vacation time. It has undertaken to give not only physical, social, and moral training, but it has attempted also to provide for recreation. New York is spending upward of $150,000 a year to provide the children with these facilities. Some have thought such an expense unjustifiable. Most of those who take a negative view of the value of the playgrounds consider them from a very narrow point of view. The street department could very nearly or quite afford to maintain the playgrounds for the sake of improving the streets. New York pays more than this for removing one large snowfall, yet there is no obstacle in the street that is half so troublesome as the child. You can steer around a post, but you never know where a child will be the next moment. Every kind of dray or carriage or car must reduce speed, and every driver of these thousands of vehicles is put under a nervous strain by the presence of the children, and the passers-by and the stores at the side are constantly annoyed by their games. The expense of the playgrounds is easily justified by the protection of the children. This means, hygienically, protection from extreme heat, from noxious dust and filth of nameless composition. It means, physically, protection from accidents. Many parents have come to the playgrounds in New York and told the teachers that formerly they could never take any comfort in vacation time because they were always leaning out of the window to see if their children were safe. Morally, the playground has meant to the children protection from almost constant temptations. The number of arrests of children in any neighborhood always falls off abruptly on the opening of a playground.

The writer has in his possession the following clipping, believed to be from the report of the Chicago schools and addressed to the superintendent:

MY DEAR SIR: I am pleased to drop you a line in relation to the decrease in patrol calls during the recent vacation. Ordinarily the telephone would ring almost continually, complaining of boys playing ball in the streets, stealing fruits, swimming in the canal, etc., but this year we have experienced quite a relief, and I am candid enough to believe it is largely due to your summer schools and the Mothers' Club baseball grounds.

Hoping for greater success during the next season along these lines, I am pleased to remain, Very respectfully,

CHAS. R. WRIGHT,
Chief of Police.

If the view herein set forth of what the playgrounds have accomplished in the way of physical, mental, moral, and social training for the children is true the playgrounds are well justified by the positive benefits.

Control of playgrounds.—The question still remains, admitting that this work is worth doing and should be done, does it belong to the department of education? So long as it is carried on in connection with the school buildings it can not be well left to any other department. But the question of the control of the new municipal or model playgrounds which are being laid out so rapidly at present may well be raised. If the question be well considered it will be seen that there are three or four departments concerned in the playground problem. Some of these departments do not yet realize it, apparantly, but it is sure to be forced on their attention in the near future.

The first department is the tenement-house department, which must be brought to provide some playground in the center of the block for the small children. The center of a tenement block is to-day the dreariest spot in the "city wilderness." Partially occupied by unsightly stables and tenements and factories, crossed by ugly partition fences and a labyrinth of clothes lines, it is the most depressing outlook in the city slum. This spot must be brought to stand for nature in the form of shrubs and flowers. It must be made a playground for the small children, who are not safe on the streets.

The second department concerned is the street department. For the streets,

after all, are going to be used largely in this capacity, and of many streets of my acquaintance it must be said that their function as playgrounds is much more important than their function as thoroughfares. Recognizing this fact, such streets should always be asphalted, thus giving a usable surface for running and roller skating. They should be cleaned not with a view of making them passable for wagons, but of making them fit playgrounds. The traffic should be so regulated or turned into other streets that the children will not be exposed to unnecessary dangers.

The third department is the department of parks, which is at present so active in building model playgrounds.

The fourth is the department of education.

The question as to whether each of these departments should be stimulated to carry on this work and each set to compete with the other, or whether a playground department should be created to take charge of this side of the work of all departments will not be discussed, but this is certainly an important consideration at the present moment.

Games in the curriculum.—Should we introduce games into the curriculum as the Germans have done? Should we attempt to make athletics compulsory where it is possible, as it is in the English public schools? There would be a great improvement in the attitude of the teachers and scholars toward each other if they might play together more often, and I hope this question will soon claim the attention of American educators.

Normal training for vacation teachers.—The very rapid development and wide extent of the movement seems to demand that the normal schools pay more attention to this side in their training. New York will employ nearly 2,000 teachers in this work this summer, yet her normal schools are giving no training. The training required will pay more attention to gymnastics, to physiological laws, and the aims and methods of social work.

PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAY.

Any treatment of the playgrounds would seem incomplete without some brief treatment of the psychology of play.

There have been two chief theories in the field-the Schiller-Spencer theory and the theory of Professor Groos. The first theory, which has been most intimately connected with the name of Herbert Spencer, is the theory that play is surplus energy. Spencer says an animal in its daily pursuits generates a certain amount of energy. When conditions of life become easier for any reason, the amount of energy which was only sufficient in other times now is in excess of requirements, and this excess is expended in play. It is like a locomotive; when it is running on the tracks and drawing its load it uses its steam, but when it stops at the station it soon begins to blow off. The young animal having no serious activity, and no way to use the energy it generates, uses all of this energy in play and gains physical development thereby. The human brain is like a steam chest; as the process of nutrition goes on the brain cells are constantly being nourished beyond the point of nervous equilibrium and tend to a nervous discharge. Children can not sit still. The writer has tried hundreds of small children, and there are very few children under five who can be got by any inducement to sit still for one minute. By actual register with pedometers he found that the ordinary child of five or six not in school will walk or run around 8 or 9 miles a day. These facts seem to show the presence of this surplus energy and this tendency to nervous discharge. Anyone may notice the sedate pace of the plow horse as he comes from his work, and the wild gambols of the idle steed unloosed from his stall.

Professor Groos says, however, that this is all very good so far, but why does

one animal play in one way and another animal in another? Surplus energy may account for the presence of play, but it can not account for its form. He says, further, that the young tiger, no longer fed by its parents, must inevitably starve if it had not gained that practice in its play which would enable it to spring upon and seize its prey. His solution, then, is that play is an instinct which gives the animal his education for the serious activities of life. He says: "The animal does not play because it is young, but rather it has a period of infancy in order that it may play."

Dr. Luther Gulick has also made some very interesting studies on play. In observing the differences between the plays of boys and girls, he finds that boys have a tendency, which begins to manifest itself about the age of puberty, to organize themselves into gangs and to play organized or team games. Girls have never invented team games, and it is much harder to teach them to play together as a team than boys. Doctor Gulick accounts for this by the past of the race. As human kind was emerging from savagery, the men had to organize for protection and aggression, or the ones that did not organize were killed off by those who did. Out of this grew the life of the tribe or clan. This tendency to organize is transmitted as an instinct in the male line and manifests itself about puberty. The women have never had any such necessity for organization laid upon them. Each has lived apart as an individual in the home, and the girls consequently have not inherited this instinct. Doctor Gulick sees in this organizing tendency, and its resulting loyalty to tribe or clan, the second root of altruism, an unselfish element that has come to us through the male.

It is generally believed that the form of games is derived from earlier activities of the race. They are much conventionalized, ofttimes so that the original is hard to make out; but each game, which may have undergone many modifications before it assumed its present form, was once a serious activity of some kind. As such it was learned by imitation, and the tendency to play it was transmitted in the form of instinct. Thus the games of children between 6 and 13 are competitive; the ideas of choosing, striking, throwing, or hiding away are elements in nearly all. These are also elements in the life of a savage. The team games, such as football or baseball, represent the life of the tribe or clan and are derived from the old game of war. The best example we have of a war game was the tournament, the great game of the days of chivalry.

VALUE OF PLAY.

Physical. The mission of play in the animal world seems to be to give physical strength and muscular coordination. It is the only gymnastic of the animal or the small child. Play, however, stands for more than mere physical strength; it is always graceful and represents a perfect coordination of impulse and movement. It is action completely expressing an idea. Play has a more healthful action on the vital organs than other activities, and is a greater stimulus to growth because it is activity for which we have inherited adjustments, and because the glow of pleasure with which it is accompanied gives tone to the whole system.

When

Intellectual.-Probably the stimulus that did most to arouse the dormant intellect of primitive man and goad it on to think, was the stimulus of war. life hung in the balance, stupidity was fatal. For this reason very likely primitive races have craved this stimulus naturally, as they have craved food. It is our great organized games, too, which represent this period, that offer the greatest stimulus that is ever given to a boy. What else does a boy's world ever offer him that is comparable with the reward of a difficult touchdown on the football field? It gives him at once popular renown, the praise of the beautiful, and the admiration of his friends. He becomes a hero in an hour. Is there anything else that

can awaken a stupid intellect to the same degree? "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Yes, and the way to brighten a dull boy is play. Play develops a quick reaction time, and the tendency to execute a purpose as soon as conceived. No halting Hamlet was ever produced on the football field. It stands for self-control under strain. But the best thing it does for a man, perhaps, is to give him the play spirit.

Social.-Socially, play stands for good fellowship, for the ability to get on with others, to take knocks and give them, and smile through it all. It stands for competition and cooperation.

Moral.-Children acquire their manners and habits mostly from their play. Compare the ways of kindergarten children with those of similar children who do not go to kindergarten. A child has formed habits long before he comes to have serious activities. It seems to me that precept has very little to do with these; they are formed from imitation, impulse, and restraint, all acting together. I doubt if any man ever grew up dishonest in business who had not been dishonest hundreds of times before in playing croquet, checkers, or dominoes. I doubt if many are untruthful in manhood who were not untruthful as children at their play, and vice versa. I doubt if there are many who are honest and truthful as children in their games who grow up dishonest or untruthful in business affairs. To my mind the most valuable game is the team game. It is the most valuable in every sense. It gives the best physical training, it teaches the healthiest cooperation, it requires the most implicit obedience to law, it exacts the most manly spirit, it demands the constant subordination of the individual to the good of the whole. Corresponding to the life of the clan, it teaches all the virtues of unselfishness that have sprung from it. If we accept the recapitulation theory, then as this was the way the race first learned loyalty to each other and cooperation and obedience to law, then this is the natural way to teach these virtues to the child, or in other words, to teach him to be a good citizen.

The name "settlement" implies residence. The essential idea of this new movement is that people from the more fortunate ranks of life shall come down and live among the poor and wretched and seek to raise them by personal example and influence and by improving the conditions under which their life must be passed. It is an attempt to bridge the chasm between the classes by bringing them to live together, with the hope that neighborhood shall breed respect and sympathy and that the wise and the good may become the leaders to direct and inspire those who have had fewer advantages. As such, the settlements are located among the most crowded tenement sections in our great cities. In America they have to deal almost altogether with a population of foreign parentage and mostly with recent immigrants.

Only a very brief treatment of this subject is here admissible. Consequently

no mention will be made of the early anticipations of this movement as found in the work and writings of Coleridge and Morris and Owens and Kingsley, and only the movement itself will be considered.

In England. The work began on the theoretical and practical sides at almost the same time. Some thirty years ago John Ruskin was lecturing at Oxford on social conditions and seeking to make his students sympathize with the lives of the poor. One of the students who drank in his words and was fired by his spirit was Arnold Toynbee. The Rev. S. A. Barnett had already been laboring for some years among the poor in the Whitechapel district of London. To him Toynbee went to consult and confide his desire to do something to raise the lives of the wretched above the squalor and misery of their condition. In 1875 Toynbee, then tutor for the Indian service at Oxford, spent the summer in living among and in lecturing to the people of Whitechapel on economic subjects. After this he came every summer. He was much loved, both by the people with whom he labored and by his associates at Oxford, and when he died in 1883 his friends resolved to erect some sort of memorial to his life of self-sacrifice. At first they thought best to found and endow a university extension lectureship, but after consulting with Rev. S. A. Barnett, who came to Oxford to lecture at this time, they were convinced that the needs of the poor could not be met by outside influences or lectures, but that only those who had lived among them and knew their needs and had gained their confidences and sympathy were in a position to help them. The outcome of this talk was the founding of the University Settlement Society, which built Toynbee Hall in 1885. Rev. S. A. Barnett was made warden, and so the first settlement began its career under the guidance of one with long experience in work among the poor.

Toynbee Hall is situated just off from Whitechapel, in the interior of a very crowded block. It has accommodations for about twenty residents. A large part of its work, following the career of Toynbee, has been educational, consisting of university extension lectures, classes, clubs, etc. The residents have taken great interest in the municipal affairs of the neighborhood and have often held positions of public trust. They have been inspectors of schools, supervisors of charities, etc., but the warden holds the actual contact with the people and the influence that comes from it as their most important services. There is a great mass of literature on the work of Toynbee Hall, but it is hard for an American who can only travel during his summer vacation to get a personal estimate of the work, as it is closed and the residents are absent during most of the summer.

Oxford House, London, was also founded in 1885. St. Margaret's House, the ladies' branch of the Oxford House, was founded in 1889. There are now probably thirty or forty settlements in London, among which the Passmore Edwards Settlement is of especial interest, because it has been so closely associated with the name of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Its aim is religious, and it may be said to represent the views promulgated by Mrs. Humphrey Ward in Robert Elsmere. This settlement is notable as having been the first to establish a school for crippled children. Wagons were sent out for the children in the morning and redelivered the children to their homes at night. While in school they were under the treatment of a trained nurse. The cost per child was two or three times the rate in the public schools, but a class of children was reached which would otherwise have been neglected. To them school meant pleasure, health, strength, and the possibility of becoming self-supporting. Since then there have been several such schools established in England. Last summer Mrs. Ward started in this settlement the first English vacation school.

There are settlements also in the other large cities of England.

In general, I believe lecture and class work is made more prominent in England than it is in our American settlements. The religious motive is also more promi