opied
it, and sometimes you can find it now on the buildings downtown." She
added, shyly: "Of course, I like it awfully well because it was first
used by people living in Africa where the colored folks come from."
Such a reasonable interest in work not only reacts upon the worker,
but is, of course, registered in the product itself. Such genuine
pleasure is in pitiful contrast to the usual manifestation of the play
spirit as it is found in the factories, where, at the best, its
expression is illicit and often is attended with great danger.

There are many touching stories by which this might be illustrated.
One of them comes from a large steel mill of a boy of fifteen whose
business it was to throw a lever when a small tank became filled with
molton metal. During the few moments when the tank was filling it was
his foolish custom to catch the reflection of the metal upon a piece
of looking-glass, and to throw the bit of light into the eyes of his
fellow workmen. Although an exasperated foreman had twice dispossessed
him of his mirror, with a third fragment he was one day flicking the
gloom of the shop when the neglected tank overflowed, almost instantly
burning off both his legs. Boys working in the stock yards, during
their moments of wrestling and rough play, often slash each other
painfully with the short knives which they use in their work, but in
spite of this the play impulse is too irrepressible to be denied.

If educators could go upon a voyage of discovery into that army of
boys and girls who enter industry each year, what values might they
not discover; what treasures might they not conserve and develop if
they would direct the play instinct into the art impulse and utilize
that power of variation which industry so sadly needs. No force will
be sufficiently powerful and widespread to redeem industry from its
mechanism and materialism save the freed power in every single
individual.

In order to do this, however, we must go back a little over the
educational road to a training of the child's imagination, as well as
to his careful equipment with a technique. A little child makes a very
tottering house of cardboard and calls it a castle. The important
feature there lies in the fact that he has expressed a castle, and it
is not for his teacher to draw undue attention to the fact that the
corners are not well put together, but rather to listen to and to
direct the story which centers about this effort at creativ