ng outlet has thus been forced that the right and
natural one has to be reopened with an effort as the first condition of
reclaiming the boy. The play in him has all run to "toughness," and has
first to be restored. "We have no great hope of a boy's reformation,"
writes Mr. William F. Round, of the Burnham Industrial Farm, to a friend
who has shown me his letter, "till he takes an active part and interest in
out-door amusements. Plead with all your might for play-grounds for the
city waifs and school-children. When the lungs are freely expanded, the
blood coursing with a bound through all veins and arteries, the whole mind
and body in a state of high emulation in wholesome play, there is no time
or place for wicked thought or consequent wicked action and the body is
growing every moment more able to help in the battle against temptation
when it shall come at other times and places. Next time another transit
company asks a franchise make them furnish tickets to the parks and
suburbs to all school-children on all holidays and Saturdays, the same to
be given out in school for regular attendance, as a method of health
promotion and a preventive of truancy." Excellent scheme! If we could only
make them. It is five years and over now since we made them pass a law at
Albany appropriating a million dollars a year for the laying out of small
parks in the most crowded tenement districts, in the Mulberry Street Bend
for instance, and practically we stand to-day where we stood then. The
Mulberry Street Bend is still there, with no sign of a park or play-ground
other than in the gutter. When I asked, a year ago, why this was so, I was
told by the Counsel to the Corporation that it was because "not much
interest had been taken" by the previous administration in the matter. Is
it likely that a corporation that runs a railroad to make money could be
prevailed upon to take more interest in a proposition to make it surrender
part of its profits than the city's sworn officers in their bounden duty?
Yet let anyone go and see for himself what effect such a park has in a
crowded tenement district. Let him look at Tompkins Square Park as it is
to-day and compare the children that skip among the trees and lawns and
around the band-stand with those that root in the gutters only a few
blocks off. That was the way they looked in Tompkins Square twenty years
ago when the square was a sand-lot given up to rioting and disorder. The
police had their han