ewspaper
clipping reporting a performance of The Prince and the Pauper, given
by Chicago school children.

*****

To Mrs. Hookway, in Chicago:

Sept., 1908.

DEAR MRS. HOOKWAY,--Although I am full of the spirit of work this
morning, a rarity with me lately--I must steal a moment or two for a
word in person: for I have been reading the eloquent account in the
Record-Herald and am pleasurably stirred, to my deepest deeps. The
reading brings vividly back to me my pet and pride. The Children's
Theatre of the East side, New York. And it supports and re-affirms what
I have so often and strenuously said in public that a children's theatre
is easily the most valuable adjunct that any educational institution
for the young can have, and that no otherwise good school is complete
without it.

It is much the most effective teacher of morals and promoter of good
conduct that the ingenuity of man has yet devised, for the reason that
its lessons are not taught wearily by book and by dreary homily, but by
visible and enthusing action; and they go straight to the heart, which
is the rightest of right places for them. Book morals often get no
further than the intellect, if they even get that far on their spectral
and shadowy pilgrimage: but when they travel from a Children's Theatre
they do not stop permanently at that halfway house, but go on home.

The children's theatre is the only teacher of morals and conduct and
high ideals that never bores the pupil, but always leaves him sorry when
the lesson is over. And as for history, no other teacher is for a moment
comparable to it: no other can make the dead heroes of the world rise
up and shake the dust of the ages from their bones and live and move and
breathe and speak and be real to the looker and listener: no other can
make the study of the lives and times of the illustrious dead a delight,
a splendid interest, a passion; and no other can paint a history-lesson
in colors that will stay, and stay, and never fade.

It is my conviction that the children's theatre is one of the very, very
great inventions of the twentieth century; and that its vast educational
value--now but dimly perceived and but vaguely understood--will
presently come to be recognized. By the article which I have been
reading I find the same things happening in the Howland School that
we have become familiar with in our Children's Theatre (of which I am
Pr