creation. Within very recent years the leaders of the
Associations have countenanced the use of billiard tables. No longer is
the gymnasium an annex to the prayer-meeting. It has values of its own.
Without moralizing, these practical men have discovered that the social
parlors were good for ends of their own and not merely as a place for
hearing the distant sound of hymns. In other words, recreation is a form
of ethical culture.

Rev. C. O. Gill, who was captain of the Yale football team in 1890, has
had an extended experience among farmers. He says, "The reason why
farmers cannot co-operate is in the fact that they did not play when
they were boys. They never learned team work. They cannot yield to one
another, or surrender themselves to the common purpose." The writer,
observing Mr. Gill coaching a university team, commented upon the good
spirits with which a player yielded his place on the team just before
the victory. Mr. Gill had removed him, as he explained to him, not
because he played poorly, but because a new formation required a
rearrangement of the team. In reply to comment upon the player's
self-forgetfulness, Mr. Gill said, "Football is the greatest school of
morals in the country. I learned more ethics from the coaches when I was
an undergraduate in Yale, than from all other sources combined."

It is this high ethical value of recreation which causes the working man
to defend his amateur baseball team, and makes it so hard to repress
Sunday games. The working man admits the high value of the Sabbath, but
he sets a value also upon recreation, and without analysis of the
philosophy either of the Sabbath or of the play-ground, stoutly
maintains the goodness of recreation and its necessity for those who
have labored all the week. "I work six days in the week, and I must have
some time for recreation," is the working man's answer to all Sunday
reformers. Waiving for a moment the question of the Sabbath, the human
process to which the working man testifies is exactly as he describes
it. Organized labor and systematic industry will react on any population
in the form of systematic recreation.

The Play-ground Movement, therefore, is extending itself throughout the
country by the very influence of modern industry. Given intelligence to
interpret it, and one understands at once the desire of philanthropic
and public spirited men and women to provide "a playground beside every
school building, open for all the peo