The Board has dismissed Captain Koster’s charges against me as not entitled to consideration & on that point I have nothing more to say. His letter has a significance, however, of another kind and before it is finally lost sight of I beg leave to call attention to it. I mean its significance as to his understanding of what is to be expected of his force.

[118]

The passages which throw some light on this subject have no direct bearing on the ostensible purpose of the letter and it requires a little reflection to see by what motive he was led to introduce them.

{If Captain Koster had only wished to correct the alledged inaccuracies of the report half a dozen lines would have answered his purpose. There are epithets and allusions in his letter, however, which have no possible bearing upon such a purpose and I wish to inquire why they are introduced?} Why, for instance, is the reference in my report to the design of the more rural parts of the park characterized as poetical, sentimental and faultfinding and why is a disappointment attending the realization of visionary ideas, spoken of?

The writer of the report is the person supposed to have been disappointed; the visionary ideas in regard to which he has been disappointed are supposed to be identical with those uttered in this so called poetical passage about the design of the park, and a protest is thus directed not only against the all edged inaccuracies of the report but (in a prolonged undertone), against its assumption that a proper standard of duty for the police can be based on these visionary ideas. It would not require a larger force merely, Captain Koster means to suggest, to meet the requirements of such a standard but a force of a different character, different training, different discipline from that now employed.

To be sure that he did mean this, I have obtained a substantial acknowledgmnt under his own hand.

Now I wish the Board to recall what was the cause of the disappointment to which Captain Koster refers and to look at it a little more below the surface than he is able to.

It is obvious that it can only have occurred through some act of the Board itself because the Board alone controls all questions of the design of the Park and if I have been disappointed in the setting aside of anything in which I have been deeply interested in respect to the design of the Park it has been through some action of the Board.

But the Board will look in vain for any such action on its part. What then, was in Captain Koster’s mind when he wrote this letter? There can be no doubt as to the answer.

A year and a half ago a Committee of the Board recommended the abandonment of a temporary expedient for improving the discipline of the park-keepers which I, under its earlier instructions had just put in operation, to the great indignation of those whose persistent evasion of their duty in respect to the protection of the timid, delicate & weak in their use of the more rural parts of the park, had made it necessary.

At the same moment, it was recommended that the force should no longer receive its instructions or make its reports through me. I earnestly labored with the Committee, as Captain Koster knew, to induce them to forego their determination in these respects, and, that I did so in vain, Captain Koster, also knew.

[119]

As affecting my personal interest, my ease and comfort, and even the dignity of my position, it could have been only a gratifying relief that was proposed to be given me; the duties from which I was to be retired, being in every respect, irksome, distasteful and burdensome. They took a great deal of time and energy which I could ill afford from occupations which were agreeable, honorable & profitable and they brought me large wages of senseless resentments.

Nevertheless Captain Koster is right in assuming that the action of the Board caused me deep disappointment. It would have been more than disappointment; it would have been a deep sense of injustice and of indignation, forbidding me to occupy the position in the service of the Board which I since have held, but for one important circumstance. And that it may be realized what this circumstance is, (as for my argument is desirable), I must state the conviction that oppressed me as to the consequences which would result from the action by which my disappointment came. To show what that circumstance is I must explain the conviction I had as to the effect of the action of the Board to which I have referred. It was that the police would necessarily be confirmed in habits of leaving essentially uncared for those parts and elemnts of the Central Park which, to realize the intention of their design, require, more than any other, to be vigilantly watched, kept and protected. Because also I believe that they would be confirmed in habits of slighting, if not of regarding with contempt, those parts of their duty by which they should be distinguished from an ordinary street police. And I suffered peculiar pain in this prospect because it is in respect almost alone to the parts and elemnts of the design of the Central Park to which I refer, that it is, in my judgemnt, at all worthy of the fulsome praise it often gets, and because also, (as I may be allowed to add), it is in my share of the work by which these parts of it have been designed and partially and imperfectly developed that my best hope to be remembered kindly and gratefully must lie. I happen always to have had enough of that weak timber in my composition which Captain Koster calls poetry and sentiment to value this hope more than I have valued fortune or immediate applause.

In this respect, therefore, I suffered a disappointment. But it was not a disappointment of that personal character which would render me an unsuitable servant of the Board simply because I did not consider that I differed with the Board on any question of the design of the park, as I had, for example, with the Board of 1871, but only on a question of practicability and method in pursuing that design. There was never a doubt expressed by a single Commissioner that such a result as I apprehended was greatly to be deplored, the only question was whether it would necessarily follow. The chairman of the Committee will testify that I spared no pains to convince him that it would, and I will testify that he would never for a moment entertain the idea. When I asked him at last, how he supposed it could be guarded against he answered me emphatically, in these words: “By establishing a sufficiently high standard [120] of duty in the force and maintaining it by the most relentless discipline.” In this respect he added the Board would be found determined and inflexible.

This sentence if I am not greatly mistaken was the key to the whole policy of the Board then adopted. It was absolutely essential—literally so, it was the very essence of that policy—that a standard of duty should be set up adequate to sustain the design of the park in all particulars and that the force should be kept to it by a relentless discipline.

Captain Koster has been your agent for upholding that standard and for maintaining that discipline.

What then is the meaning of Captain Koster’s coming now, a year and a half afterwards, to expostulate with the President on the publication of a few sentences setting forth the elements of the design in question and characterizing these sentences as sentimental, poetical and ill-natured?

It means simply this: that he knows that you know that he has never made the slightest effort to sustain the required standard of duty or to maintain discipline in the smallest degree with reference to it and that he feels it necessary to say something in excuse for himself. It means a naive, half conscious, uneasy plea that the expectations ascribed to the writer of the report as if they were his alone, but which the writer justly and properly assumed to be those of his principal, the Board, were really unreasonable and based on visionary ideas.

With regard to which, I would only ask the Board to remember that, if everything now found on the park which was a visionary idea fifteen years ago should by any means be all at once swept out of existence there would remain absolutely nothing to show for the seven million dollars which in that time has been laid out upon it.

The facts mentioned in the report do indicate that much for which that outlay was made is in actual process of wasting away—and Captain Koster is perfectly right in intimating to the President, what I had not, even indirectly, ventured to do, however strong my conviction of it, that no mere enlargement of the Police in numbers can be expected to arrest that process. He is logically right also in claiming that what is being lost and wasted is simply the romance and poetry and fine art of the park—all, that is to say, that differentiate the scope of this Departmnt’s duty essentially from that of the Departmnt of Works and the Departmnt of Police, and justify its distinct existence.

As soon as the views of the park and of the proper duties of its police upon which the police is now managed, come, through the gradual habituation of the public to them, to be generally accepted, either as desireable or as, from the political condition of the city, the limit of that which is practical, the whole business of the Departmnt will be gradually merged in that of water mains and pavements, sidewalks and sewers.

There are, as far as I can see, no sufficient grounds of argument against such a consolidation this very winter, except those which your Captain [121] of Police deliberately and formally assures your President, are regarded with pity and contempt in the management of your police. I have for a long time believed this to be the case but you will find no intimation of such a belief in my report, no statements introduced in justification of it, and I should not have thought it proper to express it to you but for Captain Koster’s volunteer testimony of the fact. With the class of men from which the police force has been largely recruited it could not perhaps have been confidently hoped to be otherwise, unless the force were placed under the constant and prolonged instruction either indirectly or better directly of someone of sufficient natural qualities of heart and mind, or of refinemnt through education, to respect, and revere, precisely that which Captain Koster gives you assurance that he wholly despises.