THE PARKWAYS 17%3 
securing the franchises might obtain. How the effort was 
made to use both the press, and even forged postal card 
ballots to accomplish these ends. How such representative 
organizations as the New England Society, the Woman’s 
Club, the Road Horse Association, and other civic and good 
government associations joined the parkway forces and en- 
tered into the fray, where they remained to the finish. 
A volume might also be written on the action of certain 
officials and the majority members in the Board of Free- 
holders, and of the municipal authorities in East Orange 
and Orange, who for years were seemingly so anxious to 
serve “the organization” (alias, in this instance, the cor- 
porations), that their official acts resembled those of toy 
officials and toy boards, where each, in time of emergency, 
sprang to rescue the situation for their superiors, and 
against the parkways and their constituents, as moves a 
jumping-jack when the strings are pulled by the man in 
power behind the scenes. 
A chapter might also be of interest accurately describing 
the shifting of position of some of these officials; first upon 
the one side, and then upon the other of the same identical 
question, when their opinions and services were needed to 
comply with the needs and exigencies of the corporations as 
from time to time these requirements developed. 
TOPICS OF GENERAL INTEREST, 
Much might also be written of the changed attitude of 
the Park Commission, clothed as it was, and is, by its char- 
ter, with all authority and full power, from its original 
position of active interest toward securing the two principal 
parkways for a time after their announcement in Novem- 
ber, 1896, to a somnambulistic condition of non-activity and 
_ seeming impotence, and an apparent indifference as to what 
became of its own plans, and as to whether the board should 
secure the parkways as it had planned, and had repeatedly 
promised the public, or should give them over, through the 
