seeing children disciplined in their
play. Children do not need to be taught to play. Games which are not
spontaneous are as much a task as enforced lessons. I have been a child
myself. The people who run charities, I think, never have been....
However....

This Shepherd's Bush enterprise was an entirely private affair. The idea
was based on the original inception, and much improved. At these
organized meetings the children are forced to go through antics which,
three hundred years ago, were a perfectly natural expression of the joy
of life. These antics were called morris dances; they were mad, vulgar,
joyous abandonment to the mood of the moment; just as the dances
performed by little gutter-arabs and factory-girls around street organs
are an abandonment to the mood of to-day's moment. But the elderly
spinsters have found that what was vulgar three hundred years ago is
artistic to-day; or if it isn't they will make it so. Why on earth a
child should have to dance round a maypole just because children danced
round a maypole centuries ago, I cannot understand. To-day, the morris
dance is completely self-conscious, stiff, and ugly. The self-developed
dance of the little girl at the organ is a thing of beauty, because it
is a quite definite expression of something which the child feels; it
follows no convention, it changes measure at fancy, it regards nothing
but its own rapture.... The morris dance isn't.

So, at the hall to which I went, the children were allowed to play
exactly as and when they liked. Any child could come from anywhere, and
bring other children. There was a piano, and some one was always in
attendance to play whatever might be required by the children. If they
wanted "The Cubanola Glide," or "Down in Jungle-Town," or "In the
Shadows," they got it, or anything else they might choose. Toys of all
kinds were on hand--dolls, engines, railways, dolls'-houses, little
cooking-stoves, brick puzzles, regiments of soldiers, picture-books,
and, indeed, everything that a child could think of.

When I arrived I tripped over the threshold of the narrow entrance, and
fell into a warmly lighted room, where the meetings of some local
Committee were usually held. All chairs had been cleared to the wall,
and the large central space was littered with troops of glad girls and
toddlers from the stark streets around. Instead of teaching the children
to play, the management here set the children to play by themselves and
s