another summer will finish me, and I had better at once, before we begin upon the preliminary work for the next season, take—an entirely different position—or—quit the park, altogether.

At the bottom of the most important function of my office, Mr. President, there must be something which you can not buy in any market, of good quality, merely for money. It is a natural, spontaneous, individual action of imagination—of creative fancy. I mean that the best conceptions of scenery, the best plans, details of plans—intentions—the best, are not contrived by effort, but are spontaneous and instinctive and no man would be worthy of my office, who did not know that he must depend for his best success less upon any strong effort, than upon a good instinct. There are circumstances favorable to the action of this good instinct, and there are circumstances unfavorable to it. There are circumstances under which no amount of good intention & hard labor will produce good design. What would you think of a landscape painter who stayed in town all summer, ever so industriously dabbing at his canvas? But what is most necessary to really good design is a satisfaction in the work for itself and not merely in what [304] it may buy or purchase. I say, then, I can not do my duty as it ought to be done, without having some enjoyment in it, and it’s wrong for me to pretend to be doing it when I am conscious that my ability to do it well is in any considerable degree impaired. The work of design necessarily supposes the designer to have & to carry about with him a gallery of mental pictures, and in all parts of the park I constantly have before me, more or less distinctly, more or less vaguely, a picture, which as Superintendent I am constantly laboring to realize. Necessarily, the crude maps which are laid before you are but the merest hints of the more rigid outlines of these pictures, of these plans.

I shall venture to assume to myself the title of artist and to add that no sculptor, painter or architect can have anything like the difficulty in sketching and conveying a knowledge of his design to those who employ him which must attend upon an artist employed for such a kind of designing as is required of me. The design must be almost exclusively in my imagination. No one but myself can feel, and without feeling no one can understand, at the present time, the true value or purport of much that is done on the park, of much that needs to be done. Consequently, except under my guidance these pictures can never be perfectly realized and if I am interrupted and another hand takes up the tools, the interior purpose which has actuated me will be very liable to be thwarted, and confusion and a vague discord result. Does the work which has thus far been done accomplish my design? No more than stretching the canvas & chalking a few outlines, realizes the painter’s. Why, the work has been thus far wholly & entirely with dead, inert materials. My picture is all alive—its very essence is life, human & vegetable. The work which has been done has had no interest to me except as a basis, as a canvas, as a block.

On this foundation I have now to build: this canvas I have to paint, this rough-hewn head to chisel and rub into the delicacy and crispness of life—these rude brown & grey slopes, poles and sticks, to nurse and tend and train and direct toward that ideal for which & for which alone they have been shaped and planted in these three years. The work upon them will much of it have been vainly directed, wastefully expended, if they miss of just such nurture, training, directing, coaxing as I want to give them.

I shall not be understood in telling this to be desirous to magnify my office or argue my own importance in it. It is as far as possible from my intention to do so. What I want to get at is to convey to you the consciousness which I have that the chief value of my personal services to you rests upon a sort of artistic perception of what is necessary to be done on the park, this perception being dependent on a sense of propriety & the fitness of things, dependent in a measure upon the possession of an ideal, of my personal ideal, which ideal & which sense of propriety, consequently, even a man of much greater talent in expressing himself, would be unable, in all cases, instantly on call, to fully convey and make clear to others. That is to say, I would do so & so, tomorrow on the park. I know as well as I know when I ought to eat or sleep, that this ought to be done; that it [305] ought to be done to-morrow and not next week, and in this manner & not another; but why it ought to be done to-morrow, why it ought to be done at all, I can not demonstrate. At all events, I can not, without neglecting matters still more important, go to town, find the comptroller, wait his leisure, & then so fully demonstrate it that he can not have the shadow of a doubt of its immediate & peremptory & unquestionable necessity. But I find 9 times in 10 I must do this or let it go. And I let it go. But I am none the less certain that it ought to have been done. I am discouraged & disheartened if I am unable to do it. And this has been my daily & hourly experience during the last year.

I never once have been in the lower part of the park that I have not experienced shame, disappointment, discouragement. I have found it [so) today, and I can point out to you today a dozen things which I can’t see without feeling myself disgraced by them. I will refer to one which in the last month must have been remarked, must have been considered and discussed to my disgrace, by thousands & thousands of people.

There is a beautiful bow-bridge across the Lake. It is the direct central avenue of communication through the park. It is one of the best, if not the best, point from which to observe the lake and the Ramble &, at this season, the skating multitude. The planking of the floor was delayed until near winter this year. When the ice formed in the lake it was still, with many other matters, incomplete. Remarking to the property clerk that it would cost no more to employ two men one day than one man two days, I directed the employment of more carpenters to hasten its completion before skating commenced. The Comptroller the next morning countermanded this order & at the same time dismissed several men who were in the midst of jobs also important, as I thought, to be immediately completed. At length, however, the planking was done, but it still needed caulking. The Comptroller was applied to by the Superintending Engineer to employ a caulker: no caulker came. The Superintending Engineer and the Carpenter both came to me to say that it was important that the caulking should be done immediately, and I wrote myself to the Comptroller requesting him to give an immediate order for the caulker; I have since then sent him several verbal requests to the same effect. I never received a reply from him, but understanding that he said to one who urged it upon him that he was not sure that it was necessary that it should be caulked, I wrote him again, explaining the necessity & saying that this bridge must be closed till caulked—and there it is to this day, that beautiful bridge, with great crowds on both ends of it any day, looking through the barricade, seeing everything apparently clear, seeing no reason why they should not use it, but prevented by barricades, and all the time a necessity for two officers to watch these barricades because people under such circumstances will try if they have a chance to remove them or to get over them.

I should remove the barricades if I were ordered to do so by the Comptroller, but I think it would be wrong to do so, would be to the injury of the bridge, and I don’t want to provoke such an order. I prefer to have the caulking [306] delayed to the chance of provoking it. I mean that that bridge, which is more needed to prevent injury to the banks at this season than any other, has been closed for nearly three months, when it ought to have been closed three days.

I can point to instances far more disheartening in their character than this, far more mortifying to me, and will do so now if you wish.

Years ago, Mr. President, more than twenty years ago, before I had ever seen a park, though not before I had dreamed of one a good many times, I was a merchant’s clerk in a respectable French Importing house in this city. I believe they have the reputation of being rather close dealers. They are supposed to look rather sharp after the pennies, & if this is their reputation I think it is a just one. I thought so when I left them, & if I hadn’t thought so I should have remained with them. Well Sir, I had not been with them long when the senior partner sent for me to come into his private office, and I went trembling, and he said to me in effect, “You know, Frederick, that I pay Biolle $1500 a year and you I pay $150 a year—so his time costs ten times as much as yours. And you know that Biolle is my cashier and pays you your salary, monthly, and all the rest. He also pays the cartmen and he pays the postage, &c. He has to look sharp after all this and it costs too much for him to do it. Now here is a book and here is a hundred dollars. Hereafter you will pay the cartmen and the postage and buy twine & pins and ink and marking pots and all such things, and you will put down on one page here what money I give you and on the other what you spend—and when you have spent the hundred dollars bring the book to me. I know that I can trust you not to pay anything that you think you ought not to, and if you have any doubt whether you ought, you can consult Biolle.”

Well, gentlemen, I took this Petty cash business, I spent my hundred dollars, just as I thought right, and I handed my book back to the senior partner, and he looked it over, and once he questioned me about a charge for a supper which I had thought it right to pay, for when we boys were kept at the store three or four hours later than usual—but that was all, and after that he never disputed an item, but gave me a check for another hundred dollars, and so on till I quit his service. I was a mere boy then, Sir, & the youngest boy in the establishment, with wages of $150 a year. Well Sir, now I find myself, being 40 years of age, the responsible executive head—or the associate executive head—of an enterprise in which seven million dollars and a half have been invested, of which somewhere about two million have practically passed through my own hands; my services are valued at $4,000 a year, and yet, Sir, I find myself forced to resume the same duties which the old merchant thought he could not afford to leave with a clerk at $1500 a year. Only, Sir, that instead of $100 being put in my hands and my being required afterwards to account for it, using it at my discretion, I find myself obliged to advance the money out of my private means. And when after three or four months I send my bill for it, I send vouchers for items of 12½ cents and then, Sir, I can not be reimbursed until I have undergone a cross-examination for an hour, it may be, as to the necessity under which I had been constrained to [307] pay the said 12½ cents. I don’t think that I am less honest or that I have less common sense than I had 25 years ago, and it is humiliating to me, Sir, to be dealt with in this way. I don’t want to spend my time in discussions of such matters. I am perfectly able to judge for myself whether a messenger whom I send to town should be paid his car-fare by the park or not, & if I am not, I have no business to be placed in charge of such a work as this. And I verily believe that for every dollar thus spent, the Commission pays $10 in salaries to myself & my clerks and for the necessary stationery consumed in the correspondence about it. And the matter is brought very likely before your honorable Board, Sir, and is discussed and I am called to account again & again and I am required to consider it as a favor, an act of grace, that I am reimbursed at all.

I will show you the flag which I have been flying at my mast head the last month, the flag of the Commission, under which we do our work. It is more than a month since a call was made for a new one and it has been called for three or four times since. A torn and ragged flag is an honorable and interesting object when its rags represent bravery and resolution, but when its rags represent improvidence and beggary, then it is a shameful object. Ought you to subject me to the shame of living and working under such a banner as that?

Who is to blame in such a case as that of the bridge? Myself, undoubtedly, before the public. What is the meaning of Superintendent if not that? And if the public did not blame me by name, the pleasure of the public in the park is by so much lessened, and my design by so much injured. Is the Comptroller to blame? He is not, for the Board holds him responsible that no expenditure is made on the park which is unnecessary. He has got to be satisfied of its necessity before he can authorize it, and with the difficulties about the extension to 110th Street, which is yet to be no trifle, and a fight in hand in the Common Council & another in the legislature, and another with Mr. Clancey, and the responsibility of deciding whether the ride round the Reservoir shall or shall not be elevated four feet at a cost of 10,000 dollars, and the question of the cabs, Sir, and a dozen other matters, all involving questions of general policy vital to the park and questions of expenditure of thousands of dollars, I can not insist on boring him for as many hours as would be necessary to remove the last lingering doubt from his mind, about picayune details. I can’t insist on his letting me bore him.

I can not myself wait his leisure to give them all the consideration which in his mind is necessary to a decision upon them. But why have you not in such cases come directly to the Board? asks the President. To do so would be in the nature of a complaint against the Comptroller because the Comptroller is appointed to relieve the Board from the consideration of such small matters. The Comptroller is my superior officer. [I] don’t speak technically—legally—Sir. He is practically my superior officer, my Superintendent, and is so regarded & so used by you, by the Board, Sir. I am obliged, Sir, to so regard him, & it is entirely contrary to my habits of mind and my instincts of discipline & subordination to ever make an appeal against his judgment. The Comptroller is a [308] Commissioner of the park. I am a servant of the Commissioners, and it is not my business to report of him to the Board, it is his business to report of me. There would be neither policy nor propriety in my doing so. As I said before about the employment of clerks, it would be useless for me to do so.

There were certain matters about which I had been applying to the Comptroller for six months, matters not of grand importance, but just those little matters which, when all as they ought to be, make the park delightful, and which, if not as they ought to be, will altogether leave the park—people don’t know why—but somehow so that it don’t seem as if it were well managed—and is just tolerable—tolerable instead of delightful. I had been applying to the Comptroller about certain of such things for six months. In this time I had written him I suppose a dozen letters and I had tried to get his attention to them in conversation two or three score of times. At length I so far got his assent to my intentions that I felt it safe to address the Board—and sometime, I think in October or early in November, I sent, under cover to the President, a communication for the Board about them. The Board met and met again and again and I heard nothing on the subject, & when I asked about it I was told that the Board was too busy with more necessary & pressing matters to take it up. It was hard to hold a quorum together long enough to vote the money necessary to carry on the work. And it went on so till December 21st, when, having in the meantime addressed the Comptroller several more letters on the subject, I came to town to see him about it, and he finally said that he did not think it necessary that I should trouble the Board about it; he could manage the business. But he wasn’t yet perfectly satisfied about the last detail, and at his request I wrote him again that night a letter of six or eight pages & which with attendant calculations occupied me till 2 o’clock in the morning. I had several further conversations with him and addressed him further notes and—well—I have within a week been able to obtain about one half of what I asked and was glad enough to get that and willing to let the rest go for another six months.

But suppose I succeed in getting such matters before the Board, what course do they take? Suppose for instance I want half a dozen hand ladders for pruning trees. The regular course is to make a requisition on the Board for them. They are placed with other things on a requisition; the standing rules of the Board require that before any requisition is acted on by the Board it shall be endorsed by the Comptroller. Before the Comptroller will endorse the requisition he will not unlikely wish to be informed for what the ladders are wanted, he will doubt if the trees need pruning or if the pruning can not be done without ladders; & if it would not be cheaper to make up some stuff already on the park into ladders, and finally if the estimate of cost which is required to be given with the requisition is not too high.

Suppose he does not object or his objections are overcome, & he countersigns & presents the requisition to you. You will refer the matter with power to your Executive Committee, and your Executive Committee will most likely refer [309] with power back to your Comptroller; at best will merely authorize the Comptroller to purchase. And then, if not before, the duty you impose on the Comptroller makes it necessary that I should be able to convince him of the necessity for obtaining the articles, & perhaps discuss the kind best to be got, the price proper to be paid &c., &c., &c., &c.—and it is not at all unlikely that months pass before I get the ladders, and then that I get but three instead of six. It is not always so. It is not generally so. I don’t mean to overstate it. You see exactly how it is. I only have to show you its effects on me—on my duty. It is so often enough to make all the difference between a good and a bad keeping of your park, between my being a good Superintendent and my being a very poor Superintendent, between a true & perfect realization of my conceptions and an abortion of my conceptions, between my engaging satisfactorily, confidently & energetically at my work and going about it wearily disheartened. It is enough to disconcert my plans; embarrass me in every direction.

Hard as it has been, I love the park. I rejoice in it and am too much fastened to it in every fibre of my character to give up, if I did not see that [to] go on so was out of the question—for me.

To come back to the grand question of the cost of the work and the estimates. Am I responsible for the cost of the work, for the errors of estimates, for false information under which you have acted? Am I, Sir? Why then, Sir, I am an imposter.

I am not an imposter, Sir. I am not responsible in those particulars. I am not a Superintendent, I am not a Chief Architect. And if I sail under false colors, it is because you who have commanded the ship have hoisted them over me.

Now, with regard to the staff of Superintendence. As I have said, I never have indicated what I felt to be necessary in this respect that I have not seen that you thought me extravagant. I do not believe, Sir, that since my appointment a month has passed that I have not been told that it appeared as if I had too large a number of engineers and clerks and so on, and that I had better get rid of some of them.

Now, gentlemen, who is the proper judge of what I need in this way? You or I? I say, if you hold me responsible for errors of estimate, for excess of expenditure, I am and no one else. And if you constrain me in this respect, you relieve me of that responsibility. I am no longer Architect, no longer Superintendent. You have taken the duties which those titles imply away from me. You have assumed them.

Your Board had it once under consideration to employ Mr. Alphand, or Mr. Kemp, or Sir Joseph Paxton for the duties which subsequently devolved on me. If either one of those gentlemen had undertaken the laying out and general supervision of the park, he would undoubtedly have brought some portion of his professional staff with him—because such assistants as those gentlemen are accustomed to employ are not to be had here.

[310]

I know what I say, gentlemen. I have been in their offices and I know what sort of assistance they have. But you have the evidence in your own hands; look at the paper sent you by Mr. Alphand, or that from Mr. Austin of London. I saw the man who drew up the latter in London & obtained much information from him direct. He occupies a very subordinate position in Mr. Austin’s office, but you have but one man in your employment, but one man who is able to prepare for you such a paper as that, and that man is myself. There is not another man on the park to whom I could hand over such a duty (except Grant) who has the necessary education & training for it. Why Sir, so far as I know, I have had but two men at any time who had ever been on work like ours before. Of my immediate office assistants there is not one who had ever seen a park. I say, gentlemen, that if you had employed Alphand or Kemp or Paxton, or Sir William Hooker, or any of the men to whom such a work as this would have been assigned in Europe, any man of established reputation for such work, here, if there had been any, they would have had their own staff of practiced professional assistants, would have undertaken the whole business of Superintendence in their own way, with their own men, and then, in the usual course of such a business, they would after a time have brought in their bill for Superintendence & travelling & incidental expenses—the Superintendence being a certain fair percentage on the outlay for which they had been responsible. That is the usual way, Sir. I won’t say that it is the only way in which men of established reputation would have served you, but it is the usual, proper and very likely the best way—very likely the cheapest way—for good work.

Well, gentlemen, if such a bill were presented to you at this time and footed up say $100,000, would you refuse to pay it as an exorbitant charge? Indeed you would not, gentlemen—for a little investigation would satisfy you that it was a very moderate professional charge; that in the absence of a contract, your Superintendent might recover much more than that from you by a suit at law. A suit of the kind brought by our friend Mr. Hunt, against Dr. Parmly, was decided last week in the Superior Court, Dr. Parmly being ordered to pay 5 percent & costs, for Hunt’s superintendence of the building of Rossiter’s house. A similar case (I think it was Eidlitz against the city) was decided a year or two ago in the same way. These were purely architectural cases it is true, but there is no reason why the quality and cost of superintendence of such work as you have entrusted to me should be less. There is good reason why it should be more than ordinary, every-day, architectural superintendence.

But what does your own architectural superintendence—purely architectural superintendence—cost, think you, Gentlemen? It is much more difficult, requires much more professional ability than the kind of work to which these decisions refer. But do you think it has cost you more for superintendence—more than 5 percent? No, gentlemen, it has not cost you 2 percent. I don’t believe it has cost you 1 percent. Is there any good reason why you should pay less than private individuals? You have better work—more [311] substantial—better considered. I happen to know what Mr. Vaux’s professional earnings were last year. He was paid over $10,000—entirely for plans & superintendence of buildings and grounds. Of this you paid him a quarter. Do you think you only took from [him] a quarter of his expenditure of time, thought, study, anxiety? I know that you took a good deal more than half, & yet I have had more than one intimation that Mr. Vaux should give more time to the park. Mr. Barreda paid Mr. Vaux $5,000 for his services last year. You paid him half this, but I assure you Mr. Vaux gave you more than double the amount of his personal service that he gave Mr. Barreda.

Now, gentlemen, if you had employed Mr. Alphand or Mr. Kemp, Sir Joseph Paxton or Sir William Hooker, in the usual manner of employing professional supervision of work of this kind, how differently would they have been situated from what I have been, how much safer, how much better able to do credit to themselves, to have satisfied you & the public. They would have employed such assistance as they required—selecting their own men, making their own arrangements with them entirely (I refer to their professional staff, not to the laboring force), paying them according to their various talents, holding & dismissing them as they saw fit, and taking advice of no common councilman or Senator in that matter. They would have employed a much larger staff than I have had, a better equipped staff, a more talented staff, & would have paid them altogether better than you have done mine. They would not have had a moiety of the annoyances, the embarrassments, the anxieties, the humiliations that I have had, and after all they would have had for their own personal emolument from 5 to 10 times as much as I have received. Mr. Alphand is scarcely an older man than I. I venture to say that he has studied this profession less than I. Neither Mr. Kemp nor Sir Joseph Paxton are men of as good education for this duty as myself, & they have neither of them been entrusted with a work of this kind of one tenth the magnitude of this, or demanding anything like the amount of talent, of anxiety, of engrossing, harassing responsibility, which this should have given it, which this had given it, gentlemen. And I say, Sir, that neither of those men, neither one of them, would have agreed to provide adequate superintendence for such a work as this, for double—no Sir, not for double—what, with constant difficulty, I succeed in persuading you to pay. And you could not today get a man of established reputation in duties of this kind to undertake to finish your work, being responsible for estimates & expenditures, for double your present rate of expenditure for Superintendence. Why, gentlemen, the commonest engineering duty—merely forming earth embankments on mathematical lines and grades—invariably costs more than you have been willing to pay for the Superintendence of all the nice & complicated esthetic duties and unusual engineering duties—the grading to undefinable curves, the hydraulic engineering of forty miles of subterranean channels laid at every possible inclination and angle, the staking & locating of 50,000 trees & shrubs.

The throwing up [of] a common raw earth bank for a railroad or plank [312] road or canal costs more, Sir, for Superintendence than do all these complicated & delicate operations for which I have been responsible, or have been supposed to be responsible, on the Central Park. Our engineering duties proper have not been of an ordinary character. Where is the engineer in this country, Sir, who is familiar with the construction of such roads as ours, Sir; with such a drainage system as ours? Nay, Sir, not only not in America, but not in Europe—not in the world—is there precedent, example, for such work as our engineers have been called upon to superintend there on the park. Tisn’t common work, Sir, & tisn’t easy work, & tisn’t cheap work—not cheap for the Superintendence. And yet, Sir, I believe that you have paid less for your Superintendence than any rail-road company in the United States—less than the simplest Superintendence upon which the commonest engineers are employed.

I can give you all the proof you want, Sir, of what I say. Not to detain you—there’s the American Engineering Journal with an abstract of the State Engineer’s Report in which is shown the cost of Superintendence of the enlargement of the State canals—simpler work there couldn’t well be—all marked out to their hands. But the cost of Superintendence has varied during the last eight years from 6 to 16 percent per annum, and it is estimated for the future at 10 percent on the cost of construction. And what is meant is carefully defined & it is the same for all practical purposes with what was meant by your own Finance Committee, who, July 1859, reported to you that the cost of Superintendence had been up to that time 3⅓d percent on the total construction cost of the park. 3⅓d percent, Sir, for the park work—10 percent, Sir, for the widening of an old canal, and your Committee distinctly recognize & acknowledge, as a self-evident proposition, that it was to have been supposed that the cost of Superintendence should be larger for the park than for ordinary public works. You may make the comparison, where you please, Sir. You may consult whom you will—Mr. McAlpine, Mr. Craven. I notice that McAlpine demands $6,000 per annum for himself & $2500 for his first assistant for superintending a very common sort of stone bridge—nothing half as difficult in it as in our Transverse Roads. Why, Sir, when we were about to begin the 2d Transverse Road, with its tunnel, along under the Reservoir, a member of your board quoted one of the most distinguished engineers in the city as having given his professional opinion that the obstacles & difficulties to the successful completion of that work according to the plan were insurmountable. It would undermine the reservoir. It would shatter the foundations of the reservoir; it would drain the reservoir; there was not head room enough for the Tunnel; the Heading would break down; it would fill with water & could never be drained. It encountered more professional opposition—or rather professional distrust (honest professional distrust, Sir, which I always respected & gave careful thought to because it was legitimately based upon the fact that I had no name or standing as an engineer)—more, Sir, than the High level Sewer or the Menai bridge. It could not be safely done. That was a commonly expressed professional opinion—it could [not] be done. It is done, Sir, and it was so carefully superintended [313] that not one of those difficulties & obstacles so much as checked the progress of work upon it for a single hour. There was a panic once, Sir, & you were startled by an express from the Croton Board. But it was carefully proved that we knew what we were about and that they didn’t. What do you think that Superintendence cost you? About as much as the usual cost of Superintendence in digging a mile of canal through a meadow. I can’t get at it exactly, but in my opinion it was not more than 1 percent of the work.

Why, Sir, talking of the Menai bridge, Stephenson was paid £150,000 for his personal Superintendence of the Menai bridge—and that by a private company—not a government job. The Metropolitan Board of Works pay their Chief Superintendent, I am told, £15,000 per annum for his personal services, and Barry was paid £90,000 for a partial Superintendence of the building of Parliament house. Brown who laid out St. James Park, I don’t know how he was paid, but I know that he made a fine fortune & put his son in Parliament. He was bred a kitchen gardener, was but a common man and never in his life had a work which compared with this, in magnitude, or in the amount of study & talent required to do it justice.

I am not calling your attention to these examples because I want you to pay me better. You know I would not do that. I never did such a thing in my life. I don’t care a copper for myself, Sir, or for what becomes of me, but I do care for the park, which will last after I’m dead and gone, years & years, I hope. I want to have the work well done upon it, and I tell you that it can not be well done, honestly and surely and carefully and certainly well done, without a better superintendence, a more liberal superintendence. And I want to show you that, in this respect, you have been following an unusual and, it is therefore to be presumed, an unsafe and an uneconomical policy. I want to show you, Sir, that whatever you may think about it, you have no reason to be surprised that I can not sustain the responsibility—responsibility which you wish to put upon me—on the terms you have hitherto required. I want to show you that it is not safe for me, who cares a great deal more for my reputation, who cares a great deal more for the consciousness of being an honest, capable, trustworthy, God fearing man, than I do for any artistic or professional reputation—a thousandfold more than I do for personal emolument—I want to show you that it is not safe for me to go on without being at liberty to employ as many aides as I like. I must be the best judge of what I need in that respect. And if you can not trust me upon such a question as that—so purely and entirely a professional question—even more than the planting of a tree or the grading of a bank—I say, Sir, if you are not able to trust me for that, then for what do you employ me? For what supposed capacity, knowledge, discretion, skill or art, am I receiving $4,000 a year—and dubbed Architect in Chief & Superintendent? I ask you, gentlemen, if you can not trust me in that, does it not look as if you were swindling the city and playing the fool with me? I know that some people think so, Sir, & I conceive that it [is] no more complimentary to yourself than to me that they do so.

It was a different thing, Sir, when we commenced. That is true Sir, I [314] had no professional reputation, no professional standing, except what you had given—or rather, given me the means of gaining myself. It was natural—perhaps wise—to distrust my judgment, to distrust my talent, to distrust somewhat even my honesty perhaps.

You could not even then, Sir, doubt my ability to organize and control, efficiently & economically control, your work, for I had, Sir, then already brought out of a mob of lazy, reckless, turbulent & violent loafers a well organized, punctual, sober, industrious and disciplined body of 1000 men. I had quelled a mutiny, I had made the idle, incompetent paupers, Sir, whom you forced me to employ (because it was necessary to do so to get money to go on at all), I had made them, lots of them, take 30 or 40 cents a day, that being the exact value of their services in the open market, instead of a dollar and a quarter a day, which they demanded, and this against the judgment of nearly every member of your board as to its possibility. I had arranged that business to its last detail—even making the models of the tools required with my own hands. I had done all this alone, Sir—not without the kindest support, assistance, advice, & encouragement from the Treasurer—but in the park alone, Sir, with every possible obstacle & difficulty in my way, as he will tell you.

But, however it might have been then, I can not assert to myself that I stand any longer in the least degree in the position of an unknown man, an untried man, a man of doubtful prudence. For two years I was denominated, and I was, your sole executive officer. I selected, I engaged, and I fixed the pay of every officer, man & boy employed in any department on the park. You gave me limits, for the different grades. Sometimes you refused to enlarge the limit or to allow me an increase when I thought it desirable in my professional staff, but even in that, and through the whole work, for every such case there were a hundred where I refused to pay as much as you authorized. It was rarely, indeed, that I reached the limit of the discretion which you then allowed me.

Look at the history of those two years, and detect if you can the slightest indication on my part of a disposition to carry sail imprudently, to be extravagant or careless in details, to be lax in discipline, to be blind to or neglectful of small leaks. Look at the various checks & precautions to make sure of true & good measure of service being rendered you for your payments on the work, and you will find them all. I don’t now think of a single exception—all devised by me—devised, invented, and put into operation by myself voluntarily, without requirement or suggestion, generally without any assistance, often against the judgment of others—of some of yourselves. Take the whole series of such checks and precautions which the Senate Committee of Investigation enumerate as peculiar to this work, and which lead them to speak of it as the best managed public work in the country. As far as I recollect, Sir, there is not one of all of them—pertaining to the field (not the Book-keeper’s work—with that I never meddled)—all of them, pertaining to the field-service, are mine. Some of them I was months getting your Board to allow me to use because they were unusual, new, untried, & therefore [315] assumed to be of doubtful expediency. Some, which I put into operation, were reported upon unfavorably by your Committees & I was reproved for them, but they were forgotten & stood on, and they have stood the test of time; they are vindicated in experience. Some, Sir, which were greatly ridiculed, and which it required hand-spike discipline for many months to enforce, are now so well established & so well justified by results that you make honorable mention of them, to your own credit, in every report. I have been under the harrow, Sir, of four Investigating Committees. Is there a scar upon me? Have you heard anyone call me a careless, an inefficient, a lazy or neglectful, officer? I believe the worst that has been said of me, Sir, is that I am a mild enthusiast. But for what have I been enthusiastic, Sir, but for the objects—for every object which you have had in view—which you have committed to my trust.

And now, I say, after three years’ trial of me I feel that if you are, now, unwilling to trust my judgment, to trust confidently and implicitly to my judgment, in such matters as I have referred to, that it is time you were rid of me altogether. I feel this, Sir, I feel it, & I have felt it, and spite of my sincere respect for you; spite of my real love for the park; and in spite of my personal habit of discipline and loyalty—which is a very strong and inherent element of my character—feeling this as I have done, it has been impossible for me to give you the true and good service which my conscience demands that I should do, Sir, if I continue to receive your pay and to wear the title of Architect in Chief & Superintendent, or anything like it.

Let me ask then, Sir, if you will not think it improper for me to take up an old question of your own. Let me ask, what is the proper business of your Commission? I mean, Sir, what business with advantage, economically, efficiently, can your Commission undertake to perform directly? In 1858, Mr. Dillon, Mr. Belmont & Mr. Fields took the ground that the Commission, having adopted the plan, appointed their Executive Officer and assumed to give him powers necessary to carry out the plan, had no longer any functions to perform with reference to the park but those of cashiers and accountants. Those were the words of Mr. Dillon’s report, Sir, “cashiers & accountants.” Manifestly the fact was overlooked that the Commission was a legislative body. The mistake was also made, Sir (and the same error has since occasionally led to some confusion of words in the debates of your Board), the error of considering that the plan of the park was at that time complete. Speaking technically, the Commission had seen nothing & acted on nothing but a study—had adopted nothing but the outline of a plan. I know, Sir, that some of the competitors pretended to finish a working plan for the park, but that was an absurdity. Working plans for the park could not have been formed—fully and usefully—in a year’s hard labor of a dozen engineers. Although the Commission had in common parlance adopted a plan, there was much yet remaining, as there still is, to be determined about the plan; much which it was not right & is yet not right to leave wholly to the judgment of their Architect & Superintendent. And there were considerations [316] of general policy, Sir—on account of the relations of the Commission with the Common Council & the State Legislature and on other grounds—which rendered it inexpedient for the Commission to hand over to its Superintendent that entire general control in all respects which a commercial body, an independent & self-sustaining corporation, having the same purposes in view, would have done—would have done, Sir, for the sake of economy, efficiency and success.

But, theoretically, Mr. Dillon and his associates were right. And still right, practically right, if his proposition is limited by a reservation of the exercise of functions from the Executive such as—not as ordinary prudence requires, for ordinary prudence requires none—but of such functions as the special and unusual relations of your body required that it should sometimes exercise itself & directly. I say that ordinary prudence—ordinary commercial prudence—required the reservation of no functions from your chief executive except those of cashiers & accountants—only so far as I have made exception—because, Sir, when ordinary prudence requires a corporation to interpose and interfere with its executive, in a work of this character, then, Sir, ordinary prudence goes further, it requires that they should supersede him altogether. He is the round man in the square hole, Sir, and they made a mistake when they got him to layout, plan, and carry on the work of this character. Why, a work of this character? Because, Sir, this work is eminently one of design, and Congress might as well engage a clever draftsman like Mr. Enniger or Mr. Darly to sketch a historical cartoon for a panel of the rotunda of the Capitol, and then get a good colorist like Mr. Ginoux or Mr. Page to paint it. Mr. Ginoux or Mr. Page wouldn’t do it. Why, some Western Committee once actually proposed something of that kind to Mr. Page, as I recollect he told me when I was in Rome, but he laughed at them and declined to serve them, as any man fit for your work would refuse to serve you on such terms.

All comparisons, Sir, are imperfect, and involve some error on close scrutiny. I don’t say that this does not, or that the inference is to be perfect and unqualified. To be strictly accurate there is a good deal of qualification to be allowed to this view of your business, and of the business proper to be devolved on me. But the general conclusion from the practice of other bodies having similar duties, and from your own experience, seems to me to confirm and establish the theoretical proposition that—having fixed upon certain prudential limits and holding your designer most rigidly to account within those limits—you should trust, as largely as is by any means compatible with your duty as cashiers & accountants, to his prudence, to his judgment and not to your own, or to that of any committee, or any man of you—but to his judgment and his prudence, as to details. So long as you employ him at all, Sir, it is absolutely necessary to your success that—fixing for your own safety’s sake certain general limits—in details of his duty you should deal with him confidently—generously—even generously—even over-looking unless very distinctly offensive to you, or largely [317] wasteful, largely wasteful, Sir, overlooking what may appear to you in such details, errors of judgment or taste—whims, fancies, which you can only regard as personal idiosyncrasies because, Sir, in all works of art in a crude & incomplete state there appear always unaccountable touches, which when finished—completed and brought into good light—are suddenly recognized as strokes of genius. If your designer has any genius in him, Sir, it will show itself in that way, in little details where he acts as it were instinctively, where, at all events, he could no more explain and demonstrate before-hand the absolute necessity of the expenditure of the last sixpence that does the business, than a graceful woman could give an anatomical demonstration and explanation of her every graceful movement.

The President required of me, gentlemen, perfect frankness tonight. If I am too frank, he is responsible for it. I promised that I would be frank with you. You very well know that up to this moment I have not been entirely frank with you—and if I said nothing more you would not believe that I had been perfectly honest.

A few weeks ago, a man came to my office wishing to see me “on private business.” What do you suppose he wanted, gentlemen? He wanted to know how I got on with Mr. Green? I replied by demanding what business he had to ask me that question? It was not the first time, nor any where in the first hundred times, that it had been asked me, and I was getting tired of it—and this man certainly had no right to ask it of me as a matter of private business, confidentially. He answered that he supposed I knew that Green was trying to supersede me. I gave him very clearly to understand that if his business was in that direction—as it no doubt was—he had come to the wrong shop, & he left with a flea in his ear.

Well, Sir, I suppose that a dozen persons have been to me since. One, and a good friend of you all, it was, only yesterday, asking the same question. It has been asked 50 times in the last three weeks. And I have found it difficult to make these people believe that I am not at sword’s points with Mr. Green—and that I have not the slightest need of assistance in fighting him.

Now, Gentlemen, do you believe that I have ever done anything to create this impression, which is apparently universal & which you evidently know to be universal?

I have not, gentlemen. I will not say that I have never been provoked into uttering a hasty word—a word of impatience—toward, or in regard to, Mr. Green. I am a patient man, Sir, but I am human. Well Sir, for any impatient word which I have uttered with regard to Mr. Green, I have rebuked fifty, I have contradicted fifty lies, I have said a thousand words in his honor and for his advantage.

Your associate, Mr. Gray, came to see me within these twelve months, came clear out to Mt. St. Vincent, Sir, for the especial purpose, to warn me against this dreadful conspirator, Green—to solemnly warn me. And [318] this was not the first nor was it the last time that I have been in like manner warned against that man by Commissioners of the park. Well, gentlemen, my good friend Commissioner Gray was a little annoyed that I should smile at his warning. He said that Green was laying a deep plot to supersede me. He certainly was: I might smile, but the time would come—and finally Mr. Gray got really angry. He finally told me he knew from what Green had said himself, the last time they had been friends, that he wanted to be & meant to be the Superintendent of the park, and he asked how I could have so much confidence in that fellow. And I answered, “Because, if you do think Mr. Green a rascal, Mr. Gray, you surely don’t believe him to be a _____ fool. Not being a fool, he has no more idea of being Superintendent than I have of being Treasurer & Comptroller. That’s my opinion.” And Mr. Gray departed with very decided conviction, I’ve no doubt, that if Mr. Green was not a fool, he knew who was one.

Well, Sir, I have an appointment with a certain ex-commissioner of the park and another gentleman, a Tammany chieftain, I believe, tomorrow. It is a special appointment, gentlemen—private and confidential; the nature of the business is not divulged to me, gentlemen, but I would bet large odds, that the first question will be, “How do you and Green get on, these days?”

And I would bet that if one could overhear the first word that is spoken after they drive out of the gate, it would be—“Olmsted is a [damned] fool.”

Now, gentlemen, what is the reason of this universal suspicion that I am a poor, helpless, victim of that deep rogue, Green? Why, I should judge, Sir, that there were fifty men in the city at this time actively engaged in trying to counter-mine Green’s under-mining of my office—against my will—with, in fact, my profound contempt as a general rule for their assistance not at all disguised from them. In fact, they all believe me, as I have said, to be a _____ fool. Now, Sir, what does all this mean? It does not mean any good to me, Sir, I know that; and it means no good to the park.

It is impossible, Sir, that two men could work together better, with more mutual confidence, with a better understanding—I can not say, Sir, in better temper, always in better temper, but I can say, I believe, Sir, with truth, with more cordial common purpose and general mutual friendly intuition—than Mr. Green and myself. He is my superior officer, Sir, and it does not become me to say more than this of him; to tell you how carefully, with what excessive care, he has served your interests, Sir. He can tell you, Sir, whether he has ever seen a symptom of a disposition, on my part, to be unfaithful to my duty to him, from the first day I set foot on the park, to this day, Sir.

Now, gentlemen, you know all this as well as I do—you knew it last week as well as now. When Mr. Green came up to see me, after your meeting, at which my resignation was presented, he said that when it was read, every body looked at him.

Why did you look at him, gentlemen?

The President, when we met the following night, assumed almost as if it [319] were a matter of course that my supposed hasty proceeding had been provoked by some action of Mr. Green. Why Mr. Green? I told you in my letter of resignation that I never felt a more keen gratitude to you all—(including Mr. Green, of course)—than at the moment of that writing. And yet three of those who were present have told me that you thought that I must have had a quarrel with Mr. Green—& that this was the cause of my resignation.

What does this mean?

I suppose it to mean, gentlemen, that it is evident to all of you on the face of the matter, that with such an arrangement as you have made of the relative and associated duties of myself and Mr. Green, no two men who have much self-respect could work long together without quarreling. I have not quarreled with Mr. Green, and I am not going to quarrel with Mr. Green. But, I repeat, gentlemen, that all this shows me that you yourselves recognize something wrong in your machinery.

And the mending of the machinery, gentlemen, is your business, not mine.