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how eager all classes were to avail themselves of an 

 opportunity for a visit to anything resembling a park. 

 Mount Auburn, Greenwood, and Laurel Hill had 

 been already established for a quarter of a century, 

 and that they had come to be places of resort was 

 certainly not because they afforded opportunity for 

 solemn meditation or for the artistic value of the 

 monuments reared within them. He truly argued 

 that it was because they contained bits of forest-land, 

 hills and dales, copses and glades that they attracted 

 throngs of visitors in cities which possessed no great 

 public gardens, and that if thirty thousand people 

 would visit Laurel Hill in one year many times that 

 number would visit a public park in a city like Phila- 

 delphia. He set his argument on the highest plane 

 at the very outset, and, while recognizing the use of 

 parks as helping to furnish air and sunshine, he held 

 that the fostering of the love of rural beauty was 

 quite as important an end, and that such a love of 

 nature helped to civilize and refine national character. 

 Mayor Kingsland's proposed park of a hundred and 

 sixty acres he pronounced altogether too scant, and 

 argued that five hundred acres between Thirty-ninth 

 Street and the Harlem was the smallest space that 

 should be reserved for the wants of the city, since no 

 area less than this could furnish a rural landscape or 

 offer space enough for broad reaches of parkland with 

 a real feeling of the breadth and beauty of green 

 fields and the perfume and freshness of nature. It 

 was argued by some who assumed to represent the 



