743 
PARK AND CEMETERY. 
■i- 
ARE NATIONAL PARKS WORTH WHILE? 
Address of President I. Horace Me Farland at Seventh Annual Convention 
of the American Civic Association, Washington, D. C., December 13, 1911 
There can only be a negative reply 
to the query of the subject, unless it 
be conclusively shown that the National 
Parks add definitely something of value 
to the life or the resources of the nation. 
Mere pride of possession cannot justify, 
in democratic America, the removal 
from development of upwards of five 
millions of acres of the public domain. 
To establish true value, real worth- 
whileness, therefore, it is necessary to 
put the national parks on trial. Indeed, 
as the national parks are but a larger 
development of municipal, county and 
state parks, we may quite properly put 
on the stand the whole American park 
idea. 
It is necessary to call the recent rapid 
development of a certain kind of parks 
in the United States an American idea, 
for it has no close parallel abroad. 
Examining, for instance, the admirable 
plan upon which the capital of Belgium 
has been developing since 1572, we note 
in Brussels an almost entire absence of 
such parks as those of Boston. The 
present day plan of Paris shows that 
inside the old city there had been pro- 
vided almost as large an area of ceme- 
teries in which to store the dead, as 
of parks in which to restore the en- 
ergies of the living. Great London has 
barely an acre of parks for each thou- 
sand of her people — only a tenth of the 
ideal American provision of an acre for 
every hundred inhabitants. Even model 
Berlin is long on municipal forests and 
short on well-distributed municipal 
parks. The recently published Encyclo- 
pedia Brittanica, written abroad, devotes 
just 31 lines to the discussion of the 
word “park,” but 17 of these lines refer 
to its military significance. 
So the American service park is a 
new world idea, and it is even quite new 
in the new world; for at the date of 
the Centennial Exhibition in Philadel- 
phia, parks in the United States were 
few in number, small in extent, and 
largely upon European models. Within 
five years, indeed, a contest has raged in 
Greater New York around the idea of 
diverting a portion of Central Park 
from the service of the relatively few 
in the way of purely pleasure develop- 
ment to the service of the very many 
through the establishment of well- 
equipped playgrounds. 
Yet inquiry has developed that in 1909 
74 American cities owned 41,576 acres 
of parks, an average of about four- 
tenth of an acre to the 100 of their 
population, and spent upon them that 
year for maintenance — that is to make 
them of service to the people — an aver- 
age of $91.42 per acre. Some of these 
cities are in what I call the honor class 
of American communities, in that they 
own and maintain an acre or more of 
parks for each hundred of their people. 
Such cities are Council Bluffs, Minne- 
apolis, Harrisburg, Colorado Springs 
and Springfield, 111. 
This American service park idea, in- 
to which we are inquiring critically as 
to its true value, its relative efficiency, 
has its intensive development in mod- 
ern playgrounds — those first aids to en- 
dangered American childhood, of which 
few examples are found abroad, and 
not nearly enough in our own country. 
We have multiplied schools in which 
to cultivate the brain, but have delayed 
long in providing adequate facilities to 
develop and keep in order the body 
which houses the brain. Our cemeter- 
ies, our juvenile courts and our reform 
schools have increased much more rap- 
idly than the means by which the city 
can hold back the population of the one 
and decrease the business of the others. 
Chicago, for instance, has notably dis- 
covered the truth as to this relation be- 
tween crime and disorder and the small 
park and social center. It is a depart- 
ing relation ; for in 1909 it was discov- 
ered that within a half-mile radius of 
her twelve splendidly equipped and 
maintained breathing spots, veritable 
life-saving stations in the midst of the 
sea of industrial strain and stress, juven- 
ile delinquency had decreased 44 per 
cent, while in the same year it had in- 
creased 44 per cent as a whole. 
Here then, is the first evidence for 
the defendant at the bar — the American 
Park idea. The service park, the or- 
dered and supervised playground, act 
immediately and favorably on the health 
and the orderliness of the community, 
and consequently increase materially the 
average of individual efficiency. In 
other words, they pay dividends in hu- 
manity. 
The park idea we are examining has a 
development in another way. The join- 
ing of separated parks by a highway of 
green, usually called a parkway, is the 
step taken when a community develops 
from the simple having of parks to the 
proud possession of a park system. The 
one may have merely happened; the 
other is always the result of a careful 
plan. Minneapolis, Hartford, Kansas 
City, Boston, Buffalo and other pros- 
perous and advanced American cities 
have such systems. Chicago has a great 
plan for a park system, and owns some 
links in the chain which is to bind it 
together. 
An adequate park system, looking to- 
ward the future of the city, and giving 
to every inhabitant easy access without 
expense for transportation to the relief 
of a spot of green, to the recreation of 
a playground, is the most profitable in- 
vestment a city can make. It is profit- 
able in promoting the welfare of the 
people; it is profitable in providing along 
its borders increased taxable values. For 
instance, Kansas City’s Paseo, cut 
through her length, has cleared fully 
its cost in increased values, and even old 
Central Park in New York has returned 
to the city more than eight times the 
total amount spent in purchase and de- 
velopment within sixty years. 
I bring then before the court the sec- 
ond witness for the character and 
worth-whileness of the American park 
idea. Well considered park improve- 
ments always react favorably upon com- 
munity values. Proper park investments 
are usually placed at what amounts to 
compound increment. 
But there is another witness for the 
defendant. It is typified in the Ameri- 
can flag, the emblem of our national 
existence, the concrete, visible essence 
of that love of country which manifests 
itself in the essential virtue of patriot- 
ism. Consider what it is that inspires 
us as we sing the national hymn. Is 
it our wonder of mining, showing in 
the hideous ore dumps, the sordid min- 
ing village? Is it in the burned-over 
waste that has followed the cutting of 
much of our forest wealth. Is it the 
powerhouse in which is harnessed the 
beauty of Niagara? Is it the smoking 
factory chimneys, the houses of the 
grimy mill town, the malodorous 
wharves along our navigable rivers? Is 
it even the lofty Metropolitan skyscrap- 
er, or the great transcontinental steel 
highway? 
No; not one of these produces pat- 
riotism. Listen to the most sordid ma- 
terialist who is American in birth or 
residence, as he boasts ; it is always of 
the beauty of his town, his state, his 
country ! Our devotion to the flag be- 
gins in that love of country which its 
beauty has begotten; it may end, at the 
last supreme test, in the beauty of soul 
that makes the patriot ready to die for 
his country in battle — if just battle 
there may ever again be. 
Now these parks that have been pre- 
