day, and if Mike Duffy is ever persuaded or coaxed to go in for good government there will be no business for the reform movements. The Board of Education has confronting it many difficulties. The question of housing schoolless children is not the least, but with all their problems of school work they find time to devote a great deal of energy to the problem of child play. Nearly 1,000 men and women are employed to conduct summer vacation schools and playgrounds in the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx. That their efforts were worth while, to the child mind worth much fun, is likely, for last summer more than 100,000 boys and girls were in more or less constant attendance. The scheme is very simple. In the densely populated districts, schools, kindergarten tents, out-door gymnasiums, recreation piers, parks, roof gardens, and the floating baths were utilized under skilful supervision, of course, for the purpose of cultivating and directing a healthy instinct of play. Not aimlessly, however, for boy play was encouraged that led later to useful trades and occupations, and the little girls played housekeeping, nursing babies, and numerous other things that experience has shown they have need for in their cramped lives; solemn, earnest duties-but there is no reason why they should not learn how to do them well and get some fun in the learning. This does not mean that the children were fooled into the belief that they were having fun to illustrate a theory. In the mornings their play was directed systematically-but they could remain outside in the playgrounds if they preferred: prepare for the athletic tournament, learn to turn back flip-flap., do the grasshopVOL. XXX.-30 per, swim the breast-stroke, or walk on their hands, and, above all, to play fair and honestly, whether in the sand-box or on the flying rings. This latter aim may not seem important, but a woman who knows gang boys well feels that her year's work is done if she can see something more than a glimmer of fair dealing in the play of her gang. Little fellows who are compelled to exercise their wits to keep alive are not squeamish about using them to win in games by hook or crook. Give a country boy a jack-knife and he will provide pine and the ingenuity to whittle out anything from a wind-mill to a terrible tomahawk. There is something pathetic in the page of the Board's report that records the necessity of a course in whittling. I showed it to a country boy who read it seriously and remarked: "I guess they never traded knives, no sight no see." To get pinched a disgrace.-Page 264. There is one nameless gentleman in New York who enjoys himself very thoroughly in the summer-time. He equips barges with a band, policemen, life-saver, doctor and fresh milk; crowds them with as many children as they will hold without sinking, and away they go up the Hudson for a day's excursion, band playing, flags flying, with a chatter and buzz that can be heard on shore. Almost all of the societies that consider children at all make some sort of an arrangement for excursions and vacations far in the country. The children and their mothers are taken to Coney Island, to Long Island, up the Hudson and to Jersey-and give as much fun as they getfor those who look after them come back with stories and enthusiasm. There are not very many long faces in a children's summer home. Sometimes in July and August a group of children huddle around baskets, scatter papers and make a great deal of noise in Central Park. They offend one's sense of neatness, and muss up the ordinarily prim grass-plots we admire as we pass on our sedate Sunday walks home from church There is no use being solemn about this sort of thing, those who have it in charge think, nor is there any reason in being reckless in the distribution of a day's fun, and if you ever meet one of these fresh-air excursions screaming at your boat's salute, yell back merrily and without reserve your approval, for all of those women and children are there be--but be patient. There are as many chilcause they deserve the fun, have some- dren downtown ignorant of the beauties thing of hard luck, grinding work or child of Central Park as there are little shavers sacrifice in their lives. uptown who never heard of Jeannette Park-and think of what it means when, as an inducement to being good, children are promised all of the excitements of a day's outing in Central Park. They do not throw a drag-net over the East Side in these days when they do charity and net good, bad, and indifferent for the dispensation. An examination must be passed before even a day's excursion or a fortnight's vacation in the country can be enjoyed. The examiners take into account little girls who have weak mothers, drunken fathers maybe, and the responsibility of caring for the tenement-home, the last baby and several others already here; little girls one sees tugging bundles home, the little mothers of the poor. Widows are marked high, too; women with several children who are fighting against the cold, hard fact that it is next to impossible for a mother to support more than two children unaided. The day's outing gives her fresh courage to face that fight against the dreaded institution for little Ted and eight-year-old Mamie. Boys are passed who help the mother in the fight. Sickly children, too young to know what it is all about, are taken, too, by courtesy, not because they get any fun perhaps, but because their lives need saving. It is a curious fact that, however underfed a baby may be, it is almost always overdressed. One infant arrived at Coney Island last summer during the hot weather clothed in a heavy flannel binder, two woollen undergarments, a cotton shirt, and a heavy woollen cloak. They It is a far-off country to them. line up somewhere downtown in that part of New York we know so little about, dressed in their best, each clutching tightly the nickel he is expected to pay-half the car-fare. In the hot early morning they chatter and squabble until the expedition moves. The journey north is exciting. With knees on seats they view the changing sights on the Bowery. Fourteenth Street is not like Baxter Street; Twenty-third Street is a novel experience; Fourth Avenue and the tunnel are interesting; Fortysecond Street is a strange land; and then dumped out in one of the quiet, deserted, burglar-protected sixties they get into the shade of the Park, where one little girl is said to have remarked: "I seen the most wonderful things we ain't used to seein' in our neighborhood." I suppose she scattered papers and worried the slow-moving park policemanbut what of it? While all this is going on in New York, country papers as far inland as central Pennsylvania record, in local gossip columns, items like this: "A car-load of fresh-air children ar Dave gives them a good time, and resents the imputation that he is doing charity. He treats them as guests, and Bill McVitt is not above strolling across fields of an evening to take a look at the city kids. There is something final about a quiet, peaceful farm; something that makes us all slyly dream of having one some day when our ship comes in. Seen through a Seen through a pair of eyes that for ten years have looked out on the environs of Mulberry Bend a farm is dreamland. Dave Yoder hitches up his trousers and looks at the youngsters in pure amazement. He cannot understand it-nor can anyone appreciate the joys of sliding down a hay-mow that fill the soul of a boy who has been accustomed to stolen slides down the stone sides of the steps of the Park pavilions-and the crack of the ever-watchful policeman's switch. They give Dave more to talk and think about in the winter, in the mornings when he sits by the kitchen stove waiting for sun up, than he gives them. Their curiosity, their funny questions, their appetites make him forget for a time to go even to the post-office, and make him maybe a little more content on the old farm in the valley. "I guess," said a Dave to me once as we sat by my camp-fire, "they'd have the laugh on me if I went to the city." Dave had been telling the strange experience of two boys on his farm, and not once had he suggested the thought that he had been doing any good. But Dave had never been to the city-knew nothing of crowds, bigger than those on circus days-never spent a hot night in a back tenement, and from boyhood up had always had the green of trees to look at. I think the freshair funds are splendid charities for the country folks. With all their ways of lending a helping hand, during the time when vacations and summer fun are in the air, there is a steadily growing feeling among very practical folks that if by far the larger part of our people have to stay in town in summer as well as in winter, and are compelled to go home to tenements after the day's work, a good tenement is more desirable than a bad one -for them, for the general welfare of the city. There are some thousands of people in New York who tackle cheerfully the job of living, push hard all the time away from the line between pauperism and independence, ask no help and are compelled to pay high rents for homes that in the matter of light, ventilation, water-supply, and plumbing do not compare favorably with the homes of average carriage horses. You are liable to arrest if you allow your stable to become filthy and a nuisance. The landlord may do pretty much what he pleases with his tenement. That is because you and I do not live near it, never smell it, and think it a man's own fault if he prefers to live in one. We do not realize that the people of the tenements pay really high rents, a large proportion of the daily wages, for inferior homes because they cannot get anything better and pay the grocer's bill. We hear so much from East Side workers about uncleanly homes they visit that we forget that they are acquainted in the main only with the uncleanly. There are spick and span homes in the worst of tenements-people who use water, children that go to school with shining faces and clean frocks, women that take pride in their tenement keeping and keep alive the something that makes any little place, wherever it is, if it is pure with the honest living of parents and the growth and care of children, home. The landlord offers them as little as the feebly enforced law, in many respects, allows, and differs greatly from the polite individual who does business with apartment-seeking applicants in an office on Broadway, with roll-top desks and hard-wood finish. But there is no reason why we should be more than healthily discouraged about the housing of the poor. There is one active man who is always ready to lead a fight in print or in person against dishonest builders-grasping owners. With his friends and sympathizers he has pushed them hard, and they have been touched on the raw more than once-witness the to-do they made recently when the tenement-house bill was before the Governor. It is simply a contest between honest building and management against greedas anyone can see after looking the mat ter over. The City and Suburban Homes Company said little until its model tenements were ready for occupancy. They provid ed homes for men who wanted to live decently; gave them light, air-space, baths, individual closets, water-supply, gas-stoves, wardrobes, laundries with stationary tubs, drying chambers, steam heat, lighted halls, and a room for baby carriages on the first floor. Besides, they complied with the law in building, and offered investors a good interest. "Wait," said their opponents, " until the year is out, and see how much money you have lost." Several years have passed, and a report of the company reads like the report of a get-rich-quick concern. Nothing seems to go wrong. Interest has been paid to stockholders regularly and a contingency fund set aside. The tenants keep their apartments in good order, and pay the rent, averaging a dollar a week per room. Many applicants have been turned away because of lack of space—and the result has been so encouraging that the company has no difficulty in finding all the money it needs for an extension of its business. The people for whom the tenements at Sixty-eighth Street and Amsterdam Avenue and at Sixty-fifth Street and First Avenue were erected have used them; they have kept their health well and show no disposition to abuse the comforts provided. All of the old tiresome stories told by builders and owners about the piggishness of the poor, their fondness for dirt, and their preferences for just what they had have turned out to be interested statements. Pretty much the same sort of thing was said about the Mills Hotels before they were opened to the public. Let the outof-works, the young bachelors who do not like to board five in a room, go to the Bowery lodging-houses if they have not money enough to go to better places. . Both hotels are now crowded with men who seem to enjoy the accommodations they get. You see men loafing about the courts, chatting over games, growling about something or other, as some hotel patrons always do, and sitting alone, staring with unseeing eyes at a future or past -who knows-just as you do at any other hotel. There are things to complain of, naturally. You may not like the gravy furnished with the beef or the dessert of the day, but men out of work or living on an uncertain dollar and a half a day are not so particular. They get what they pay for-not much more, for these hotels are a paying investment. Charities, or interest in others, of this sort are not dangerous. If men who have concentrated industries, crowded workmen in cities where the old-time ambition of each man to own a little home is idle because of the impossibility of realization; if such men build tenements and hotels, help along a little the scheme of things, and get much fun in helping, they are doing only what they feel they ought to do. They are hard-headed business men, and are not given to sentimentality, but it is quite possible that underneath it all there is more heart than head. And after all, this whole business of thinking of others that evidences itself in summer and in winter too, is simply a matter of kindly feeling, showing itself in a variety of ways. Some of us pooh-pooh at any philanthropic movement that does not show a definite result, others like to see a balance on the right side of the sheet. There are those who sneak in their sympathy with the bald contribution of "a friend," and a large number of men and women do their work because they like it and feel in a measure that it is their duty. Whether they build tenements or provide potted plants for the sick, there is little real difference between them. They are all tarred with the same stick, kindly feeling. The intensely practical philanthropist who likes to see a well-kept set of books, and be able at the end of the year to say : "We have done this and that," cannot understand the dreamer who walks the city full of big bulging thoughts, careless as to whether he spends a few dollars he cannot account for, but both have their places and their fun. When all is said and done it seems that whatever may be happening to faith these days, hope and charity are not being neglected. If charity covers a multitude of sins there is some hope for New York. LOVE By Marguerite Merington My love for thee is like my love for thee Soul of my universe, it stands alone! On all by poets dreamed, or prophets shown 'Tis all the human heart hath known By giving life a crown of thorns to gain. Yet, though its Heaven is snatched from Hell's abyss, |