The fifteen squares colored yellow are proposed to be divided among the several States of the Union, for each of them to improve, or subscribe a sum additional to the value of the land for that purpose, and the improvements around the squares to be completed in a limited time. The centre of each square will admit of statues, columns, obelisks, or any other ornaments, such as the different States may choose to erect, to perpetuate not only the memory of such individuals whose councils or military achievements were conspicuous in giving liberty and independence to this country, but those whose usefulness hath rendered them worthy of imitation, to invite the youth of succeeding generations to tread in the paths of those sages or heroes whom their country have thought proper to celebrate. The situation of those squares is such that they are most advantageously seen from each other, and as equally distributed over the whole city district, and connected by spacious avenues round the grand federal improvements and as contiguous to them, and at the same time as equally distant from each other as circumstances would admit. The settlements round these squares must soon become connected. The mode of taking possession of and improving the whole district at first must leave to posterity a grand idea of the patriotic interest which promoted it. Two months after the publication of those magnificent designs for posterity, Major L’Enfant was dismissed from his exalted place. He was a Frenchman and a genius. The patrons of the new Capital were _not_ geniuses, and not Frenchmen, reasons sufficient why they should not and did not “get on” long in peace together. Without doubt the Commissioners were provincial, and limited in their ideas of art and of expenditure; with their colonial experience they could scarcely be otherwise; while L’Enfant was metropolitan, splendid, and willful, in his ways as well as in his designs. Hampered, held back, he yet “builded better than he knew,” builded for posterity. The executor and the designer seldom counterpart each other. L’Enfant worried Washington, as a letter from the latter, written in the autumn of 1791, plainly shows. He says: “It is much to be regretted that men who possess talents which fit them for peculiar purposes should almost invariably be under the influence of an untoward disposition.... I have thought that for such employment as he is now engaged in for prosecuting public works and carrying them into effect, Major L’Enfant was better qualified than any one who has come within my knowledge in this country, or indeed in any other. I had no doubt at the same time that this was the light in which he considered himself.” At least, L’Enfant was so fond of his new “plan” that he would not give it up to the Commissioners to be used as an inducement for buying city lots, even at the command of the President, giving as a