LEE: _Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy_, pages 109-184.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE DIVERSIONS OF THE WORKING PEOPLE

247. =The Demand for Recreation.=--The natural instinct for recreation
is felt by the working people in common with persons of every class.
They cannot afford to spend on the grand scale of those who patronize
the best theatres and concerts, nor can they relax all summer at
mountains or seashore, or play golf in the winter at Pinehurst or Palm
Beach. They get their pleasures in a less expensive way in the parks
or at the beach resorts in the summer, and at the "movies,"
dance-halls, and cheap theatres in the winter. They have little money
to spend, but they get more real enjoyment out of a dime or a quarter
than thousands of dollars give to some society buds and millionaires
who are surfeited with pleasure. Recreation to the working people is
not an occupation but a diversion. Their occupation is usually
strenuous enough to furnish an appetite for entertainment, and they
are not particular as to its character, though the more piquant it is
the greater is the satisfaction. Craving for excitement and a stimulus
that will restore their depleted energies, they flock into the
dance-halls and the saloons, where they find the temporary
satisfaction that they wanted, but where they are tempted to lose the
control that civilization has put upon the primitive passions and to
let the primitive instincts have their sway.

It is a prerogative of childhood to be active. If activity is one of
the striking characteristics of all social life, it is especially so
of child life. The country child has all out-of-doors for the scope of
his energies, the city boy and girl are cramped by the tenement and
the narrow street, with occasional resort to a small park. It requires
ingenuity to devise methods of diversion in such small areas, but
necessity is the mother of invention, and the children of the city
become expert in outwitting those whose business it is to keep them
within bounds. This kind of education has a smack of practicality in
that it sharpens the wits for the struggle for existence that makes up
much of the experience of city folk, but it also tends to develop a
crookedness in mental and moral habits through the constant effort to
get ahead of the agents of social control.

248. =Street Games.=--To understand how the youth of the city get
their diversions it is well to examine a cross-section of c