girls been suddenly
released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk
unattended upon city streets and to work under alien roofs; for the
first time they are being prized more for their labor power than for
their innocence, their tender beauty, their ephemeral gaiety. Society
cares more for the products they manufacture than for their immemorial
ability to reaffirm the charm of existence. Never before have such
numbers of young boys earned money independently of the family life,
and felt themselves free to spend it as they choose in the midst of
vice deliberately disguised as pleasure.

This stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play
has, of course, brought about a fine revenge. The love of pleasure
will not be denied, and when it has turned into all sorts of malignant
and vicious appetites, then we, the middle aged, grow quite distracted
and resort to all sorts of restrictive measures. We even try to dam up
the sweet fountain itself because we are affrighted by these neglected
streams; but almost worse than the restrictive measures is our
apparent belief that the city itself has no obligation in the matter,
an assumption upon which the modern city turns over to commercialism
practically all the provisions for public recreation.

Quite as one set of men has organized the young people into industrial
enterprises in order to profit from their toil, so another set of men
and also of women, I am sorry to say, have entered the neglected field
of recreation and have organized enterprises which make profit out of
this invincible love of pleasure.

In every city arise so-called "places"--"gin-palaces," they are
called in fiction; in Chicago we euphemistically say merely
"places,"--in which alcohol is dispensed, not to allay thirst, but,
ostensibly to stimulate gaiety, it is sold really in order to empty
pockets. Huge dance halls are opened to which hundreds of young people
are attracted, many of whom stand wistfully outside a roped circle,
for it requires five cents to procure within it for five minutes the
sense of allurement and intoxication which is sold in lieu of innocent
pleasure. These coarse and illicit merrymakings remind one of the
unrestrained jollities of Restoration London, and they are indeed
their direct descendants, properly commercialized, still confusing joy
with lust, and gaiety with debauchery. Since the soldiers of Cromwell
shut up the people's playhouses and destroye