PARK AND C E M ET ERY. 
187 
be marked and allowance must be 
made. Also, beside the seasonable 
and age variation there are many- 
other things that affect a man’s 
working period, and all is to be 
reckoned with if equity and justice 
is to be done the workman. 
Man is not a machine and the “joy 
of work” should not be destroyed, nor 
should the spirit be broken. Never- 
theless, tables giving the standard 
time for doing standard units of 
work are helpful if rightly used, or 
they may become cruelty itself if in- 
discriminately used. I shall not at- 
tempt to give the tables I work out 
for myself, for it would take too 
long to explain the exceptions that 
have to be made, and the exceptions 
are of greater importance than the 
tables. 
This paper is already so long. I 
shall not attempt to discuss the mak- 
ing out of the daily report for the 
superintendent, the monthly report 
for the Commissioners, or the annual 
report for the public. These reports 
are the resultant of all record and 
account keeping, but it is so self- 
evident how these reports should be 
made out, it is hardly worth while 
to give emphasis to my special 
method. 
I have not made myself clear as 
to what I have tried to explain, and 
the worst of it is I do not see how 
I can improve upon it much without 
going more into detail or to write a 
text-book giving all the blanks and 
examples to be worked out. 
The new thing about all this, at 
least it is new to me, is the arranging 
around the four sides of a table of 
figures, any number of ways of dis- 
tributing their value, providing that 
each distribution includes their whole 
value. That it is just as practical 
to have a five or ten entry book- 
keeping as it is to have single and 
double entry bookkeeping, and fur- 
thermore, although this is not new, 
they can be kept in such a way that 
comparison by the index method of 
statistics is easily made, and the bur- 
den of much of the details can be 
lessened by mnemonic symboliza- 
tion and the facility of working on 
the right hand side of the decimal 
point. 
If what I have stated seems like 
a rehashing of an old subject, that of 
ordinary bookkeeping, then I have 
failed. I do not know of another sys- 
tem which attempts the results this 
does that can accomplish it with so 
little work. The old double entry 
system of bookkeeping is but little 
used under modern industrial condi- 
tions. There are short cuts, and the 
elimination of “dead wood” every- 
where. Every one wants to know the 
cost of making, of selling, how much 
they owe or is owing to them. 
It is a matter of business, and the 
measure of success is the amount 
gained. But park work is not busi- 
ness — it is service. Its measure is 
not how much we can get, but how 
much we can give, and nothing is 
dead that gives light on the giving 
or tends to interpret the needs of the 
public. This nation, in common with 
The boulevards and parkways of 
Kansas City, Missouri, are under the 
control and jurisdiction of the Board 
of Park Commissioners, who have by 
charter provision, a general mainte- 
nance tax of 2 mills against all real 
estate property and a special mainte- 
nance tax of 10 cents per front foot 
other nations, is trying to learn a 
brand new thing; that is, how to 
make cities so that men and women 
can be grown out of children who 
must live in cities and whose parents 
were born and bred in cities. No one 
knows how to do it now, and the rec- 
ords and accounts such as I have out- 
lined will help give the data by which 
we can learn. Therefore, the sys- 
tem now proposed is an effort to help 
through the medium of accounting, 
the making of a better balanced city. 
If I am right in this then so much 
of this system is new. We have ap- 
proached accounting from a different 
angle. This system is applicable to 
any other department or to the city 
as a whole, and any city who would 
adopt it would know within only 
three days back just where it stood 
in regard to any expenditure and 
would have on file a record of what 
every employee had done by his own 
statement or the statement of his 
foreman. The larger the city the less 
expensive and the more efficient the 
system would become. 
I have brought with me a set of 
the seventeen blanks used, but have 
not included them as a part of this 
paper, but should any member of this 
association care for a set, I will glad- 
ly send them. 
on all property fronting on boule- 
vards and parkways under the con- 
trol of the Board, which is used for 
the general maintenance of the boule- 
vards and parkways. This mainte- 
nance consists of repairing, cleaning 
and oiling the roadways, repairing and 
cleaning sidewalks, and curbs, trim- 
ROADWAY MAINTENANCE and LAWN SPACE WIDTHS 
By Fred Gabelman, Engineer Board of 
Park Commissioners, Kansas City, Missouri 
