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

[31] acreage, for by his law of 1882 nothing of the people's fresh air and other benefits went into the pockets of any man, and his plan, by stimulating public spirit in the Fells owners, and by taking all the land at one time, was as well secured against money greed as it is possible in the nature—or, father, human nature—of things for la plan to be. But at first his hope for his object lay in the city government; and tall undaunted — if he ever heard of it—by A. S. Hilliard's remark to H. W. S. Cleveland, who in 1857 urged on one occasion the same object, that ‘you might as well try to persuade the Common Council to buy land in the moon as the Fells,’ his first step was this very trial. No man of the city's executive, who could be persuaded to go, but was taken through the Fells, and there seconded by the multitudinous facts of its glorious predestination. Mr. Wright urged its claims to be secured at once. When Mr. De las Casas, of the present Park Board, in his historical sketch for the New England Magazine of 1898, says of Mr. Wright, ‘He was trained in his line of thought by association with the anti-slavery movement and by a residence in England, where he had watched the use of the common lands by the masses,’ he says truly, for the former had certainly taught him that until some determined man or leader of men, ready to wear the thorns, and let others take the laurels, has gone ahead to pave the way, the last thing the ‘masses’ have anything to hope from is this mammon-ruled administration. Before it was possible to inoculate a single grain of anti-slavery manhood or abolition action into, legislative halls anywhere, he and his anti-slavery co-workers had seen their petitions flung under legislative tables, their presidential candidates reviled, and earlier their homes mobbed, presses destroyed, and their most dispassionate arguments burned. But Mr. De las Casas does not speak truly when he says that Mr. Wright, in behalf of his Fells, ‘naturally enough began to agitate and seek the assistance of those with whom he had worked in the anti-slavery cause.’ The Fells cause and the cause of the slave were common causes and the interest of all, and he therefore invited the assistance of all; but it was only the money men and the politicians that he