d their pleasure fields,
the Anglo-Saxon city has turned over the provision for public
recreation to the most evil-minded and the most unscrupulous members
of the community. We see thousands of girls walking up and down the
streets on a pleasant evening with no chance to catch a sight of
pleasure even through a lighted window, save as these lurid places
provide it. Apparently the modern city sees in these girls only two
possibilities, both of them commercial: first, a chance to utilize by
day their new and tender labor power in its factories and shops, and
then another chance in the evening to extract from them their petty
wages by pandering to their love of pleasure.

As these overworked girls stream along the street, the rest of us see
only the self-conscious walk, the giggling speech, the preposterous
clothing. And yet through the huge hat, with its wilderness of
bedraggled feathers, the girl announces to the world that she is here.
She demands attention to the fact of her existence, she states that
she is ready to live, to take her place in the world. The most
precious moment in human development is the young creature's assertion
that he is unlike any other human being, and has an individual
contribution to make to the world. The variation from the established
type is at the root of all change, the only possible basis for
progress, all that keeps life from growing unprofitably stale and
repetitious.

Is it only the artists who really see these young creatures as they
are--the artists who are themselves endowed with immortal youth? Is it
our disregard of the artist's message which makes us so blind and so
stupid, or are we so under the influence of our _Zeitgeist_ that we
can detect only commercial values in the young as well as in the old?
It is as if our eyes were holden to the mystic beauty, the redemptive
joy, the civic pride which these multitudes of young people might
supply to our dingy towns.

The young creatures themselves piteously look all about them in order
to find an adequate means of expression for their most precious
message: One day a serious young man came to Hull-House with his
pretty young sister who, he explained, wanted to go somewhere every
single evening, "although she could only give the flimsy excuse that
the flat was too little and too stuffy to stay in." In the difficult
role of elder brother, he had done his best, stating that he had taken
her "to all the missions in the neighborhood,