d, is occasionally made against the
completeness of detail to which the Commissioners are disposed to
carry their work, on the ground that the habits of the masses of our
city-population are ill-calculated for its appreciation, and that loss
and damage to expensive work must often be the result. To which we
would answer, that, if the authorities of the city hitherto have so far
misapprehended or neglected their duty as to allow a large industrious
population to continue so long without the opportunity for public
recreations that it has grown up ignorant of the rights and duties
appertaining to the general use of a well-kept pleasure-ground, any
losses of the kind apprehended, which may in consequence occur, should
be cheerfully borne as a necessary part of the responsibility of a
good government. Experience thus far, however, does not justify these
apprehensions.

To collect exact evidence showing that the Park is already exercising a
good influence upon the character of the people is not in the nature of
the case practicable. It has been observed that rude, noisy fellows,
after entering the more advanced or finished parts of the Park, become
hushed, moderate, and careful. Observing the generally tranquil and
pleased expression, and the quiet, sauntering movement, the frequent
exclamations of pleasure in the general view or in the sight of some
special object of natural beauty, on the part of the crowds of idlers in
the Ramble on a Sunday afternoon, and recollecting the totally opposite
character of feeling, thought, purpose, and sentiment which is expressed
by a crowd assembled anywhere else, especially in the public streets of
the city, the conviction cannot well be avoided that the Park already
exercises a beneficent influence of no inconsiderable value, and of a
kind which could have been gained in no other way. We speak of Sunday
afternoons and of a crowd; but the Park evidently does induce many a
poor family, and many a poor seamstress and journeyman, to take a day or
a half-day from the working-time of the week, to the end of retaining
their youth and their youthful relations with purer Nature, and to their
gain in strength, good-humor, safe citizenship, and--if the economists
must be satisfied--money-value to the commonwealth. Already, too, there
are several thousand men, women, and children who resort to the Park
habitually: some daily, before business or after business, and women
and children at regular hours