Brookline, Mass.

Under your instructions we came to Cincinnati early in January. The next day we were taken by your Commission on a tour of observation of the works of which it is in charge. Afterwards, we made other visits to these works under the guidance of your Superintendent, and were furnished with a number of documents relating to their history.

By your invitation, several representatives of the Press were with us on our introductory tour, and many questions were asked of us, some of which could not be answered satisfactorily upon a cursory, superficial examination of the ground, in the dead of Winter, without reference to maps or plans. Others referred to such details that they could not be wisely answered [598] without better knowledge than we then had of the leading motives of design of works of which these details were minor incorporate parts. Others were of such a class that before answering them we should have wished to consult an engineer who had had opportunities of observing the results of operations carried on under the conditions involved. It is not surprising that some of our impromptu answers, made conversationally, to questions partly of a technical character, were a little misunderstood, and, as reported, were liable to make wrong impressions.

Having regard to the probable object with which it had been provided that what we might off-handedly say under the circumstances, should be made public, we have since obtained through a commercial agency a collection of reports and comments upon the park affairs of the city which have appeared in your public journals. From these and other sources of information, we infer that there has been for sometime past a questioning attitude of public opinion as to the policy and methods under which conditions have been brought about that your Board has inherited.

No general report of the results of our visit has been formally asked of us. But such a report appeared to be expected by members of your Board, who, referring to doubts that had been prevailing in the public mind, expressed the hope that we should not be reluctant to state what we thought of the past dealings of the city with park affairs, nor to state wherein its policy seemed to us open to improvement.

We think that we can serve you best by adopting the view of our duty thus suggested, and, as the value of what we may say is to be largely estimated by regard for the opportunities we have had for comparing the operation of different policies and methods of administration for the public parks, we will here briefly indicate what these have been.

We have examined and, several times at intervals of years, have re-examined, a large number of European public grounds, and have conferred and compared experience with those in charge of them. We have, in like manner, visited most of the public grounds of this continent and, with regard to seventy of them, divided among twenty different cities, we have had professional and official responsibilities giving us an intimate knowledge of their modes of management. We have attended several hundred meetings of different park commissions, and have had part in their debates. We have devised the plans for several local series of parks connected by parkways; have watched the carrying out of them, and have studied the results comparatively. We have prepared regulations afterwards adopted by park commissions for the public use of several such series of parks and parkways, and have watched the manner in which they have operated in practice.

As bearing, in a preliminary way, on the question of sound policy and methods in the park department of city business, we submit the following considerations to which, however simple and primary they may seem to be, we have not found that due regard is apt to be given.

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No man can be expected to contrive a good method of accomplishing a result who does not set about the contriving of that method with a fairly clear idea of the result required. If two men or ten men are to do the contriving, it is a necessity of their working efficiently together, that all shall have in mind the same idea of the result to be reached. It is equally necessary that all shall steadily keep this idea in view. Inefficiency and extravagance must grow from a difference of understanding in this respect, or from any understanding held weakly and vacillatingly. It follows that if some of those engaged in advancing such a work retire and others take their places, waste is liable to occur if the new men proceed upon a different view of the result to be accomplished from that which has been taken by their predecessors. We have known several hundred thousand dollars of public money wasted because of the prevalence of different ideas of their duty with successive honest members of a park commission.

Suppose that the result of the co-operation of several men is meant to be an apparatus of many parts; then each of these parts needs to be contrived to serve, in some subordinate way, the general purpose of the required apparatus as a whole. If, in the contrivance of these contributive parts, a wrong idea is had of the main purpose, then the work of contriving them is likely to be wasted, or worse. A bolt, for example, may be a good piece of workmanship in itself, but if it has been made too large or too small for the part it is to play in the work of the whole apparatus, or if it is made of too brittle or too flexible material for that part, not only will the labor which has been spent upon this bolt have been badly spent, but all the labor which has been applied to the whole apparatus will have been spent to less advantage than it otherwise would have been. The waste thus occurring through bad dealings with details may be very great.

The larger the number of those who are at any time to be engaged in the preparation of the apparatus, the greater is the necessity of a clear, common understanding among them as to the purpose which the apparatus as a whole is wanted to serve.

All that has thus been said as to providing an apparatus for any purpose applies to an arrangement for providing the people of a city with parks. To a useful inquiry, then, whether the park arrangements of a city have been well contrived, it is first of all necessary to ask with reference to what purpose these arrangements have been contrived, and how steadily, closely and shrewdly this purpose has been kept in view.

A sound understanding of the purpose that should be kept in view by a park commission is not always to be obtained by consulting the statute under which it has been formed. Such statutes are generally extremely vague in their statement of purpose.

When a statute provides for a commission to look after the building of a Court House, a School House or a Poor House, if anything results unsuited to the purpose intended, the commissioners can be held accountable [600] for this unsuitableness. But when a statute provides for a commission to look after the forming of that which is called a park, there is commonly thought to be room for a wide difference of opinion as to the purpose with reference to which the Commission is entitled to use public property. Within places which are called public parks, the land of which belongs to the public and which are kept in order and guarded at public expense, there are to be found a theatre, a church, an arsenal, a grave-yard, a race-track, a dance house, a menagerie, a flower garden, a picture gallery, beer houses, club houses, and private homes in houses with gardens about them, leased to the occupants.

The legal definition of a park according to Blackstone is “an enclosed chase extending over a man’s own ground.” Dr. Johnson defines a park as a body of land enclosed and stored with wild beasts. Dr. Crosby Brown adds that when the beasts are destroyed the land is no longer to be legally known as a park. In the laws of Colorado a park means a body of treeless prairie-like ground, the ownership of which may be divided among a hundred private citizens. There is an Act of Congress, and there are Acts of State Legislatures in which it is explained that by the word park is meant a place of public recreation, and much that has been written assumes that, to define the business of a park commission, it is sufficient to say that it is to prepare places suitable for public recreation, no definite limitation being provided in respect to the character of the recreation to be had in view. A large part of all that has been written for the public about the parks of the United States has been written with an equally inexact understanding of the end for which park commissions exist. Yet, with a moment’s reflection, the practical inadequacy of such an idea of a park commission’s duties should be evident.

Suppose that the building committee of a Normal School, or of a singing school, a dancing, a riding or a fencing, school should go to work with no more specific object than is to be expressed by the word education. Suppose that it should spend large sums for costly pictures and statuary, and meet criticism by asking — Are these things not educative? Obviously, the question the building committee should answer is, not whether they are educative, but whether they are educative in the specific manner to provide for which the committee, in this particular case, has been given other people’s money to spend?

There have been men; in some parts of the world there are yet men; who regard it as a recreation to see criminals hanged. Public money is expended in Spain for the recreation of the people by means of bull fights. A cock-pit is often built and maintained with public money for public recreation in the principal public grounds of a Mexican town.

No one, so far as we know, has yet distinctly advocated such a view of the duty of a park commission, but a great deal of the criticism of the doings of park commissions, and a large proportion of the propositions urged upon park commissions, and of the arguments used in favor of these propositions, betray confusion of mind between the proper purpose of public parks and a [601] view of that purpose that must be essentially the same, not only with that upon which it is thought best for the public authorities to provide for popular recreation by means of bull fights and cock fights, but with that under which, in the days that went before the downfall of the Roman Empire, men were paid from the public funds to take the risk of being slaughtered in the amphitheatre for the recreation of the populace.

There is no duty resting on any intelligent citizen of our republic more imperative than that of resisting all tendency of public opinion to drift toward such a confusion. If parks are to promote such confusion it would be better to have no parks.

A search for a sounder idea of the duty of a park commission; for an idea that can be followed without peril to the republic, may begin with the consideration that park commissions are departments of city government of comparatively recent origin, the larger number of all in the United States having set about their work within the last eighteen years, while the pioneer of all of them began its work but thirty-four years ago. It is to be inferred that park commissions began to be established in order to meet a public want which in most communities has only of late been recognized to be of pressing importance. That this want has, nevertheless, been widely felt and that no adequate means of meeting it has been found except through some such machinery of government as has with us been provided in park commissions is evident, not only from the number of park commissions for which American cities have obtained legislation, but from the fact that within forty years nearly every growing city in Europe, not before provided with parks, has taken measures to acquire them, and those cities which had before happened to possess any, have been securing land for more and larger parks. London and Paris, for example, have each added several thousand acres to the park areas they formerly possessed. The amount of land now held by European cities with a view to its use for public recreation is, in many cases, several times larger than it was twenty years ago. There has been nothing like a corresponding increase in the number of play-houses, billiard rooms, picture galleries, race-tracks and provisions for bull fights, cock fights and other means of recreation.

So large, so costly, so continuous has been this public park movement that it cannot wisely be regarded merely as the transit of a fashion; of an epidemic of vague, romantic sentiment, or as the result of a passing phase of popular taste.

To get nearer to a rational explanation of the movement, it is to be considered, first, that it began, and has been growing in all parts of the civilized world, only since another yet more notable movement became manifest, namely, the movement of which the present result is seen in a great recent enlargement of the population of many of the oldest large towns of the civilized world, and in the growing up of many entirely new large towns.

Cincinnati presents an example of what had thus been everywhere [602] occurring shortly before the park movement set in; her population having advanced from 31,000 to 145,000 in the period of fifteen years before the first move occurred in the proceedings which ended in the formation of the first American Park commission. Within this period large public parks were begun to be formed in London, Liverpool and Paris, each of which towns had for some time previously been greatly gaining in population. So, also, within this same period, more was done for the multiplication, enlargement and improvement of places of popular open air recreation in several other European cities than had been done in centuries of their previous history.

The space occupied by the population of the principal towns of the world has been enlarging more than correspondingly with the enlargement of the population; the effect of street railways, telephones, telegraphs and other apparatus of modern introduction, having been to cause towns to spread over their old suburbs, even faster than their population has increased. Yet fewer people than formerly, relatively to the whole population of a large town, now attend evening church meetings, theatres and other entertainments in it, because so many more of its people live at a distance from the central parts of the town, and the increase of means of transportation within the town has not been proportionate to the increasing popular need for transportation.

With enlarging populations, notwithstanding the fact that towns are now built less compactly than they formerly were, and for this reason and others are much cleaner and better ventilated, evils of a particular class are apt to increasingly prevail in them; evils by which the vigor, sound-minded ness, earning capacity and tax-paying capacity of their people is made seriously less than it otherwise would be.

Increase in this particular class of evils is not due, as is often assumed in the advocacy of parks, to the increasing impurity of air attending the enlargement of towns. As a rule, in modern built towns, people have much better air than the people of much smaller towns formerly had. Then, it is a fact that the evils in question have been increasing in quarters of these enlarging towns, in which the buildings are upon heights looking seaward and with air pressing into them which has come over the sea, or in other cases, which has come over great rivers and forests; quarters in which not the slightest taint of foul air can be detected; quarters in which a change of air is constantly occurring.

In all aggravated individual cases in which this particular class of evils appear, there is one means of relief which, when it is possible to be used, good physicians seldom fail to advise. It is that of a holiday or vacation to be taken largely with a view to the usual result of what is called a change of scene; more accurately to be specified as a change of scenery.

To what kind of scenery is it most desirable for the purpose that a man should escape from the scenery of a city? Broadly speaking, it is to that kind which will supply the strongest contrast that can be had to city scenery.

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There should not be a doubt in any man’s mind; there cannot be a lingering doubt, after he has taken the trouble to investigate the facts, or has sought the advice of those who have investigated them, that what is here said is wholly free from false sentiment or romance. It is plain, prosaic, matter-of-fact of which our knowledge is derived from the practical experience of many thousand over-worked men and women; men and women many of whom have had less admiring interest than the average man and woman, in beautiful trees and plants and flowers. There is no room for doubt that it pays exceedingly well; pays in the form, among others, of increased money-making capacity, and in the form of increased tax-paying capacity, for such men and women, living in towns, to take from time to time, doses of rural scenery; the more completely rural the better, provided the taking of doses of it does not involve too much inconvenience, fatigue, hardship and resulting nervous depression.

In every large city in the civilized world there are men distinguished for their devotion to pursuits which can only be followed to advantage in large cities; men of wealth, who under the advice of the ablest physicians that their wealth can obtain, are in the habit, much against their inclinations, of using this remedy. Such men have experimental knowledge that the time they lose from their pursuits for the purpose of using this remedy is profitably spent; is profitably spent with reference to commercial profits in those pursuits. Many a man has come to bankruptcy, even many a man to premature death, because he would not soon enough accept his physician’s advice to use this remedy. And the experience applies to poor working men and women as much as to those upon whom the cares of large commercial enterprises are weighing.

If relief from the evils in question is to be obtained by occasional change from town scenery to suitable country scenery, what means are people to use to guard against the coming on of that sapping of health, strength and means of usefulness and earning capacity, to which, when engaged in town pursuits, they are peculiarly and increasingly liable?

The sound answer seems to be that they must look to such measure of change of scenery as it is practicable for them to systematically secure in frequent doses.

It is a plain fact that the troubles in question can be thus guarded against; a fact as well established as any other in sanitary and medical science; and it is only a matter of common sense to recognize, as the people of large cities have lately come to recognize, that the man who cannot act upon this fact; the inhabitants of a city who cannot act upon this fact, are only less unfortunate than they would be if they could not act upon the fact that food and drink are necessary for the maintenance of their strength.

By what physiological process this remedy operates, it is unnecessary here to attempt an elaborate, scientific explanation. It is enough to say that it plainly operates in the main by inducing a change of mental bents or moods; [604] that the inducement of such change comes primarily through a subtle action of the remedy which sets a movement going of a man’s imagination and that the resulting changes of mood are more or less in a direction from a materialistic toward a poetic mood. Through these changes of mood the whole human system is affected healthfully.

The only way in which it is possible that provision for the object thus explained can be made available for the mass of the people of a large and growing town is by preparing places for the purpose at public expense. The places now called parks in our laws are places intended to be adapted to this purpose. The ultimate value of what parks in preparation are to be depends, first, on the adaptation of the design with regard to which they are to be prepared to the purpose which has been stated; second, on the adaptation of the work to be done upon them to a realization of that design; third, on the manner in which use shall be made of them, this last being chiefly a matter of suitable rules for visitors and inducements to them to comply with those rules.

Now it has to be considered that the time required for the realization of the design for a public park does not depend on the force employed, the money spent or the energy or skill of the management, in anything like the degree that is required for the realization of the design of a public building or the pavement of a street, or any other ordinary piece of corporation work. After all advantage has been gained that it is practicable to gain through the energy and skill of those in charge of the work, the realization of the design must be more or less dependent on progress by natural growth. In many cases it is so largely a question of the advance by natural growth that it may be estimated that such value as the parks shall have at the end of twenty years will, under good management, be doubled at forty; doubled again at sixty, and will thereafter be advancing continuously. The older the park, provided it is conservatively managed, the more valuable it will be relatively to the only purpose for which public money should have been spent upon it. Park works, it will be seen, differ in this respect from building works and from almost all other public works.

It is for this reason right that public parks should be largely paid for, as they commonly are, by the proceeds of loans, maturing as the value of the parks increases and comes more and more to be realized.

The first time that provisions adapted to the purpose which has thus been explained were made in the United States, they were made with reference to the wants of the future people of that one of the cities of the country which had already become the largest and most crowded of all, and in which strains upon health of the class that have been explained, were already most marked and were already obviously detracting from the prosperity of the city. And it was with reference to this undertaking that the first of the present forty or more park commissions of American cities was constituted and the first park loan authorized.

We do not say that in the case of that park; we do not say that in any [605] existing case, the purpose explained was clearly and precisely defined and limited in the minds of those who prepared the statutes under which park commissions have been constituted. What we urge is that the powers given to park commissions, and the use of borrowed money which has been allowed them, can only be reasonably accounted for and justified through reference to such a purpose, and that often blunderingly in particulars, sometimes with great departures in particulars, from this purpose, the work that has been done by park commissions has, in a large view of it, been done as it would have been if regard for such a purpose had been enjoined upon them by the law.

Nor is there a single case within our knowledge in which this idea of the distinctive function of this new department in city governments, called the park commission, has been accepted, and at all intelligently acted upon for a sufficient time to allow the designed results to be fairly tested, that it has not been found that the people are obtaining a degree of benefit to health through their use of the park that far more than compensates for the outlay by which it has been obtained for them.

This conclusion is sustained by the general testimony of physicians, even in cases where the outlay has been extravagant. Such testimony only fails where this idea of the distinctive function of a park commission has been wholly lost sight of or been largely eclipsed by the rising, during the work, of other motives wholly inconsistent with it.

Reviewing the experience as a whole, that has been gained in such public parks of this country as have been established within the last five and thirty years, the following conclusions may be considered as established.

First, that people living in large towns are liable to be acted upon by the class of subtle influences to the more aggravated results of which the terms nervous exhaustion and nervous irritation have come to be commonly applied.

Second, that when thus acted upon, people are more liable than they otherwise would be to suffer from various more distinct forms of ill health, and in all cases, to lose strength, vigor and ability to bear well their part in the general business of the city.

Third, that this liability may be materially lessened, and the bad effect of the class of influences in question counteracted by certain means.

Fourth, that the most efficacious of such means, so far, at least, as they can be provided for by legislation, is that by which the people of a town are, at frequent intervals, brought under the counter influence of natural scenery.

Fifth, that forms of natural scenery the most efficacious that can be secured for the purpose under local circumstances must be so presented that they will be generally available and will not be materially lessened in value by such means, in the form of roads and walks, seats and shelters, as will be necessary for the immediate comfort of those to be benefitted.

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Sixth, that works of this class are likely to be well designed only by designers who have been qualified for the duty by much industry and discipline in the pursuit of special professional studies and through courses of special professional training.

Seventh, that when men who are without the results of such special study, training and discipline attempt to direct such works, the result is apt to compare with that of the work of trained designers as the work of amateurs on the stage or in architecture, or any other of the Fine Arts, is apt to compare with that of suitably trained and disciplined artists.

Park commissioners are not intended by the law to be selected for their duties, nor, in practice, have they ever been selected for their duties, because of any special training that they have had in the exercise of judgment in determining the adaptation of lands to the purpose of parks, or in determining by what series of operations such lands may be well prepared for parks. They have generally been selected and it is the intention of the laws that they shall be selected, on the same grounds that are commonly regarded in the choice of men to serve as trustees of funds provided for the buildings of hospitals, churches, bridges, railroads or for obtaining statues or historical paintings for a public place or building.

Taking this view, what is the first duty of a board of trustees for a public park? Plainly, it is the same with the duty of a board of trustees of a building fund for any public purpose. It is to select and employ men who are specially and technically trained for the designing and management of park undertakings; and to deal with their undertaking through them as do the directors of a bank, or a factory, or a railroad, or a line of steam boats, through the skilled men whom they employ.

When the trustees of a hospital undertake to prescribe the medicines and the diet of patients; to personally regulate the means of ventilation of the wards, or to determine the qualifications of the nurses and stewards, it is time for the surgeons to resign. Nor can we see how any man competent for the duty of our profession, can rightly hold a position in which a board of trustees as a body, much more in which trustees individually, feel themselves at liberty to give orders whereby his professional responsibility for the value of the results of the work upon a public park may be made questionable. The case, in our opinion, is precisely the same with any in which the professional responsibility of an architect, a sculptor, a painter, a lawyer, or a physician is involved. Nor, when we have been employed have we, in thirty years ever failed to offer our resignation when it had become demonstrable that the trustees or commissioners of a park on which we were engaged took a different view in this respect from that which we have thus presented. We have four times resigned our position under such circumstances, and if we have earned a reputation for a successful performance of our professional duties, as your call upon us may be thought to indicate that you believe, it is largely because we have thus refused to allow ourselves to be made responsible before the [607] public for work the character of which was to be determined by men not professionally qualified to determine it.

If the people of Cincinnati are dissatisfied with the result of the money spent in their behalf by your predecessors, the reason they are so may be that a view of the duties of those who have been trustees for them has been taken as differing from that usually taken in business affairs of a corresponding character in commercial life. It seems to us not improbable that this is the case from evidence which the public grounds of the city present that they have been operated upon with inconstant, incoherent, inharmonious and disunited motives; with motives, also, to some extent, such as no honest man of our profession would have entertained. There are many fine things in your parks. There are many examples of good work, but, from our professional point of view, these fine things do not appear to have been designed, or where they are natural, to have been made use of, as parts contributive to the working out of a fixed and legitimate common comprehensive purpose.

Why have they not?

That we may answer this question we review, with such means as we have, the history of the proceedings of which the parks of Cincinnati as we find them, are the result. At the outset of such a review, three notable circumstances are to be recognized.

First, In the near borders of Cincinnati there were, thirty years ago, more of certain natural and unsophisticated elements of beautiful sylvan scenery than in the borders of any equally large town in the country.

Second, Numbers of the citizens of Cincinnati at that time were keenly appreciative of this fact; keenly interested in the pursuit of methods whereby the value of such elements of scenery might be combined, preserved and developed. There was but one town in all the country, if there was even one, in which, more than in Cincinnati, intelligent interest in horticulture was then manifest.

Third, Twenty-two years ago, Adolph Strauch was employed to devise and supervise the carrying out of a plan for providing the future people of Cincinnati with means of counteracting the special dangers to health which attend the collection of people in large towns.

For the duty to which he was called, we suppose that Mr. Strauch was better qualified by nature, by special education in the art required, and by the results of close observation of the local conditions to be dealt with than any other man in the world. As the professional advisor and chief executive agent of a corporation not of a political character, he had already produced a work which, not having the same class of ends in view, yet required the same class of materials to be dealt with, the same art to be used and the same class of processes to be followed. The result has been what was to be expected of such a man when rightly dealt with, the very finest thing of its kind in the world. It has become celebrated as such. It has been often referred to as an example and illustration as to what should be done for other communities. [608]

[609] The work is to-day being maintained, and is being carried forward and enlarged by another artist, with reverent respect for the special purposes, principles and motives of design originating with its first master, and the carrying out of which was studiously superintended by him until the day of his death. To illustrate the success attained in the carrying out of Strauch’s design as it has been carried out, we will mention certain circumstances. Several works have since been begun in places distant from Cincinnati with the purpose of accomplishing similar results; results that Strauch was the first man to think of attempting to attain. Again, similar works have since been entered upon in Europe. Again, views of passages of this work have been engraved, published and extensively circulated and favorably reviewed in Europe. Again, we have several times traveled a hundred miles out of our way to benefit by such means of education in our art as were to be obtained by an examination of the gradual unfolding on the ground of Strauch’s design. We have repeatedly conducted students of our art to Cincinnati that they might study it. Again, when our services have been sought for designing a work with the same purpose, while Strauch lived, we have told those coming to us that they had much better take counsel with him, to whom we should be but disciples.

This was the master of our art who was employed to contrive the plan of the required park system of Cincinnati.

Lately, visiting one of your public grounds, the plan of which was said to have been devised by Strauch, pains were taken by the Superintendent of the work to explain to us what ideals of scenery he supposed that Strauch, in making this plan, had had before him, and he pointed out how various things had been done with the ground and had been put upon it by which it had now become impossible to return to any such ideals. We may indicate the impression in this respect which was made upon us by saying that we suppose that now, after twenty years work and twenty years growth, it would cost more to realize what all the work of Strauch and all the work that was done in accordance with his wishes, was intended to bring about, than if not one dollar had in the meantime been spent upon the ground.

What did Strauch himself think about it? It so happens that we are able to give some slight testimony on this point from personal knowledge. On one of our visits for instruction in our art to Spring Grove, having expressed a wish to look also at Strauch’s public park work, he made a reply which, while we will not attempt to quote the words of it, we well remember to have been strikingly expressive of impatient repudiation of responsibility for what was to be seen in the park properties of Cincinnati.

Suppose Strauch had been treated by the Trustees of the park undertaking as he was by the Trustees of the Spring Grove undertaking? Suppose that the same respect had been paid to his special professional knowledge and rare special talent in one case that was paid in the other? Suppose the same business methods had been followed in carrying out his design in one [610] case as in the other? Suppose, in short, that Strauch had been given such professional control of the work as was necessary to make him professionally responsible for the results to be attained, as the architect of a bank is made so responsible by its Directors, do the people of Cincinnati doubt that they would now already be getting much greater dividends from their investments in parks than, as things are, there is any prospect will ever be realized?

It is our opinion that had Strauch been given the problem of a park as we have been stating it, and had he selected what he thought the best ground near Cincinnati with a view to the solution of that problem, and had he been allowed to direct the work with the same freedom to follow his own judgment in details, under the general control of a committee with a single eye to the proper end of the enterprise, Cincinnati would be provided with the best public park system in America, and the cost of it would have been less than has been the cost of the parks as they now are.

As to what should be done with your parks as they now are, you need no advice from us other than that which we have in effect thus given. It is hardly possible that good work in park making can be done prudently, at reasonable cost, or with respectable results even at extravagant cost, upon plans that are held easily subject to adjustments, amendments and interpolations from year to year. It would be much more feasible to build a good courthouse or prison economically under such conditions than to form good parks. This for the reason that the value of parks depends mainly on the relations of every other element of value in them to conditions of natural growth. Plans in the carrying out of which progress has once been made cannot be changed; processes of growth cannot be interrupted, without a spendthrift waste of results previously gained.

The first requirement of sound park administration, then, is a fixed design; the second is a steady pursuance of that design with a well-organized and well-trained working force, efficiently commanded and disciplined. Payment for such work as you have now going on should plainly be charged in large part to the charities of the city. Not much of it can justly be regarded as a part of the cost of your park system.

We recognize that the counsel which we have thus offered is little more than that the real object for which a park commission exists should be more clearly recognized than it seems to have been by some of your predecessors, and that ordinary business principles should be applied to the pursuit of this object. If such counsel seems superfluous, we can only apologize for giving it by saying that what is faulty in your park system has seemed to us to be the result of failures to apply common sense in this respect, rather than to lack of sound professional advise such as you may have expected to obtain from us.

If your present Superintendent is competent for the duties you are putting upon him, and we have no reason to doubt that he is; if your engineer [611] is a competent advisor in respect to the strictly engineering problems that are presented in your park works, and we have no reason to doubt that he is; common business sagacity will lead you to trust much to the discretion of these gentlemen, as the Trustees of Spring Grove at a corresponding stage of their enterprise trusted much to the discretion of Strauch. If they fail to bring about good results, you should dismiss them and look for others, but while they remain, you should take care that their proper professional and official responsibilities are clearly established and that they have no excuse for not meeting them, especially no excuse of that class of excuses commonly referred to in political affairs as “influences,” of which the effect always is a practical dissipation of official responsibility.

On our arrival in Cincinnati, we were led to suppose that our advice would be asked with reference to the selection of a site for a park of a more suburban character than any you are now preparing. Afterwards, any intention there had been to consult us in this respect seemed to be abandoned. It may, nevertheless, be within our duty to say that, judging from general experience elsewhere, regard for public health in the future of your city and for its attractiveness as a place of residence, will soon lead a park to be desired of a different scope and character from any of those you are now preparing; that within moderate distance of your present center of population there are yet sites unoccupied by expensive improvements, or cut up by public roads, which are adapted to provide a degree of sequestered rural and sylvan scenery of very much greater value with reference to the essential purposes of a park than any which you now possess. We should not think it our duty to make even this suggestion were it not for the fact that we have never been asked to advise as to the selection of a site for a public suburban ground for the healthful recreation of the people of a city, without hearing that if this duty had been set about a few years sooner, a much better place for the purpose could have been obtained than any that remained available; and that such a place could then have been obtained at comparatively small cost. It is a prudent custom to obtain and hold in reserve such bodies of land in the outer suburbs of a city with reference to its future needs. London has lately acquired 6000 acres of land for this purpose; New York 4000; Boston is now acquiring 10,000. Neither city is spending anything for permanent improvements upon these reservations. They are held simply in order that their value for future use may not be destroyed, and that the cost of obtaining them may not be excessively increased.