The telegraph being out of order I shall have to wait some time I suppose to hear your reply to my letters. I shall not write further as there is no necessity. Green’s father is dying of strangulated hernia & he is away. So I am not pushing matters & indeed have not yet been to the park. However I shall probably go today with Pilat to the Restaurant site by way of enunciating my resumption of duties.

I cannot of course tell how the arrangement may strike you. I have you see had to deal with you throughout in two characters, as Olmsted the artist & republican with whom I could heartily act and sympathise—and with Olmsted the bureaucrat and imperialist with whom I never for a moment sympathised. All the good to the Park that you could ever hope or expect to achieve is now easily possible, and without your vigorous cooperation it is not possible, but the realization of “your plan” is unlikely, if by that I understand the conversion of this many sided, fluent, thoroughly American high art work into a machine—over which as Frederick the Great, Prince of the Park Police you should preside, and with regal liberality dispense certificates of docility to the artists engaged in the work. All this side of the affair is nauseating & odious. I have not opposed it either by word or deed, solely because it was worth the risk of your discovering the danger of the method you pursued yourself and, as I once before said, it was absolutely necessary when everything was flying apart, that our interests should seem to be identical. The result of this cutting and paring and stifling was that you took it out of the region of high art or tried to do so and cut & pared and stifled it down to Green’s level and were then surprised at his taking it, although he was bound to do it by all logical rules in self defence. Your “plan” including for him “nothing” and for everybody else “nothing”—your position being unrepresentative & undemocratic. In this latitude a man must be representative to deserve success. And if you ask yourself who you desired to represent, I suppose outside of the Park Police you [420]would find nobody. However think this all over. Of course I may be wrong.