I enclose with this terms of Brooklyn. I believe I sent you the copy of the Resolution or its purport before.

I answered your letter of June 8th a day or two since. Please telegraph whether you intend to take hold or not, the Plan has to be sent in Jan 1. I am obliged to you for telling me all your failings off in the Landscape Gardening matter, but I happened to know them before. I propose a fair subscription of the power that each is capable of exercising.

I do not limit myself to be an A. or an L.A. or anything else except an aspiring citizen and I do not ask you to do so. (The B.P is an easy affair & a short job). It is a convenient title to use that excites no jealousy—gives an opportunity for boundless influence—and that ought [404]to be strengthened by being adopted. Your objection to the plan is I believe at heart because it involves the idea of a common fraternal effort. It is too republican an idea for you, you must have a thick line drawn all round your sixpen’ worth of individuality. Of course you will grow out of this like you did out of your porcupine arrangement of Foremen’s reports 70 to each pocket and one in your mouth so that you never had a word to say to a friend—but you are a damned long while about it.

The Gold mine people and the oil people get rich—most of the artists remain poor, except they prostitute their abilities. In a properly civilised republic this should not be, in our republic it need not be if representative men were only true to their (implied)oaths of office. The designers of the Parks if successful in one way should be successful in the other. In the present state of art development in the country, it is very necessary indeed for those who have the power to exert themselves to protect the strictly legitimate pecuniary interests connected with the pursuits they follow for each in its turn must be proved to be profitable or young men of ability will be deterred from venturing into it.

Those who assume the chief offices and take the prestige assume the chief responsibility in this as in other respects and pernicious precedents are lamentable evils productive of widespread injustice to innocent persons.

You have allowed yourself to stand before the Public as A in C of the C.P. and it is useless to argue that no responsibility attaches to you. Of course you can repudiate it and walk off and do the other thing, arguing all the while that you are a badly used and injured innocent.

As a friend I wish you every success, but I cannot fail to see that you leave the cause in the lurch and that the bearing of the whole proceeding is unsatisfactory.

In a many sided work like the Park you must not therefore be surprised that I cannot heartily endorse an insatiable egoism that insists on its feebleness except in one direction—a direction in which it was going to go with tremendous power if Green had not put a stop to it by telling stories to Russell and other bad tricks—

Well Well! that reads as if it were written with a hard pen and from a hard heart, perhaps it is. I shall therefore write it to you so that I may have no excuse for saying it to anyone else.