spade and the quill to care for any other sceptres at present. But it
is now plain that they have been dreaming princely dreams and thinking
royal thoughts all the while, and are now ready to put them into costly
expression.

Passing by all other evidences of this, we come at once to the most
majestic and indisputable witness of this fact, the actual existence
of the Central Park in New York,--the most striking evidence of
the sovereignty of the people yet afforded in the history of free
institutions,--the best answer yet given to the doubts and fears which
have frowned on the theory of self-government,--the first grand proof
that the people do not mean to give up the advantages and victories of
aristocratic governments, in maintaining a popular one, but to engraft
the energy, foresight, and liberality of concentrated powers upon
democratic ideas, and keep all that has adorned and improved the past,
while abandoning what has impaired and disgraced it. That the American
people appreciate and are ready to support what is most elegant,
refined, and beautiful in the greatest capitals of Europe,--that they
value and intend to provide the largest and most costly opportunities
for the enjoyment of their own leisure, artistic tastes, and rural
instincts, is emphatically declared in the history, progress, and
manifest destiny of the Central Park; while their competency to use
wisely, to enjoy peacefully, to protect sacredly, and to improve
industriously the expensive, exposed, and elegant pleasure-ground they
have devised, is proved with redundant testimony by the year and more of
experience we have had in the use of the Park, under circumstances far
less favorable than any that can ever again arise. As a test of the
ability of the people to know their own higher wants, of the power of
their artistic instincts, their docility to the counsels of their most
judicious representatives, their superiority to petty economies, their
strength to resist the natural opposition of heavy tax-payers to
expensive public works, their gentleness and amenableness to just
authority in the pursuit of their pleasures, of their susceptibility to
the softening influences of elegance and beauty, of their honest pride
and rejoicing in their own splendor, of their superior fondness for what
is innocent and elevating over what is base and degrading, when
brought within equal reach, the Central Park has already afforded most
encouraging, nay, most decisi