hat it shall at least be made safe and
sane for the city child whose senses are already so abnormally
developed.

This testimony of a physician that the conditions are actually
pathological, may at last induce us to bestir ourselves in regard to
procuring a more wholesome form of public recreation. Many efforts in
social amelioration have been undertaken only after such exposures; in
the meantime, while the occasional child is driven distraught, a
hundred children permanently injure their eyes watching the moving
films, and hundreds more seriously model their conduct upon the
standards set before them on this mimic stage.

Three boys, aged nine, eleven and thirteen years, who had recently
seen depicted the adventures of frontier life including the holding up
of a stage coach and the lassoing of the driver, spent weeks planning
to lasso, murder, and rob a neighborhood milkman, who started on his
route at four o'clock in the morning. They made their headquarters in
a barn and saved enough money to buy a revolver, adopting as their
watchword the phrase "Dead Men Tell no Tales." One spring morning the
conspirators, with their faces covered with black cloth, lay "in
ambush" for the milkman. Fortunately for him, as the lariat was thrown
the horse shied, and, although the shot was appropriately fired, the
milkman's life was saved. Such a direct influence of the theater is by
no means rare, even among older boys. Thirteen young lads were brought
into the Municipal Court in Chicago during the first week that
"Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman" was upon the stage, each one with an
outfit of burglar's tools in his possession, and each one shamefacedly
admitting that the gentlemanly burglar in the play had suggested to
him a career of similar adventure.

In so far as the illusions of the theater succeed in giving youth the
rest and recreation which comes from following a more primitive code
of morality, it has a close relation to the function performed by
public games. It is, of course, less valuable because the sense of
participation is largely confined to the emotions and the imagination,
and does not involve the entire nature.

We might illustrate by the "Wild West Show" in which the onlooking boy
imagines himself an active participant. The scouts, the Indians, the
bucking ponies, are his real intimate companions and occupy his entire
mind. In contrast with this we have the omnipresent game of tag which
is, doubtless, also fou