TOY OFFICIALS 253 
mission, for its own credit and honor, must accept or repu- 
diate the responsibility of an employe now so discredited in 
his own community as to make his retention in the Park 
Board a serious and growing menace.” 
And, on December 16, I wrote: “As the action of the 
Orange Council last evening will tend to accelerate rather 
than modify the situation you are placed in by the action of 
your counsel, I deem it just to you and to myself to state 
some of the causes leading up to the situation briefly indi- 
cated in my letter to you of the ninth instant.” I then re- 
ferred to the statements made by Counsel Munn to some of 
the members of the East Orange City Council while the rail- 
road ordinance for Central avenue was there pending; 
quoted the statements of the freeholder in Branch Brook 
Park, as above mentioned; referred to the commission’s 
“emphatic declarations” regarding the avenues for park- 
ways, and to “their own counsel, whose statements and acts” 
had for months contradicted those declarations; and en- 
closed a copy of the statement of E. H. Snyder, of January 
15, 1897, as quoted from at length in Chapter XII. 
TRANSFER OF HIGHWAYS. 
I was advised on December 24 that the communications 
“had been received and placed on file.’ And the plans of 
the traction company for appropriating the parkway con- 
tinued to move directly forward, as before. 
It may here be of interest to note, with what facility and 
readiness existing public highways, avenues, or streets may 
be transferred, and have been transferred under the Essex 
County Park Commission’s charter, when such contem- 
plated action on the part of the interested governing bodies 
is not subject to the demoralizing influences, which delayed 
for years and finally prevented the transfer of one of the 
two vitally important parkway avenues. Within ten days 
after the passage of the parkways resolution by the Park 
Board in November, 1896, H. H. Hart, then president of 
the South Orange Village Board of Trustees, called a spe- 
cial meeting of that board to act upon the question, and at 
