these, to be public heritages forever, it were hard to find. 

 Permanent as few others can be, they will only gain with 

 time, in beauty often and in richness of association 

 always. Changes in science or social organization, al- 

 tered standards of artistic interest or change in char- 

 itable method will not destroy their value. 



There are landscapes and tracts of land which for their 

 beauty and exceptional interest — or their close relation 

 to important centers — should be inalienably public, for- 

 ever free to all. Our metropolitan parks and reserva- 

 tions are a first step in this direction, as are the national 

 parks out West, but with increasing private ownership 

 and rapidly increasing population, the movement is one 

 that will need to go far eventually. 



The earth is our common heritage. It is both right and 

 needful that it should be kept widely free in the portions 

 that the homes of men, industry and agriculture do not 

 claim. Personal possession reaches out at widest but a 

 little way, and passes quickly in the present day, gath- 

 ering about itself little of that greater charm which time 

 alone can give. If men of wealth would spend but a 

 fraction of what they do for themselves alone, with brief 

 result, in making the landscape about them beautiful for 

 the benefit of all in permanent and simple ways, the 

 result would be to give extraordinary interest — of a 

 steadily accumulative kind — to every residential section 

 of the land; and it would tend, besides, to give all men 

 living in or passing through it a sense of personal pos- 

 session in the landscape instead of injury at exclusion 

 from it, and to give them, too, a freedom of wandering 

 and a beauty by the way which do not lie within the reach 

 of anyone today. 



And with such gifts would also go the pleasant sense 

 of sharing, of participation in a wholesome joy which 

 each recurrent year would bring afresh. No monument 

 could be a better one to leave behind, no memorial pleas- 

 anter— whether for one's self or others — than gifts like 



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