of the
rum-shop and dance-hall, and of the numerous other influences of a great
city, is more potent than that of the school. The evil of all evil
agencies is intensified, and the good of the good ones diminished, by
uncleanness and impure air. Clean hands and a pure heart go together.
Foul air prompts to vice, and oxygen to virtue, as surely as sunlight
paints the flowers, and ripens the fruits, of our gardens. The tired
workman, who, after a day's labor, needs the repose and relaxation of
home, is apt to be driven from it by the close atmosphere of the street
and house in which he lives. He would, if he could, get into the fresh
air of the country; but, as he cannot do this, he seeks the relief which
drink or other excitement yields. If there were a park accessible to
him, he with his family would seek it as instinctively as a plant
stretches towards the light. The varied opportunities of a park would
educate him and his family into the enjoyment of innocent amusements and
open-air pleasures. Deprived of these, he and his are educated into the
ways of disease and vice by the character of their surroundings. Who
that has watched the groups of families, neighbors, and friends, that
bivouac by hundreds and thousands on the parks which cluster around,
adorn, and invigorate the great cities of Europe, can have failed to
notice the innocent amusements and enjoyment of these crowds of young
and old, or to be impressed with the fact that the influence of the
natural scenes around them, of the trees and plants and flowers, of the
pure air and bright skies, is a humanizing and elevating one? It is
difficult to compute the value of such an influence in dollars and
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
brin