only legitimate, but vital, and which, if it finds every lawful channel choked up, will seek an outlet at the next available point. The boy has no especial desire to come in conflict with the laws and usages of civilized society." Give a boy an opportunity to play at his favorite game, and the policeman will need, as Mr. Lee aptly puts it, "a gymnasium himself to keep his weight down." Give children playgrounds, and the same spirit and imagination which form rowdy gangs will form baseball clubs and companies for games and drills. Precinct captains attribute the existence of rowdyism and turbulence to lack of better playgrounds than the streets. They break iamps and windows because they have no other provision made for them. London, after forty years' experience, says tersely, "crime in our large cities is to a great extent simply a question of athletics." "This is not theory, but is the testimony you will get from any policeman or schoolmaster who has been in a neighborhood before and after a playground was started there. The public playground is a moral agent, and should be in every community." The play of youth needs careful and scientific direction, so as to develop active and manly qualities of mind and character.

Play activity develops leadership. "When among children," says Groos, "some master spirit takes the lead by virtue of his courage, wisdom, presence of mind, or quick adaptability, his example is of quite incalculable influence on his fellows. They emulate his example. The desire to influence other wills and to direct and control public action finds full scope in play. Such experience must advance the ends of society, since it forms habits which extend beyond the sphere of play. Any form of society which develops sturdy leaders is to be encouraged, for it is these that society is in most need of."

Competitive sports rightly guided are important in their relation to the development of social ethics. All education, to be effective, must be related to conduct. It is here where boys and young men frequently fail. I have been amazed to discover how Christian young men when engaging in competitive sports have not hesitated to beat the pistol to gain an advantage in the start of a race, have consorted with others to pocket a runner to enable a colleague to win, without considering such action a breach of Christian conduct. They have failed to relate their Christian teaching to conduct.

I believe the reason for this is found in the fact that the Church has not entered into the recreation activities of young men. The activities of the religious meeting have been held up to them as the type of service expected of Christians, and because these activities have not appealed to many and because other activities in which young men and boys are

deeply interested have not been related to Christian ethics, they have failed to make the application.

The weakness of the Sunday school is that it is a society for sitting still, while boys were not made to sit still. Physical activity largely through play is the boy's labor, his trade, his life. By relating religious teaching to the boy's activities in play, by giving him the opportunity to express his religious life along these normal and potential channels of his experience, the Church will prove of invaluable service not only in establishing high standards of conduct, but of narrowing the gap between ethical teaching and practical living. It will serve to give naturalness and vitality to the boy's religious life and experience.

The churches, through the Young Men's Christian Association, have done much to relate physical training to religious education in developing a system of Christian ethics in sport, in making conditions favorable for fair play and the square deal in games and contests. Dr. Hall has said: "Thus in young men's training schools and gymnasiums, the gospel of Christianity is preached anew and seeks to bring salvation to man's physical frame, which the still lingering effects of asceticism have caused to be too long neglected in its progressive degeneration. As the Greek games were in honor of gods, so now the body is trained to better glorify God and regimen, chastity and temperance are given a new momentum. The physical salvations thus wrought will be, when adequately written, one of the most splendid chapters in the history of Christianity."

There is a tendency at the present time on the part of many churches to provide athletic sports largely of a competitive nature for their young men. In many instances, I believe they are rushing rather inadvisably into the matter. Athletic sports are exceedingly difficult to manage, and the Church must be careful about inaugurating such work without trained leadership. Without such leadership, tragic conditions will result. Here, again, the Church may secure the desired leadership from the Young Men's Christian Association, which is supplying such trained specialists for the purpose of directing the physical activities of the Christian church in keeping with the general aims and principles of Christianity.

After years of experimentation the association has developed a scientific scheme of physical training and trained directors, and last year alone provided fully three hundred of such leaders for churches and religious institutions, thus enabling the Church to adequately and efficiently enter into the physical activities of boys and men, to their physical, mental, and moral upbuilding.

This is an age of urbanization, an age of great cities. Those cities of 100,000 population have doubled in fourteen years. City growth is a permanent condition. Its problems will ever be with us. Life in the city is artificial. Motor activity is restricted. Occupations industrial, commercial, and sedentary are increasing and will continue to increase. There is danger that the race will lose the vitality, the organic vigor which characterized our forebears. Physical struggle, physical conflict, physical expression are greatly restricted. We are in danger of losing those sterling and manly qualities of mind and body which attained as a result of physical expression and physical experience. Judged by the facts that 70 per cent of the school children of New York City have some physical defect, that 35 per cent of the men who apply for enlistment in the United States army fail to qualify, that the country man is 4 inches taller than his city brother and weighs 23 lbs. more, that the children of the congested wards of great cities are at maturity from 3 to 6 inches smaller than the children of favored homes and districts, that machinery is fast displacing muscular effort - 70 per cent in thirteen years in the hand trades alone that occupations of an automatic nature are greatly increasing, that children in juvenile courts show marked physical degeneration, reveals to us the great need for planning, and working, and struggling in an endeavor to provide opportunities for our children and children's children for the expression of that most dominant of impulses, the play instinct, that physiologic function may be vitalized, mentality stimulated, the psychic impulses enriched, and moral natures trained.

THE PLACE OF THE PLAYGROUND

J. HOWARD BRADSTREET

PRESIDENT CHILDREN'S PLAYGROUND LEAGUE, ROCHESTER, N. Y.

By playground in the proper sense is meant more than a place for children to play. A football or baseball field is not a playground as understood by the Children's Playground League, nor is a park, skatingrink, swimming pool, or toboggan slide, unless regularly supervised, for supervision is essential to the playground.

The supervisor of a playground serves the function of a teacher, and is regarded as a matter of course by the children as such. They expect from him the same interest and co-operation in their play that they are accustomed to receive from their teacher in their work, with the added privilege of more intimate personal contact. It is at his suggestion that games are started, and when interest flags that new ones are devised. It is he who referees, counsels, protects, who is general arbiter and friend. A supervisor has a rare power for good, and it is his presence which makes the true playground.

The modern playground is the direct result of the scientific spirit as applied to children and their environment. There could be no playground at a time when it was thought that children should be made to go to school, learn their lessons, behave properly, and that those who ran away from school, did not learn their lessons, and did not behave, were, of necessity, bad children, as could be further shown in the trouble given the police by their stealing, gambling and general viciousness, making it necessary to erect large and expensive truant schools, houses of refuge, and other institutions, much to the public annoyance, grief, and expense.

Such an attitude is very convenient in classifying good and bad children, but on the other hand it is apt to label as "bad," a large number of boys who turn out to be our best citizens.

When children are studied as they are, by minds unbiased by prejudice as to what they should be, it is soon found that there are certain instincts in them all, developed to greater or less extent, with whose operation it is dangerous to interfere.

It is soon seen that so far from conformity to routine being the natural test for goodness or badness, it has the unfortunate outcome of often placing excellent qualities on the worse side. Vitality, energy, power of initiative are desirable qualities in a man, and are essential to carrying on large enterprises. In a boy they are equally desirable, but

they all protest against conformity to school routine. They must have an outlet and should the possessor, with marvelous control, succeed in meeting the demands of his school life, there is all the more need for their expression after school hours.

Therefore instead of truancy being the sign of inherent depravity, or playing craps, stealing goods to maintain a pirate's cave, or driving away with a man's wagon for exploration, being tokens of evil tastes, they are, from the boy's point of view, the only available outlet for emotions which compel expression.

That this is fact as well as theory is found in the general experience of reduced juvenile crime in the neighborhood of children's playgrounds. The conditions prevailing in New York and Chicago make the necessity of playgrounds there glaringly apparent, but it is none the less true that a playground, in the correct sense, is an equal necessity in every community large or small.

Starting with the general proposition that it is instinctive for children to play, and that the instinct is wholesome and should be gratified, it is found by experience that the instinct has two most noticeable characteristics: first, that the children prefer to play under supervision rather than without, and second, that they will not go regularly to any considerable distance to do so.

Those two facts are of prime importance in helping to place the playground in our municipal mechanism.

Had it been found that children resented supervision, that of two fields equally desirable, one supervised the other not, the one without supervision was popular, while the other one was neglected, then the playground would be as unethical an affair as a sewer, a fire system, or a small park, all of which may be essential to a community but are not classed with its chief direct ethical agencies.

As it is, since children prefer a personality, and since in the interplay of personalities the opportunity for ethical instruction is generated, the playground becomes an ethical center. And since the playground is a place of life in free operation, and in the greater freedom the personal characteristics are shown here distinctly, it becomes a field for the correction of bad tendencies and the inculcating of good ones, far more efficient than the school-room. In fact its relation to the school-room so far as ethics is concerned is that of the laboratory to the text-book.

Viewed in this light, inasmuch as education concerns itself with the principles of conduct as well as in presenting facts of nature and business, the playground becomes an agent of prime importance whose action should be under direct school control.