New York Children Are Taught to Play

1910

NEW YORK. — There are places where children have to be taught how to play. You might think that the youngsters wouldn't need instruction of this kind. You would be mistaken. Here in New York men and women spend the better part of their lives teaching thousands of children how to play, not only with their muscles, but also with their minds, writes a correspondent. A great many thousand dollars are spent annually by the city just for that purpose, and experience has proved that the time and money are well spent.

The tall tenements of the East side, as full of people as a warren is of rabbits, swarm with eager children. Their fathers and mothers were immigrants. Most of them had no boyhood or girlhood, as most people think of it. They worked for a living before they came to this country; they were hard at work in shops or factories after they came here. They had no traditions of play to hand down to their children. To them play was a foolishness.

Their children, unable to breathe in the tenements, take to the streets, which are dirty or infested with persons and things that are not good for little people to see and hear. Children who have no play places but the streets are apt to absorb unhealthful ideas as well as microbes. Pickpockets and loafers are developed that way. Besides, there is little of play that children can do in the streets. That ogre in cap and blue coat, the policeman, is always snooping about.

These are studies that folks with big minds made for themselves in past years. Little by little they got the city government interested and persuaded a very practical minded school board that it was worth while to provide play places for the children who had none, so the board of education has now in this city 245 playgrounds for children, day and night playgrounds, where the little people are carefully instructed how to frolic.

Don't Want Hubby, Say Million English Maids

1920

Surplus English Women Not Hunting Mates.

Scorn Suggestion That Official Action Be Taken to Relieve Shortage of Men.

LONDON, England. — A statement by Dr. R. Murray Leslie that England has 1,000,000 "too many" women and that something ought to be done about it, has aroused angry and resentful comment among the prominent feminists. They say that the modern woman, with her diversified interests, is not a husband hunter.

Radical views on the subject were expressed by Miss Norah Marsh, editor of National Health and an authority on eugenics. She contends that a new social and moral code is growing up which will solve the question.

Encourage Parenthood

"The important thing to consider is whether, with 1,000,000 unmarried women, England can maintain her population at its natural state of increase," said she. "We want parenthood encouraged only among the fit. A large number of these surplus women, from a physical and mental standpoint, would make admirable mothers.

"We are now in a state of transition and our whole moral code is under review. It may be that the day will come when a new social code will help us solve the problem of these surplus women."

"For forty years feminists have declared that marriage ought not to be the whole end of existence for women," said Miss Underwood, secretary of the Women's Federation League. "Now, in view of women's wider interests, they look upon marriage only as a minor incident in their lives.

"It is not the want of opportunity for marriage which makes a woman discontented, but her unequal economic position compared with that of men. When she secures equality with men professionally and industrially and in every other direction, you will not have any discontented women. A well developed woman needs activity, not protection."

Back to the Land

It is contended that war improved the type of woman in the British Isles, and many persons interested in the matter are opposing emigration of British girls.

Among them is the Marchioness of Townshend, who said:

"A far better way than emigration would be to attract the girls to the countryside, where they would not all be herded together in towns. They could live better lives."

Dr. Leslie has suggested that the morals of the modern girls are lower than those of their grandmothers. This charge brought a vigorous response from Mrs. Pember Reeves, well known author, who said:

"I do not believe that girls today are any worse than their grandmothers were. To ship them wholesale to the colonies would be absurd. Better drown the girls if they are such a menace and such a nuisance."

The Work of the Telephone

1916

Its Magic Has Enabled Us to Snap Our Fingers at Space.

Just how modern is the essential and ubiquitous telephone — now connecting over a half million houses and offices in New York city — there is a casual line in "Pinafore" which serves to indicate. When the kindly chorus is condoling with Ralph Rackstraw on his separation from his Josephine it chants these words to picture the terror of his lot:

"No telephone connects with his dungeon cell."

The line falls flat today. But "Pinafore" was produced for the first time in 1878, and in 1876 the Bell patents for the first practical telephone were issued. Thus when the words were written they related to a new and startling invention that was the talk of the day. and the Gilbertian line was really a gay, topical jest.

It is a safe guess, however, that very few of the people who laughed at "Pinafore" in the seventies foresaw what the telephone would really prove to be. The years of the telephone are few. But already it has transformed business method and social intercourse. The railroads, the fast trains, the telegraph, wireless, the automobile, all helped to make the nineteenth century a century of acceleration.

The telephone worked more real magic than all the rest together. The discovery of astral bodies would hardly have done more to multiply human effectiveness and enable us to snap our fingers at space. — New York Tribune.

—Stevens Point Daily Journal, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, July 29, 1916, page 3.

Civilization is Destroying Poetry, Humor

1906--

DECAY OF IMAGINATION.

Assertion Made That Civilization Not Only Killing Poetry, But Sense of Humor.

An Italian scientist thinks that civilization is not only killing poetry, but the sense of humor. Both depend upon the seen object suggesting other things to the mind, in one case congruous, in the other incongruous. Science has made our minds more rigid so that we see only what we see. "More rigid" means less vitalized.

Under new conditions at hand, we shall get back our vitality, shall once more have some to spare, once more be able to see the naked visible in its proper robes. Imagination is the seeing of real relations. It is seeing what we feel ought to be, which, when sane, is a deeper seeing of what they are. Humor is imagination relaxing herself and playing the caricaturist. While she lives at all, she must be permitted to recreate. She thrives on the surplus age of mental vitality.

Nordau dwells somewhere on the tendency of artists he calls degenerate to paint everything more or less violet. One would suppose that every color, like every sound, must be yielding its overtones. Any one can see the color as it stands. It takes an artist to see--feel, "Imagine"--its overtones and bring them down for us.-Student in the New Century.

--The Evening News, Ada, Oklahoma, August 9, 1906, page 4.