requires no advocate and no defence.  Its great proprietor, the Public, is perfectly satisfied with his purchase and his agents.  He thinks himself providentially guided in the choice of his Superintendent, and does not vainly pique himself upon his sagacity in selecting Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted for the post.  This gentleman, in his place, offsets at least a thousand square plugs in round holes.  He is precisely the man for the place,—­and that is precisely the place for the man.  Among final causes, it would be difficult not to assign the Central Park as the reason of his existence.  To fill the duties of his office as he has filled them,—­to prove himself equally competent as original designer, patient executor, potent disciplinarian, and model police-officer,—­to enforce a method, precision, and strictness, equally marked in the workmanship, in the accounts, and in the police of the Park,—­to be equally studious of the highest possible use and enjoyment of the work by the public of to-day, and of the prospects and privileges of the coming generations,—­to sympathize with the outside people, while in the closest fellowship with the inside,—­to make himself equally the favorite and friend of the people and of the workmen:  this proves an original adaptation, most carefully improved, which we seriously believe not capable of being paralleled in any other public work, of similar magnitude, ever undertaken.  The union of prosaic sense with poetical feeling, of democratic sympathies with refined and scholarly tastes, of punctilious respect for facts with tender hospitality for ideas, has enabled him to appreciate and embody, both in the conception and execution of the Park, the beau-ideal of a people’s pleasure-ground.  If he had not borne, as an agriculturist, and as the keenest, most candid, and instructive of all our writers on the moral and political economy of our American Slavery, a name to be long remembered, he might safely trust his reputation to the keeping of New York city and all her successive citizens, as the author and achiever of the Central Park,—­which, when completed, will prove, we are confident, the most splendid, satisfactory, and popular park in the world.

Two grand assumptions have controlled the design from the inception.

First, That the Park would be the only park deserving the name, for a town of twice or thrice the present population of New York; that this town would be built compactly around it (and in this respect of centrality it would differ from any extant metropolitan park of magnitude); and that it would be a town of greater wealth and more luxurious demands than any now existing.

Second, That, while in harmony with the luxury of the rich, the Park should and would be used more than any existing park by people of moderate wealth and by poor people, and that its use by these people must be made safe, convenient, agreeable; that they must be expected to have a pride and pleasure in using it rightly, in cherishing and protecting it against all causes of injury and dilapidation, and that this is to be provided for and encouraged.