Reputation in 1867 119 



respects, I mean in those respects which if anything entitle 

 me to my present position, I have obtained it by reason of no 

 advantages which many of you might not have had. The 

 best of my travelling has been done on foot at a cost of 70 

 cents a day, or working my passage as a common seaman. 

 My practical horticultural education, I mean that not gained 

 by reading, was in part acquired while engaged as a laborer, 

 looking to working men as my masters and teachers. It is 

 then impossible for me to have any hearty or habitual 

 respect for the superiority of one man over another in station 

 in life except as superiority of station means higher responsi- 

 bility and larger duty. 



In 1863, when the political situation on the Central Park 

 made it difficult for Mr. Olmsted to entertain the idea of 

 returning to his work there, he wrote to Mr. Vaux from 

 California: 



But you know that the advantages offered in the office 

 of the Superintendent for spending a good deal of my life in 

 the park, being with the people in it, watching over it and 

 cherishing it in every way, living in it and being a part of it 

 (whatever else there was), were valued by me at a valuation 

 which you thought nonsensical, childish and unworthy of 

 me; but it was my valuation of them and not yours which 

 was concerned. And that this was something deeper than a 

 whim you know, for you know that it existed essentially 

 years before it attached itself to the Central Park as was 

 shown by the fact that while others gravitated to pictures, 

 architecture, Alps, libraries, high life and low life when 

 travelling, I had gravitated to parks, spent all my spare 

 time in them, when living in London for instance, and this 

 with no purpose whatever except a gratification which came 

 from sources which the Superintendence of the Park would 

 have made easy and cheap to me, to say the least, every day 

 of my life. What I wanted in London and in Paris and in 

 Brussels and everywhere I went in Europe what I wanted 



