people of
moderate wealth and by poor people, and that its use by these people
must be made safe, convenient, agreeable; that they must be expected
to have a pride and pleasure in using it rightly, in cherishing and
protecting it against all causes of injury and dilapidation, and that
this is to be provided for and encouraged.

A want of appreciation of the first assumption is the cause of all
sincere criticism against the Transverse Roads. Some engineers
originally pronounced them impracticable of construction; but all their
grounds of apprehension have been removed by the construction of two of
them, especially by the completion of the tunnel under Vista Rock, and
below the foundation of the Reservoir embankment and wall. They were
planned for the future; they are being built solidly, massively,
permanently, for the future. Less thoroughly and expensively
constructed, they would need to be rebuilt in the future at enormously
increased cost, and with great interruption to the use of the Park; and
the grounds in their vicinity, losing the advantage of age, would need
to be remodelled and remade. An engineer, visiting the Park for the
first time, and hearing the criticism to which we refer applied to the
walls and bridges of the Transverse Roads, observed,--"People in this
country are so unaccustomed to see genuine substantial work, they do not
know what it means when they meet with it." We think he did not do the
people justice.

The Transverse Roads passing through the Park will not be seen from
it; and although they will not be, when deep in the shadow of the
overhanging bridges and groves, without a very grand beauty, this will
be the beauty of utility and of permanence, not of imaginative grace.
The various bridges and archways of the Park proper, while equally
thorough in their mode of construction, and consequently expensive,
are in all cases embellished each with special decorations in form and
color. These decorations have the same quality of substantiality and
thorough good workmanship. Note the clean under-cutting of the leaves,
(of which there are more than fifty different forms in the decorations
of the Terrace arch,) and their consequent sharp and expressive shadows.
Admitting the need of these structures, and the economy of a method of
construction which would render them permanent, the additional cost of
their permanent decoration in this way could not have been rationally
grudged.

Regard for the di