Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/451

Rh amusing to see the stand taken on the one hand, by the million, that the park is made for the ‘upper ten,’ who ride in fine carriages, and on the other hand by the wealthy and refined, that a park in this country will be ‘usurped by rowdies and low people.’ Shame upon our republican compatriots who so little understand the elevating influences of the beautiful in nature and art, when enjoyed in common by thousands and hundreds of thousands of all classes, without distinction! They can never have seen, how all over France and Germany, the whole population of the cities pass their afternoons and evenings together in the beautiful public parks and gardens. How they enjoy together the same music, breathe the same atmosphere of art, enjoy the same scenery, and grow into social freedom by the very influences of easy intercourse, of the space and beauty that surround them. In Germany, especially, they have never seen how the highest and the lowest partake alike of the common enjoyment—the prince seated beneath the trees on a rush-bottomed chair, before a little wooden table, sipping his coffee or his ice, with the same freedom from state and pretension as the simplest subject. Drawing-room conventionalities are too narrow for a mile or two of spacious garden landscape, and one can be happy with ten thousand in the social freedom of a community of genial influences, without the unutterable pang of not having been introduced to the company present.

“These social doubters who thus intrench themselves in the sole citadel of exclusiveness, in republican America, mistake our people and their destiny. If we would have listened to them, our magnificent river and lake steamers, those real palaces of the million, would have had no velvet couches, no splendid mirrors, no luxurious carpets. Such costly and rare appliances of civilisation, they would have told us, could only be rightly used by the privileged families of wealth, and would be trampled upon and