their Possibilities

Mary McDowell

Head Worker Chicago University Settlement

When years ago Walter Besant gave us in his story of All Sorts and Conditions of Men, a plan for a people's palace to be built in East London for a community without proper social or educational opportunities, we thought it a dream, that might never come true. It did come true, but in a form that was resented by the people who needed it. They did not want a people's palace offered as a charity. It failed in its purpose, but it was suggestive and is at last. realized as a normal expression of democracy in the recreation centers of Chicago's South Park system. These are people's palaces paid for and supported by all sorts and conditions of men, and accepted without fear or favor, for they belong to the people.

In almost every neighborhood of the well-to-do, city and suburban, we find the social club house sometimes a very simple structure, but oftener a large and beautifully furnished commodious house, with kitchen, dining-room, reading, ball and game room, gymnasium and plunge bath. The members of this social club-house are not without houses of their own, but there is something within them that desires a common social meeting place, and opportunity to express sides of their natures that cannot be expressed in a private house, a place where differences are ignored and where each meets the other as a neighbor.

This history of the social and play instinct is common in all such communities. If gratified it must be by co-operation in a most inexpensive way. This is apt to put it on a physical and often low plane, though I have known some of these clubs to be run in a well regulated way.

The homes are too limited for the son or the daughter to entertain guests; even if there is a "parlor" it has to be shared by the whole family and many times there is no company room for the children to entertain their friends. They must, therefore, use the public hall that the neighborhood affords which may be shared by the many, by paying ten or twenty-five cents every time for the privilege of meeting your "friend" for the evening or your group of friends for a dance. At one public dance hall, I visited in the center of town the people go in free, but pay five cents every time they enter the gate to the dancing floor. Here I saw young men alone, and groups of young girls sitting waiting for a chance to dance--a pathetic sight to witness this hunger of the young for a "good time."

In the neighborhoods where the industrial pressure is hardest, life is apt to be a struggle ten hours every day simply for food, clothes and shelter. Here people eat and sleep, and the average gain some small relief from the monotony of modern machine driven inThese club houses came in response to dustry by drinking themselves into anthe social and play instincts; instincts other state of being, or by going once common to all of us. In communities a week to the theatre, where, for a small of working people where the home is outlay, they are helped into another limited to a cottage or a tenement flat sphere of life at least for an hour. But of four to six rooms a club-house built a large number of people in our cities co-operatively is out of the question. In In do not even go to the theatre if it is out such neighborhoods these instincts are of their immediate neighborhood. The expressed by groups of young men who play and social instinct has very little. rent a vacant store and name it a club, chance in most crowded districts except such as The Quo Vadis, The Shamrock, in the opportunities offered by the saloon or The Everlasting Pleasure Club, meet or dance hall, and then only on a low every evening, sometimes all night, punch and demoralizing plane. the bag, gamble for money, "rush the can," quarrel, and "bust up the club."

The five-cent theatre has shown a need. Its twenty minutes' continuous enter