The Washington herald., 1913-09-07

riety of beauty.
Some day or other such a pipce Of
scenery will be OF infinite value to the
people Of Washington. who want to re-
fresh their souls with the charms of
Nature. All along the creek they will
see a great many water-loving birds
, kingfishers and ouzels and others too
numerous to mention. All along the
slopes and in the meadows by the stream
they can ind a great many beautiful wild
flowers. / have found some quite un-
common and most lovely wild flowers
growing there in the spring.
There's are leafy glades where a man
can go and lie down on a bed of leaves
and listen for hours TO the birds singing
and forget there is such place as WASH
ington and such thing as politics within
eight miles Of him.
These things you have now sHn left
though daily threatened, and what pity
| IL would be to lose them! AT this mo-
ment the value Of the outlying land l
have referred to would not be very high
A good deal of it is not very suitable for
buildings A good deal of it Is not used
to any extent for agriculture.
Urges Forest Reserve.
While on that subject / would like to
refer to still another matter which has
been mooted by those who are interested
in public parks. It has found some favor
in Baltimore and deserves to find favor
in Washington That is the creation Of
large forest reserve between Washing
ton and Baltimore, within, say, twenty
five miles of this city. There are lovely
pieces of woodland on the Maryland side
of the Potomac, behind Cabin John Bridge
and above Cabin John. running along
ba paipbhorhnod of Rockville
There is not much heavy timber; so the
woods, though very pretty, cannot be Of
much pecuniary value.
| The land is not very valuable for agrt-
| cultural purposes or it would have been
| turned into cultivation. So far as ap-
pears, nothing has been done or is being
done with the land to make much proht
| out OF il. There are many other pieces
of woodland of great beauty farther to
| the northeast and east. Most If not all
of these woods could be bought at mod
crate prices. They could be managed so
as to bring in a revenue which would
with good forestry methods perhaps re-
| turn a profit, or at any rate pay the cost
of administration.
What a thing it would be for the people
of Baltimore and Washington to have
an immense open space like that, where
. they could go out on Saturdays and Sun
| days, especially in the summer months;
| where they could wander about, have
their picnic parties, and enjoy these
pleasures Of nature, which are the SIM
plest and purest that God has bestowed
upon his creatures the capacity OF enjoy
ing.
Now, you may say this is all very fine
and pretty, but where are the funds to
come from? Well, considering that the
District of Columbia is Uncle Sans
property. and that his purse is a deep
one, and that a wide-open region for
recrea ton will become more and more
| valuable, and the obtaining it more and
more costly as time goes on, what you
have got TO do is to educate public opin-
| ion and induce Congress to spend a mod
crate sum for this purpose, while the
people Of Baltimore induce their city and
the State of Maryland to do the like.
D No people are really more idealistic than
I the American people. and II you can once
get hold of their imagination and appeal
! to their sense of the ideal, they will re-
spond.
should Consider Future.
/ You probably remember the old tale
1 will not call it a threadbare story, but
time-honored story-of the sibyl who
came to King Tarquin with nine books
OF prophecies 10 sell, and how when she
named the price the king said it was toe
much. She went away and burned three
I of the books and came back, and still
| the king said the price was too much
and she went away and burned three
more and came back with only three
books and asked him to buy those, and
! then the king perceived there was more
! in the matter than he had supposed and
gave her the price for the three that she
1 hnA 1Ixr Oh e. Vha ayrfY, aV,I
GREETED that the other six had been de-
stroyed. Those three contained predic-
| tions and warnings which made the
greatness OF Rome. Who can tell how
much longer the Roman empire would
have lasted IL Tarquin had bought the
whole nine.
! So some day the people are going to
| set the true value upon all these things
these spot=sf beauty around Washing
] ton and all the tract behind the Rock
1 Creek Valley and these woodlands have
| spoken or When that day comes one
of two things will happen: Those who
come after you will either have to pay
far more for these pieces of ground than
would have to be paid now, or else men
will mourn in vain over opportunities OF
enjoyment for ever lost. This is the IA
vorable moment The value of land near
this great and growing city is rising
every day. II you can but convince those
who hold the puTse-strings. it will be
good business to buy now and dedicate
to the public for an time to come.
sIt{ of Capital I'm 1913.
The trouble has been with you that you
have not been sufficiently hopeful in
| those past years during which wealth
and population were growing all through
| the nineteenth century. 1t may seem
| strange TO say to an American because
you are supposed, and rightly, to be the
| most sanguine of peoples. Nevertheless.
you have never sufficiently foreseen how
| enormously rich and populous a nation
| you are going to be.
\ / read lately a book in which a Eu-
| ropeon traveller described the site of
! Washington as it was in 1875. He said
it consisted of woods, through which he
could not find his way from the village
of Georgetown to the spot where now
stands the Capitol Just think what has
I been done since that time,
| Look at the pace at which your city
has been growing. Within the last six
years it seems to me K has extended it,
self half a mile further into the country
| in every direction, covering what were
then fields and woods with streets and
| squares.
As the result of the amazing growth
of the United States you are going to
have an enormous Capital, even IL 1t has
no large industries We smade the mis-
take in London of not foreseeing how
London would grow. When we began
eighty years ago to build railway sta
tions we made little tiny stations. not
| realizing that the country and with 1t
London were going to grow enormously,