[1] See Report on the Questions drawn up by Present Residents in our
College Settlements, p. 17. Published by the Church Social Union,
Boston.

[2] Leaflet on "Summer Savings," published by the Baltimore Charity
Organization Society.

[3] p. 25.

[4] "Public Relief and Private Charity," p. 109.

[5] See Fourth Report of Boston Associated Charities, p. 38.

[6] Eighteenth Report of Boston Associated Charities, p. 27.

[7] C. S. Loch in Fifteenth Report of Baltimore Charity Organization
Society.

{127}

CHAPTER VIII

RECREATION

I have said that the power to defer our pleasures is a mark of
civilization. There is another mark which, in this busy America of
ours, is often denied to the well-to-do as much as to the poor, and
that is the power to enjoy our pleasures after we have earned them.
Charity workers still underestimate the value of the power to enjoy.
They are likely to regard mere contentment as a model virtue in the
poor, whereas that discontent which has its root in more varied and
higher wants is a splendid spur to progress. Professor F. G. Peabody
quotes Lasalle in naming as one of the greatest obstructions to
progress among the poor, "The cursed habit of not wanting anything."
The power of enjoyment seems dead in many a down-trodden, sordid life,
while in many others it wastes itself upon unworthy and degrading
pleasures.

{128}

There is a passage in one of Miss Octavia Hill's essays that throws a
flood of light on this question. She says that the love of adventure,
the restlessness so characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon, makes him, under
certain conditions, the greatest of explorers and colonizers, and that
this same energy, under other conditions, helps to brutalize him.
Dissatisfied with the dull round of duties that poverty enforces upon
him, he seeks artificial excitement in the saloon and the gambling den.
It is useless to preach contentment to such a man. We must substitute
healthier excitements, other and better wants, or society will fail to
reform him. In all the forms of play, all the amusements of the
people, though some of them may seem to us coarse and degrading, there
is this same restless seeking to express what is highest and best in
man; not only to express his love of adventure, but his love of social
intercourse and his love of beauty. When we once realize that certain
vices are merely a perversion of good instincts, we have taken the
first step toward finding