ol children, working girls
and boys, and young men and women. In the morning the children play and
perform their costume dances. In the afternoon the fields are given up
to athletic sports of older children, and in the evening young men and
women, of all nationalities, many wearing their old-world peasant
dresses, revive the plays and the dances of their native lands. Tens of
thousands view the beautiful spectacle, which each year excites more
interest and assumes an added importance in the civic life of Chicago.

Each of the large parks in Chicago's system is provided with a municipal
dance hall, spacious buildings with perfect floors, good light, and
ventilation. Any group of young people are at liberty to secure a hall,
rent free, for dancing parties. The city imposes only one
condition,--that the dances be chaperoned by park supervisors.
Beautifully decorated with growing plants from the park greenhouses
these municipal dance halls are scenes of gayety almost every night in
the year. Park restaurants in connection with the halls furnish good
food at low prices. Of course no liquor is sold. Nobody wants it. This
is proved by the fact that saloon dance halls in the neighborhood of the
parks have been deserted by their old patrons.

Women have recognized the debt to youth and the joy of life, and they
are preparing to pay it.

In this latest form of social service they have entered a battlefield
where the powers of righteousness have ever fought a losing fight. Men
have grappled with the social evil without success. They have labored
to discover a substitute for the saloon, and they have failed. They have
tried to suppress the dance hall and they have failed. They have made
laws against evil resorts, and they have sent agents of the police to
enforce their laws, but to no effect.

The failure of the men does not dishearten or discourage the women who
have taken up the work. They believe that they have discovered an
altogether new way in which to fight the social evil.

They propose to turn against it its own most powerful weapons. The joy
of life is to be fed with proper food instead of poison. Girls and young
men are to be offered a chance to escape the nets stretched for them by
the underworld. In many cities women's clubs and women's societies are
establishing on a small scale amusement and recreation centers for young
people. In New York Miss Virginia Potter, niece of the late Bishop
Potter, and Miss Potter's