shness and loneliness of his task, and,
by connecting him with what has gone before, free him from a sense of
isolation and hardship?

Were American cities really eager for municipal art, they would
cherish as genuine beginnings the tarentella danced so interminably at
Italian weddings; the primitive Greek pipe played throughout the long
summer nights; the Bohemian theaters crowded with eager Slavophiles;
the Hungarian musicians strolling from street to street; the fervid
oratory of the young Russian preaching social righteousness in the
open square.

Many Chicago citizens who attended the first annual meeting of the
National Playground Association of America, will never forget the long
summer day in the large playing field filled during the morning with
hundreds of little children romping through the kindergarten games, in
the afternoon with the young men and girls contending in athletic
sports; and the evening light made gay by the bright colored garments
of Italians, Lithuanians, Norwegians, and a dozen other nationalities,
reproducing their old dances and festivals for the pleasure of the
more stolid Americans. Was this a forecast of what we may yet see
accomplished through a dozen agencies promoting public recreation
which are springing up in every city of America, as they already are
found in the large towns of Scotland and England?

Let us cherish these experiments as the most precious beginnings of an
attempt to supply the recreational needs of our industrial cities. To
fail to provide for the recreation of youth, is not only to deprive
all of them of their natural form of expression, but is certain to
subject some of them to the overwhelming temptation of illicit and
soul-destroying pleasures. To insist that young people shall forecast
their rose-colored future only in a house of dreams, is to deprive the
real world of that warmth and reassurance which it so sorely needs and
to which it is justly entitled; furthermore, we are left outside with
a sense of dreariness, in company with that shadow which already lurks
only around the corner for most of us--a skepticism of life's value.

CHAPTER V

THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND INDUSTRY

As it is possible to establish a connection between the lack of public
recreation and the vicious excitements and trivial amusements which
become their substitutes, so it may be illuminating to trace the
connection between the monotony and dullness of factory work and the
p