nded upon the chase. It gives the boy exercise
and momentary echoes of the old excitement, but it is barren of
suggestion and quickly degenerates into horse-play.

Well considered public games easily carried out in a park or athletic
field, might both fill the mind with the imaginative material
constantly supplied by the theater, and also afford the activity which
the cramped muscles of the town dweller so sorely need. Even the
unquestioned ability which the theater possesses to bring men together
into a common mood and to afford them a mutual topic of conversation,
is better accomplished with the one national game which we already
possess, and might be infinitely extended through the organization of
other public games.

The theater even now by no means competes with the baseball league
games which are attended by thousands of men and boys who, during the
entire summer, discuss the respective standing of each nine and the
relative merits of every player. During the noon hour all the
employees of a city factory gather in the nearest vacant lot to cheer
their own home team in its practice for the next game with the nine of
a neighboring manufacturing establishment and on a Saturday afternoon
the entire male population of the city betakes itself to the baseball
field; the ordinary means of transportation are supplemented by gay
stage-coaches and huge automobiles, noisy with blowing horns and
decked with gay pennants. The enormous crowd of cheering men and boys
are talkative, good-natured, full of the holiday spirit, and
absolutely released from the grind of life. They are lifted out of
their individual affairs and so fused together that a man cannot tell
whether it is his own shout or another's that fills his ears; whether
it is his own coat or another's that he is wildly waving to celebrate
a victory. He does not call the stranger who sits next to him his
"brother" but he unconsciously embraces him in an overwhelming
outburst of kindly feeling when the favorite player makes a home run.
Does not this contain a suggestion of the undoubted power of public
recreation to bring together all classes of a community in the modern
city unhappily so full of devices for keeping men apart?

Already some American cities are making a beginning toward more
adequate public recreation. Boston has its municipal gymnasiums,
cricket fields, and golf grounds. Chicago has seventeen parks with
playing fields, gymnasiums and baths, which at pr