is for the youth who has
enchantingly rendered the gentle poetry of Ben Jonson's "Sad
Shepherd," or for him who has walked the boards as Southey's Wat
Tyler. His association, however, is quite as clinging and magical as
is the child's although he can only say, "Gee, I wish I could always
feel the way I did that night. Something would be doing then." Nothing
of the artist's pleasure, nor of the revelation of that larger world
which surrounds and completes our own, is lost to him because a
careful technique has been exacted,--on the contrary this has only
dignified and enhanced it. It would also be easy to illustrate youth's
eagerness for artistic expression from the recitals given by the
pupils of the New York Music School Settlement, or by those of the
Hull-House Music School. These attempts also combine social life with
the training of the artistic sense and in this approximate the
fascinations of the five-cent theater.

This spring a group of young girls accustomed to the life of a
five-cent theater, reluctantly refused an invitation to go to the
country for a day's outing because the return on a late train would
compel them to miss one evening's performance. They found it
impossible to tear themselves away not only from the excitements of
the theater itself but from the gaiety of the crowd of young men and
girls invariably gathered outside discussing the sensational posters.

A steady English shopkeeper lately complained that unless he provided
his four, daughters with the money for the five-cent theaters every
evening they would steal it from his till, and he feared that they
might be driven to procure it in even more illicit ways. Because his
entire family life had been thus disrupted he gloomily asserted that
"this cheap show had ruined his 'ome and was the curse of America."
This father was able to formulate the anxiety of many immigrant
parents who are absolutely bewildered by the keen absorption of their
children in the cheap theater. This anxiety is not, indeed, without
foundation. An eminent alienist of Chicago states that he has had a
number of patients among neurotic children whose emotional natures
have been so over-wrought by the crude appeal to which they had been
so constantly subjected in the theaters, that they have become victims
of hallucination and mental disorder. The statement of this physician
may be the first note of alarm which will awaken the city to its duty
in regard to the theater, so t