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Mrs. Lasker, I believe today you are going to talk about some of your efforts to achieve beautification of the City of New York, which is an awfully interesting and important subject.

Mr. Mason, when I was a little child I was very much moved by my mother's attempts to beautify the town we lived in, Watertown, Wisconsin. She felt that it was extremely ugly and the people had no parks in which to sit, and she influenced my father to give money toward making a park behind our public library which she had helped to get established in the town, a Carnegie library. Then she worked to get another park established at the edge of the city, on the Rock River. Her efforts in this area were a little puzzling to me at the time, when I was quite small, but I was sympathetic to her and I saw how much trouble she went to to get these things done.

Why were they puzzling to you?

Well, it seemed to me funny that nobody else was doing it, or it seemed to me perfectly natural that these things should be done, and why it was so difficult was strange to me. I couldn't understand why it was such a problem.