cents, or to measure it by any scale that the market acknowledges; but it is, nevertheless, a real, substantial, and potent one. If our large cities are the pride and boast of the republic, they also contain the greatest elements of danger to the state and the nation. Ignorance and vice, disease and crime, crowd themselves into cities. There they find their best hiding-places, their surest protection, and their most defenceless victims. It makes one tremble to think of the thousands of youth in our cities whom the school and the church do not reach, and who are moulded by these influences into the worst and lowest forms of humanity. They can not and will not go out into the country themselves, except upon some errand of violence and crime. The city should therefore bring the country to them, and give them a chance, at least, to experience its humanizing and blessed influence. A park, or a series of parks, with its trees and running waters, its grass and plants and flowers, its variegated surface and changing views, and all the beauty with which such scenes are flooded, supplements the labor of the church and school in educating, refining, and elevating the community. There will be less gambling, drinking, and quarrelling in Boston, when the mass of its inhabitants shall be allowed to partake of the blessing and beauty of a public park. These considerations naturally bring us to the third point which has been mentioned, viz., the economic aspect of the matter. Few will deny the truth of the above statements; but the admission of their truth is apt to be coupled with the reply, "The park will cost so much, we cannot afford it." It is true that it will cost a good deal, but not so much to each household as the inevitable cost of the sickness, vice, and death, which the opportunities that a park provides would prevent. Are human life and health and virtue so cheap, that we can afford to count the cost of procuring and maintaining them? Are vice, crime, and disease so unimportant, that we can afford to let them thrive, and propagate themselves indefinitely? We cannot repeat too often, or ponder too seriously, the statement made in the first report of the Park Commissioners: "Nothing is so costly as sickness and disease: nothing so cheap as health. Whatever promotes the former is the worst sort of extravagance: whatever fosters the latter is the truest economy." The truth is, it will cost the city of Boston more to get on without a park than to incur the expense of buying and taking care of one. We pay at present an enormous sum yearly for the maintenance of hospitals, prisons, jails, and workhouses. It is not asserted that the establishment of a park will depopulate these institutions, or render them unnecessary; but no sanitarian will deny that one result, and a most important one, of the establishment of a park, would be to diminish the number of those who are compelled to resort to these institutions. A