The British Colonist

7 June 1861

We are unqualifiedly in favor of extending the a real of liberty, We are opposed to all pent-up institutions that stunt and dwarf either the intellectual or physical man. We want the genus homo to have room to spread himself out after selling tape or rat traps, fiddle strings, or steam engines, crinoline or town lots, soda water or camphene, ginger bread or bills of exchange. We don't like the idea of our citizens surrounding themselves eternally with the smell of the shop, or see them choking in the dusty and smoky atmosphere of the town, or sneezing away the noxious effluvia caused by the want of a municipal sanitary Board. We are in favour of everybody semi-occasionally taking a ride or a walk through Beacon Hill Park, either to inhale the sea breeze, admire the scenery, pluck the flowers and enjoy their aroma, listen to the warbling of the songsters of the forest, strengthen their muscle, fill their lungs with purer oxygen, walk or trot, gallop or run, or spread themselves out on the turf gipsy-like, and have a realizing sense of the extension of human liberty and the blessings of semi-occasional don't- care- a- rap- ativeness. We are constitutionally opposed to all encroachments on or contraction of the liberties of the Beacon Hill Park, the Hudson Bay Company's divine right or treaty right notwithstanding. The are of our liberty has to be extended. Beacon Hill Park is too small. Every accession to our population makes it smaller, without selling a slice to Col. Moody. By- and bye the very turf will disappear with the spread of the apostles of liberty, except we enlarge the area. An excellent opportunity now exists to extend the Park. If no embraced at once it is not likely to occur soon again. We have got to meet the encroachments of the Company by what they will deem an encroachment, but which we regard as a sanitary measure, and merely appropriating our own property to our own use. We want an L added to the Park- a slice of the farm on the right of the Park behind the Public Buildings. A hundred acres or so in that quarter would be a great extension of liberty. Let us have it marked at once on the Official Map. Drive in the stakes, fix the boundaries, and consecrate it to generations yet unborn. Everything reccommends it, and everybody endorses it; for Beacon Hill Park is the only unanimous institution in the colony.