Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 4.

“[p. 79] about to forego its own ends, lest somebody should be privately benefited by it. It ought to, and 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.” But in 1875 Boston, in the passage of a law which, negatively expressed, restricted municipalities from securing park land outside their own limits, Boston again played “dog-in-the-manger,” and did not play fair, either to her own vital need of pure air and water, or to her future grandeur,—still less to the necessities of the case; for the Fells and Blue Hills, her only chance for anything like a forest, were under distinct jurisdictions. Without just such a course as Mr. Wright in 1880 had the foresight and the insight to pursue, and the courage to persist in, these two most beautiful and most vitally needed of our parks would have been wholly lost to us. The ordinary legislative programme, or process, used later in the Metropolitan idea, could not, or rather would not, have been carried out without its help. Mr. Wright had not done pioneer work all his life not to know that his purpose in the Fells was something too far outside the city limits as to philanthropy and comprehensiveness not to need its practicality manufactured for it. Until 1880, hoping younger men, and men who though wise and good were not, like him, so strongly identified with unpopular good causes as to have incurred the enmity of the ruling mammon powers, would take the matter up, he continued writing, lecturing, exhibiting the Fells, and in other ways preparing the way; but no independent effort was made, and in 1880 he put his own wits to work. Knowing the necessity of forest contiguity to the purity of the air and the protection of water sources, it seemed all important to him that the entire 4,000 natural Fells acres should be taken at one time, and thus be under a wholly unitary control, and to this end his plan proposed to secure the Fells by a two-thirds vote and appropriation