Historic leaves, volume 5, April, 1906 - January, 1907

[32] sought—or had to seek; the men of soul came of their own accord, and, in so far as they were his anti-slavery co-workers, consisted of Theodore D. Weld, John G. Whittier, and Samuel E. Sewell. When Sylvester Baxter, in his ‘Boston Park Guide,’ said of What Mr. Wright's persistence had created, ‘The public sentiment aroused by this agitation finally led to the Metropolitan Park System,’ he was writing history, not politics.

The hearings before the City Council Committee took place in 1869. Of the General Court action, which in 1870 was the outcome of these hearings, Mr. Wright in his ‘Appeal’ called ‘The Park Question,’ wrote: ‘The well-guarded Park bill of last year, which submitted the whole problem of the future beauty and grandeur of our city to a competent and impartial commission, was defeated in the interest of projectors who have manifest private ends to serve. Everybody has private ends; and the public is not about to forego its own ends lest somebody should be privately benefited by it. It ought and it will do the best it can for its whole self without injury to any individual, and if any individual is enriched by it, so much the better for him or her. Let us have fair play and no dog in the manger.’

The report of the City Commission proved its impartiality, and the papers, of which there were a large number, were all strongly and ably in favor of a park or parks; but since the Fells was the only easily and cheaply accessible location then urged that had anything like the extent of territory, the woods, rocks, waters, and other requisites for the city's future beauty land grandeur, ‘Mr. Andrew Park’ alone offered the city problem a solution; and in the later working out of the problem, no greater proof of the necessity of just such means as Mr. Wright employed could be had than lies in the legislative results of the meetings, which are in brief as follows:—

With a proviso seventeen, by which as a law it couldn't take effect without a two-thirds vote of the city's legal voters, the bill was passed, and by its failure to get the vote, defeated. This law, section 4, empowered Boston to locate her park or parks ‘in or near her city limits’; and in so doing closed the door in the face of the Fells and Blue Hills, Boston's only chance of the