They are of Felix Adler's flock.

But take now the elements as we have them: this great and terrible
longing for neighborliness where the home feeling is gone with the
home; the five hundred school buildings in the metropolis that have
already successfully been put to neighborhood use. It was nothing else
that Dr. Leipziger did when he began his evening lectures in the schools
to grown audiences a dozen years ago, and proudly pointed to a record of
twenty-two thousand in attendance for the season. Last winter nearly a
million workingmen and their wives attended over three thousand
lectures.[43] Dr. Leipziger is now the strong advocate of opening the
schools on the Sabbath, as a kind of Sunday opening we can all join in.
Of course he is; he has seen what it means. These factors, the need, the
means, and then the settlement that is there to put the two together, as
its own great opportunity--has it not a good claim?

[Footnote 43: The first year's record was 186 lectures and 22,149
hearers. Last winter (1901-1902) there were 3172 lectures in over
100 places, and the total attendance was 928,251. This winter there
will be 115 centres. It is satisfactory to know that churches and
church houses fall in with the plan more and more where there are no
schools to serve as halls.]

Experimenting with the school? Well, what of it? _They_ can stand it.
What else have we been doing the last half-dozen years or more, and what
splendid results have we not to show for it? It is the spirit that calls
every innovation frills, and boasts that we have got the finest schools
in the world which blocks the way to progress. It cropped out at a
meeting of settlement workers and schoolmen that had for its purpose a
better understanding. In the meeting one gray-haired teacher arose and
said that the schools as they are were good enough for his father, and
therefore they were good enough for him. That teacher's place is on the
shelf that has been provided now for those who have done good work in a
day that is past. "Vaudeville," sneered the last Tammany mayor, when the
East Side asked for a playground for the children. "Vaudeville for the
masses killed Rome." The masses responded by killing him politically. My
father was a teacher, and it is because he was a good one and taught me
that when growth ceases decay begins, that I am never going to be
satisfied, no matter how good the schools get to be. I want them ever
closer