The New York Park 387 



diffused among men, and not shut up within the narrow 

 walls of narrower institutions. Plant spacious parks in your 

 cities and unloose their gates as wide as the gates of morning 

 to the whole people. As there are no dark places at noon- 

 day, so education and culture - - the true sunshine of the 

 soul --will banish the plague spots of democracy; and 

 the dread of the ignorant exclusive who has no faith in the 

 refinement of a republic, will stand abashed in the next 

 century before a whole people whose system of voluntary 

 education embraces (combined with perfect individual free- 

 dom), not only common schools of rudimentary knowledge, 

 but common enjoyments for all classes in the higher realms 

 of art, letters, science, and social recreations. Were our 

 legislators but wise enough to understand to-day the des- 

 tinies of the New World, the gentility of Sir Philip Sidney, 

 made universal, would be not half so much a miracle fifty 

 years hence in America as the idea of a whole nation of 

 laboring men reading and writing was, in his day, in 

 England. 



