144 
PARK AND CEMETERY. 
equipped by travel, study and knowledge of the practi- 
cal requirements involved in the construction of parks 
that they have secured most artistic results. This, how- 
ever is exceptional. 
The ideal park commissioner should be a person who 
represents the highest intelligence of the community, a 
person having refined tastes, who has traveled enough 
to be familiar with the best examples of park design, a 
person having a full appreciation of nature in all phases, 
one who in every respect is a cultivated man, broad 
enough to appreciate and sympathize with the needs of 
the whole community and with sufficient force of cha- 
racter to prevent any one element in the community from 
gaining an undue advantage over another; an honorable 
and public spirited man who will not use the position to 
gain personal or political advantage. He should be 
able to present in a convincing manner before legisla- 
tive bodies the needs of the people as represented by 
public parks. He should be a man who is able to ap- 
preciate that a well designed public park is a work of 
art which is to grow into its full beauty only in years 
and which can be wholly ruined by injudicious changes. 
He should be a man of sufficient leisure to allow him 
to devote at least a portion of his time to the parks un- 
der his care, not so much to personally superintend act- 
ual work, but to assure himself that his ideas of those 
of the consulting landscape architect are carefully car- 
ried out. 
The office of park commissioner should be unpaid 
and honorary; it should be unpaid so as to obtain the 
services of gentlemen who consider the honor con- 
nected with such a position sufficient reward for their 
services; it should be unpaid so as to make it undesir- 
able to professional office-seekers. 
A park, being a living, growing thing, designed with 
an object in view that can only be realized in years 
should be continuously under one management, hence 
the offices of park commissioners, and especially the 
positions of park employes should be of long terms and 
should be free from the control of politics. Every en- 
couragement should be given to park employes to in- 
crease their efficiency so that from their own ranks com- 
petent persons may be developed and educated for 
higher positions, especially as they are familiar with the 
growth of the parks and all local conditions connected 
therewith. 
A park is to remain a possession of the people for all 
time, and as the measure of its perfection is to be de- 
termined by the thoroughness of its preparation, a park 
commissioner should see that all work is done in a thor- 
ough manner, all work should be fully completed before 
improvement on a new portion of a parkis commenced. 
What is finished should look finished, and what is in- 
complete should rather be in its first, rough condition 
than to appear half finished. 
It should be the duty of park commissioners to see 
that the people’s pleasure grounds are made readily ac- 
cessible, both to the poor and to the rich, especially the 
former. The humble buggy or light vehicle of the 
tradesman carrying his whole family should be as wel- 
come as the stately carriage of the banker. All should 
feel that they are part owners of the parks. Visitors 
should be given the utmost freedom consistent with the 
preservation of plantations and structures; and they 
should not be required to “Keep Off the Grass” every- 
where. 
Policemen should not be permitted to assume a 
threatening and aggressive air with a great display of club 
and undue authority. They should nevertheless be vigi- 
lant to protect and to act promptly and judiciously in 
removing objectionable persons and in preventing dan- 
gerous play or fast driving or bicycling. 
Visitors should have a sense of absolute security 
while in the park. They should be encouraged to have 
a sense of ownership in the park, and to quickly resent 
any acts on the parts of visito's or employes that inter- 
fere with the comfort and pleasure of others. 
Park commissioners should give every proper in- 
ducement to encourage people to use the parks freely 
for picnics or private parties; most of all should this be 
the case with the pupils of our public and parochial 
schools. Especial privileges should be granted as well 
as assistance given to them in planting trees on Arbor 
day, thereby planting into their young hearts the love of 
trees and the beauties of nature generally. 
Indeed it is happily a growing custom in our coun- 
try to thus encourage little children to plant trees in 
parks and other suitable places on Arbor Day, and too 
much can hardly be said in support of this idea. The 
child becomes associated with that tree, so to speak, be- 
comes interested in its growth and development, learns 
thereby to love trees in general and to carefully observe 
their interesting peculiarities and characteristics. Noth- 
ing softens and broadens the human mind so much as 
observation and love of nature in all its phases, and so 
we teach our children not to destroy flowers nor inno- 
cent animals, and it has long been considered as an excel- 
lent form of early education to interest them in gardening. 
So with the Arbor Day theory, the child, if it possesses 
any imagination at all, must feel its own life and career 
to be more or less associated with the tree to which it 
put spadefuls of earth and watered for the first time. 
That child will like to frequent the place where the tree 
grows. His own life is bound to that of the tree, as it 
were, and through the vicissitudes of existence they pass 
closely connected together. Indeed, it is a beautiful 
idea — this of the children practically celebrating Arbor 
Day — full of poetic imagery 'and the foundations for 
thoughtful philosophic considerations of life in all its 
phases. It is an idea that should take root and spread, 
like the tree itself. 
The parks of the great English metropolis have aptly 
been called “the lungs of Eondon”, and too much stress 
can hardly be laid upon the all-important fact that 
through the parks the poorer classes of city denizens 
can learn to meet nature face to face. All that mental 
helpfulness of trees, blue sky, green grass, flowers and 
every other characteristic of our Eternal Mother, can at 
least be shown them in miniature in the parks, and who 
can be so thoughtless as to suppose that any day passes 
without some overworked, poverty-stricken, life-despair- 
ing soul going back to the over crowded, heated slums 
that are his only home, nearer to happiness and partial 
content for the breadth of a purer and nobler life that a 
visit to the parks have vouchsafed him? 
Everyone knows that park commissioners are un- 
paid, their positions being purely honorary, however 
hardworking, if they are faithful to their duty. But for 
them a high recompense lies in the consideration of the 
pleasure that their efforts give to tens of thousands, the 
profit that may accrue to all citizens from the facts al- 
ready noted, and the healthy, happy feeling that actual 
good has been done to so large a part of the inhabitants 
of the city in which they officiate. 
