Elizur Wright's appeals for the Middlesex Fells and the forests

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ELIZUR WRIGHT'S APPEALS

Preface

These Appeals were published in 1893 with the hope to aid the passage of the law by which the Metropolitan Park System was secured; and at that time, having a fuller faith than later developments now warrant, that Mr. Wright's purposes — though not his plan — had the approval of the Metropolitan projectors, and would therefore be regarded in the park management, I wrote a brief and, as facts later gained show, incomplete account of his own effort in behalf of the Fells and Forest, laying, as I thought would be most helpful, what emphasis I might upon such help as he received. In this same hope I obtained for the law in Medford a petition of some thousand names, — all masculine, and embracing all but one of the men considered politically influential or of high social standing. The law having passed, in accordance with our father's will — not written will, but the one he lived, and to which these Appeals are the witnesses — my brother and I donated to the new enterprise our share in Pine Hill and its surrounding woods, in acreage representing, at its earlier assessed value, the $5,000 which he had pledged to the success of his own plan, so that by this gift, and a salvation made on the sales of our family over those of other Fells owners similarly located, the later movement stands debtor to Mr. Wright's effort — not only for the infinitely larger fact that without it the Metropolitan Park idea would never have been conceived, much less brought to any degree of success — financially to the extent, on actual estimate, of $72,069. For reasons which I shall, as I proceed, let speak for themselves, they are now republished with the hope that their testimony to the necessity of tree and forest preservation generally, as well as to a less destructive treatment of the trees in his own Fells, especially

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the latter under the present caterpillar infliction which would seem to be destroying them fast enough, may still be heard. The motto of the park management in this destruction would seem too largely, spare the worm and spoil the tree, and its motive, if you will take note of such circumstantial "straws" in my historical matter as "show the direction" of the diplomatic "wind," too political. And they are also republished that I may have their aid in defending their author's memory against assertions which a careful reading of them ought to have told his defamer were false, and to this end I have substantially substituted for my original account one written later by invitation of the Somerville Historical Society.

Introduction

"Blow, blow, thou wintry wind, thou art not so rude as man's ingratitude."

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these, it might have been."

Until some courageous man with his little band of followers, ready to wear the thorns and let others take the laurels, has gone ahead to pave the way, that hope-inspiring and oft quoted couplet —

"And ever the right comes uppermost And ever is justice done" —

is in administrative affairs the reverse of true. Such is the greed of gain, the need of a living, and so all-pervading the Mammon rule that through whatever educational channel the rising effort is made it is met and, if possible, suppressed by an ever alert censorship, or, if it has power and persistence, by persecution; and in its service is not wanting that craven spirit which, masked under discipleship to his cause, for a price betrayed the reformer of Nazareth. Beranger has it personified in his "Mr. Judas"; and, in making public appeal against the destruction of the park's trees on the caterpillarexterminating pretext, we did not ourselves fail to meet it. Of his Mr. Judas as spy over the press, the poet's verse runs: —

"This moral looker-on who pries, And gossips far and wide, Hints he's a journalist at times And takes the liberal side, But should we at our purpose hint To claim the right all things to print, Hush ! hush ! I'll whisper in your ear I've just seen Judas hovering near."

It is of course the wealthy few and their prime ministers who compose the censorship, for it is the wealthy few unofficially, as well as officially, who hold the administrative rein; and to their self-enriching schemes alone is success easy. Republicanism is the outgrowth only where the wealth distribution — and per consequence administrative power — is equal, or at least fair; and largely responsible for the inequality under a government which by a division of its executive force officially is, in form, republican, lies the fact that not honesty, but diplomacy has ever been the National policy. My definition of diplomacy is taken from history, not the dictionary, and is derived from its own corrupt practices; for nothing in history has stronger proof than that power, unrestricted or practically so, inevitably leads to its own abuse; and through diplomacy in this republic the chance of anything like an equal prosperity has steadily diminished. The public money has been gained by an indirect tax or tariff drawing proportionately far more heavily upon the earnings of industry than the profits of capital, and, where it has been formerly direct, the inequality of chance has not been lessened, for the processes of gaining it have still been indirect. Assessments have been practically arbitrary, and, under plausible pretexts and false appraisals, based not on the present market value of the property or commodity taxed, but upon the financial demands of those self -enriching schemes, the latest of which has not only entailed upon the masses a money tax bidding fair to increase with coming generations, but has had its far more disastrous and criminal cost in blood and misery abroad, and — begging pardon of the brutes — in an enbruting demoralization at home, which has not stopped either at the death agony of that murder in the highest degree, war with intent to rob, but has gone on to its inevitable consequences, torture the most diabolical. As property directly taxed is extensively real estate, that safety and happiness insuring condition to a country, the possession of homes, is discouraged, and the many forced under the bur-

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den of rents, — of course, sufficiently high to more than cover, as does the tariff the tax of the trade monopolist, that of the land monopolist. And thus it is that selfishness and dishonesty have thriven, till trusts, another instrument of extortion and indirect tax, have been added to tariffs; trusts by which the poor are made to support the rich, and the "beggars in rags and tags" go hungry to feast the "one in a velvet gown," the King Midas with "asses' ears" under whose craze for gold 'and crazy " goldentouch " neither bread nor blood, work of God nor need of man, are spared, so that now it is greed of gain plays master, and fear of loss slave to its behests, while morally there has become established a silence far too near stagnation not in itself to breed into the corruption, and badly to need the stirring up which belongs to the cleansing processes of reform.

Mr. De Las Casas, chairman of the Park Commission, in a diplomatic sketch of the park movement published by the historical New England Magazine, August, 1898, attributes what he would have his readers consider Mr. Wright's failure to his lacking in practical sense; and with that sort of practical sense which, in order to gain for its object a precarious and too often short-lived success by yielding "right," "justice," truth, or any part of that object's practical worth to diplomatic expediency, tends to the increase of this corruption, he certainly had no fellowship. He was too far-seeing a reformer and too good a mathematician not to know the danger to civilization when, in any of her problems, the Mammon factor is allowed to cancel or greatly to diminish the moral, and too much of a man to favor wrong in furthering right. Whatever his enterprise or his measures for it, to so strengthen the moral factor as to diminish the Mammon, — not cancel it, for, though a born usurper, under moral direction it has its office, — and with it the necessity of such yielding, was no small part of his aim; and in his Fells effort he was especially successful. And it is also true that his reform programme had

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little in common with that of the so-called practical politician. Not his the gilded and guilty pen of indirection and falsehood, the course which promises fair and plays false, —

"But a fine sense of right, And truth's directness, Meeting each -occasion Straight as a line of light."

Not his the crafty devices by which a selfish purpose is concealed or made to appear a generous one, or the practice of antagonizing nothing except the dead and helpless. To the upper dogs in the Mammon fight — watch-dogs over the public funds — as a price of favor he threw no conciliatory bones in the way of compromises. The danger to the success thus bought, of their teeth, later he had too often seen proved ; and he knew that an honest bone of contention thrown with sufficient mental force would be quite as effective and the success, if achieved, of a more solid and lasting character. And least of all, in bringing his Fells cause to success, would he have made bones of its woods, — the flesh and blood covering of its rocky skeleton, the soul and secret of its Nature-designed beauty as well as the heart and lungs of its fullest beneficence to man. But so largely, under Metropolitan management, has this programme and this woods sacrifice — everywhere in the Fells and especially pronounced on Mr. Wright's former grounds — been the order as to justify the conclusion that his hopes have from the start been made the price of a favor and a purpose in which this fullest beneficence, in so far as possible and have a park at all, has little or no place. In the Fells and Blue Hills the city, — or mother of cities, — the metropolis, found the park features of her less fortune-favored population's greatest need, — the air purification of a forestal density and contiguity which, if protected from its enemies, natural and artificial, would in time and by wind agency make itself felt even in crowded homes the most remote; and a

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rambling ground the beauty and benefits of which to be accessible needed only paths and driveways, that dead wood should be removed, and the fields kept mowed so that therein the trees, singly, in groups or groves, should have a free chance to spread their branches and show how magnificent and majestic they can be. With these broader and more benevolent benefits at heart, Mr. Wright's effort not only aimed to secure the entire acreage within the natural Fells boundary, but that they might be extended beyond the limits of the metropolis his forest law of 1882 provided for the establishment of similar forest parks anywhere in Massachusetts. Nor was this interdependence of a carbon-exhaling metropolis with an oxygen -exhaling forest park without well-supported scientific indorsement. Under Mr. Wright's enlightenment it had also the public favor, and it was no more than his long and patient pioneer work had earned that at least in the Fells, the foster child of that work, if not in the Blue Hills, the Metropolitan consummators of his cause's success should have given this forest park a place. It would have been a magnificent scenic variety to the other parks of the System ; and its Nature-given right and title to such place has the incidental, though unintentional support of their landscape architect's investigating report;* for, after describing and illustrating the Fells and Blue Hills as they are and might be, it says, "The extreme rockiness and poverty of the soil of most of the new domain make this pre-eminently 'park-like' type of landscape impracticable as well as inappropriate." But such justice to Mr. Wright's effort, to Nature's design, and a city's need they were far from yielding. Instead of the "pre-eminently 'park-like' type" so exquisitely illustrated in Forest Hills, Mt. Auburn, and other cemeteries, we are asked, or made to do it without the asking, to let our Fells Forest Park bird in the hand go for one in the bush of empirical value; and, in defence of a

* See " Vegetation and Scenery in the Metropolitan Reservations of Boston," by Charles Eliot. In quoting from this report, I shall omit reference to pages, as the reading matter is brief, and to fully support my statements the whole should be read.

large and profitable woods sacrifice in behalf of this substitute for scenery in which the forest has a rightful and a natural part, it has been the diplomatic business of their literature, not only to deny, at the expense of truth, the value of Mr. Wright's effort to their project's success, but to undo the tree-preserving popularity or expediency which he had created for his own park purpose. Not a hard task. " It took," said Mr. Wright to a man whom he saw felling a splendid elm, "the Almighty one hundred years to grow that tree, but any fool can cut it down in half an hour." And it took at least thirty years to build the park-taking expediency, that is in favor of a philanthropic object, but any diplomatic gnawing at its foundation, be it ever so little, if it is crafty, can undo it for one not so much so, in far less time. The architectural report, the instrument most effective in this undoing and which was not published till the prospective Metropolitan Park bill had reaped the advantage of the Forest Park expediency and its Commission that of our gifts in its behalf, in support of the woods destruction which it advises, says, "It follows that the notion that it would be wrong and even sacrilegious to suggest that this vegetation ought to be controlled and modified is a mistake." Perhaps so; but it is not one which Mr. Wright, in behalf of his Forest Park, ever made or suggested. And if to control and modify vegetation is a park necessity there is no reason why, to the infinitely lesser extent of the necessity, it could not be exercised in behalf of a forest park as of any other, — of "scenery" in which the woods is the main feature as of scenery in which it has little or no part. But from certain well-polished stones flung at the naturalists as "extremists" from another quarter of the same encampment, I judge the sentence given may be yet another missile, with characteristic diplomatic indirection, aimed at their devoted heads. Nor am I quite certain that its service has not still a third object. Under diplomatic rule, double purposes are as common as double'dealing. Be this as it may, the "mistake" which holds

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life sacred is one to which man owes no small debt. In the preservation of human life it is the divine ounce of prevention worth all the prison and gallows pounds of cure ever resorted to, and in that of the forest (where the destruction has a thousand temptations to one against human life, the life dependent upon its preservation) all the regulation axes. At any rate, it is to the resurrection of this all but dead and buried mistake that the Metropolitan Park system owes its existence, and, if it wants it, will have to owe its preservation or perpetuity.

The Metropolitan purpose, "the preservation of scenery," so apparently harmonious with the preservation of the Fells woods, was proved by the report to mean neither its preservation as under Nature's purpose and her own repairs it existed at the taking nor as protected in them it would exist, nor did it mean such preservation as "controlled and modified" by man it might exist: it meant as under such controlling and modifying for an alien purpose it would be forced to exist. Because its views or pictures had been damaged by fire, the browsing of animals, and the axe of the cord-wood dealer, in this report's estimation they are not as they stood "wild," but "artificial to a high degree," and, somewhat on the "bite of the same dog cure," their repairing must also in the highest degree be artificial, — again the axe of man. And because Nature in her struggle to make her own repairs cannot, against the odds of a constantly repeated axe destruction, fully restore her scenery in accordance with her own park design, a forest of seedling instead of as now partly stump - sproutage growth, it proceeds on the hypothesis that even given time and that other indispensable condition, protection and proper care, she would not through her own destructive and reproductive processes, or evolutions, consult among her trees the "survival of the fittest," and it recommends to the park management the gradual destruction of what it holds to be the unfit, the sprout growth. It says, "To restore beauty in such woods as are now dull and crop-like, large areas must

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be gradually cleared of sprout growth, selling the standing crop, subsequently killing the stumps, and encouraging seedling trees to take possession." "The mills of God grind slowly," but it is not necessary to take for granted that they do not grind surely, or that the meal would be longer in coming than with man at the crank. Stump sproutage is not immortal; and since, in justice to the present scenery and the present enjoyment thereof by the present public, the process in either case, not to be excessively ugly, must be gradual, why is not the scythe of old Father Time as good a regenerative instrument as the axe? In our own woods where the axe, except against the dead, has for nearly forty years been prohibited, it would seem so, for the seedling growth there has already gained upon the sproutage; and, notwithstanding the annual visitation of the infestation, until this past summer no woods was more vigorous or beautiful. Owing to causes which have their place in later pages, its share of suffering from the pest this year was greater than on any previous year. And even wholly under Nature's "controlling and modifying" would not our Fells be safer than, as now appears to be the case, wholly under that of an axe-wielding power without legal restraint as to either the character or amount of the tree destruction? While that power stands in so much greater need of it, it hardly seems fair that the controlling and modifying should be devoted so exclusively to the vegetation, nor with such the case can one feel quite as well assured of the "subsequent killing of the stumps" and the consequent seedling and scenic results as of the "selling of the standing crop" and their consequent financial or political gains. And the tree destruction is not by any means to be confined to stump sproutage, nor has the beautifying or bettering of the woods any great part in its object. The report says, "To prepare for increasing the interest and beauty of the scenery, work must be directed to removing screens of foliage, to opening vistas through 'notches,' to substituting low ground cover xm.

for high woods in many places," etc., and on an earlier page, "A ground covering of bushes will serve as well as grass when it is only a question of keeping a view open and there is no need of providing strolling places for crowds or smooth playgrounds for boys and children." If such benevolent provision as a rambling ground for crowds, forestal or otherwise, is anywhere in the Fells deemed a necessity, it does not appear in the report. The only question there is open views, and, when it is only a question of keeping them open the forest and its manifold benefits to crowds must stand aside. It says, "The beautiful variety and intricacy of this bushy growth is often, and indeed generally, remarkable and delightful. With time the bushes of sweet fern, bayberry, viburnum, and the like grow more and more numerous and entangled; and their combination with the dark cedars and the white birches often helps to form even broad landscape of rare beauty. Slowly, however, this type of landscape vanishes. From the midst, perhaps, of junipers which browsing cattle have avoided or from clumps of crowded bushes, slow-growing oaks and other forest trees start up from seeds brought by the winds, birds, or squirrels. Slowly, but surely, as the great trees grow in height and breadth, the low-growing birches, cedars, junipers, and bushes are overshadowed and, as it were, suffocated, and in the end the forest of seedling trees takes full possession.

"On the other hand it is obvious that the bushy stage of type is so beautiful in itself that it ought to be preserved in many places for itself alone; while it is equally obvious that in such parts of the reservations as command broad views which would be shut from sight by trees this bushy ground cover will need to be encouraged in every possible way, even, if need be, by going through the natural order of felling trees, killing the stumps, and pasturing the rough ground for a limited time."

And thus it will be seen that should the forest, — through Nature's processes, mark, not man's, — a victor over stump

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sproutage, again arise and, in the glory of its seedling growth and the "sublime audacity" of its persistence over generations of resistance, again plead its inalienable right to the Fells, it must again and yet again be fought down, that, if possible, Nature's own Fells design, a forest park, may at last be conquered. And it is not only in the " places" where the " bushy type" should be " preserved for itself alone" or in the low ground where "broad views would be shut from sight" that the woods must be sacrificed. The hills, the artistically, scientifically, and popularly acknowledged province of the woods, must also be forced to share in the sacrifice. Regardless of the fact that rough stone observatories would be an harmonious and enjoyable remedy for the evil, the summit trees must go down, for they would conceal the "broad prospect," so also, where they would hide fine "ledges and crags" — and where in the Fells would they not ? — or partly hide them, must the lower trees. In short, in the Fells nowhere must Nature, to use Mr. Wright's expression in another connection, be allowed "to resume her work of covering and beautifying her own bones in her own way."

If the woods, as according to the report it is ultimately to exist, has any place in the Fells, it is not therein defined. You are indirectly permitted to infer that when it isn't in something's way it may possibly escape destruction, and that is all. Even the "open groves" which, if "pasturing is resumed and continued after well-spaced trees have been developed," are the "result," and which — as the Fells now exists, or did at the taking — "present, perhaps, the most lovely local scenery of the reservations," it would seem, are not then to be, for it is in these "open groves" that the "impractical and inappropriate" "pre-eminently 'park-like' type" consists. Taste is a matter, more or less, of education and association and scenic enjoyment, like all else the outcome of the soul and senses, is a matter of individual taste. My own accepts as beautiful scenery both when Nature operates alone and when art co-operates with

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her; but it must be co-operation, not an effort to so "control" her operations as ultimately to defeat her designs. She must still be mistress; and I don't agree with the report that under her own repairing her pictures are not "wild," — those in the Fells certainly are,— and still less do I agree with it that her part stump-sproutage woods is "tame" or "tedious" or "monotonous," "crop-like," or anything else depreciative which in support of its destruction the report urges. The damages are "artificial," but the repairs are not, and the scenery is, therefore, wild; and, if it is "tame" or the rest of it anywhere, it is where the damage is so recent that the repairs have had no time to produce results. Where they have, the scenery is exceedingly picturesque, or if it is not you wouldn't know it unless you read the report. In Mr. Wright's time hundreds, artists among them, testified to its beauty; and, as for stump-sprout growth, I would decidedly, if not respectfully, recommend giving it, as long as it lasts, at least a fair chance with the seedling. Such growth is much in keeping with the rough, toss-and-tumble character of the Fells woods. Where some vigorous old stump has had time and the hardihood to send aloft a couple or more of giant trees, its presence among the different tree combinations of the constantly varying rocky woods levels is exceedingly fascinating. In our own woods the rugged majesty of some of these is enough to make a stone shout; and certainly the rocks, ledges, and crags there cry out, not for their destruction, but against it. Nor is the Fells woods interior without its vistas, its openings to its open views. ' The secret of Nature's charm, whether her scenery be close or open, is still that she does not and cannot reveal all at once, and in the woods these only half-revealed views tempt the rambler to further and further invigorating exploration, nor is his effort unrewarded; for at every step not only do the interior pictures blend harmoniously one into another, but a thousand forestal attractions meet his eyes. Infinite are the dells, mossy nooks, fern-covered plateaus, the rock -work, over-

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hanging crags, the brooks, the cascades; and in time, worn by eager feet alone, there would be a thousand winding paths, each one a vista to views beyond, sometimes the open ones and sometimes those of the woods. But plead, poor Fells. Even though after thirty years of appeal your woods still stands on the auction block, it is not yet all bid off. Speak, then, while you may.

What I shall now submit, historical and otherwise, was written earlier than the foregoing, and before I had read the report; for, though presented to me by my brother — who had also then not read it — at the time of its publication, it did not until some weeks ago, occur to me to give it attention, and I, show myself, therefore, at a loss to account for a tree destruction reports of which, as well as the sound of the axe in my own neighborhood, from time to time reached me. Taking, as I did, for granted that, whatsoever the means of preservation, the term "preservation of scenery" would include the Fells woods with its open views, at least to the extent in which both existed at the time of the securing, — in other words, that preservation meant preservation, not creation, — it did not seem necessary to inform myself further. Nor, although I told them my gift was in behalf of my father's woods-preserving hope, did it seem at all necessary to the Commissioners in accepting it to so inform me. Even the writer of the report, though behind the diplomatic scenes and probably a principal actor in them, must have found that phrase somewhat equivocal; for after thus explaining it, "The purpose of investing public money in the purchase of the several Metropolitan reservations was to secure for the enjoyment of present and future generations such interesting and beautiful scenery as the lands acquired can supply," he adds, "at all events, it is on the assumption that this was the purpose in view that the following report, with the investigation it describes, is based."

HISTORICAL SKETCH.

No man, however gifted, sets his pen to work for right against might or Mammon with any great chance of becoming anything but poorer. And in 1839, after seven crowded years of such work in the anti-slavery cause, two events occurred which brought Mr. Wright so near destitution that for many years his life was a hand-to-hand fight with the wolf at the door. In 1837, while Secretary of the American Anti-slavery Society in New York, he chanced, at De Behr's repository of foreign books, to come upon a cheap copy of La Fontaine's Fables in the French, with some two hundred woodcuts in it. His little son, he tells us in his introduction to his translations, was just "beginning to feel the intellectual magnetism of pictures," and, to please him, he bought the book. The pictures alone, however, were not enough to satisfy the child. He must have the stories, too. And from putting them into English by word of mouth the father became as fascinated as the son, and, finding no English version, "resolved to cheat sleep of an hour every morning till there should be one." A year later, at the call of the "political action" abolitionists, of which he was one, he left the national society to become the editor in Boston of the Massachusetts Abolitionist, the State organ of his party. The success of political action to him depended upon the nomination and strong united support of men whose own actions proved their anti-slavery principles beyond doubt. In explanation of this position he wrote in 1849: —

As editor I felt it my duty to advocate an entire separation from the political parties, and in the use of the suffrage in full accordance with these principles. Though this ground is now occupied by all the abolitionists of the United States except a few leaders in what is called non-resistance or no govxvm.