another better and that more of them shall get together; for what boy
does not want a jolly good romp, and why should he not be Mr. Schwab's
guest for the day, if he does count his dollars by millions?

The working plan the Board of Education can be trusted to provide. I
think it will do it gladly, once it understands. Indeed, why should it
not? No one thinks of surrendering the schools, but simply of enlisting
the young enthusiasm that is looking for employment, and of a way of
turning it to use, while the board is constantly calling for just that
priceless personal element which money cannot buy and without which the
schools will never reach their highest development. Precedents there are
in plenty. If not, we can make them. New York is the metropolis. In
Toledo the Park Commissioners take the public school boys sleigh-riding
in winter. Our Park Commissioner is ploughing up land for them to learn
farming and gardening. It is all experimenting, and let us be glad we
have got to that, if we do blunder once and again. The laboratory study,
the bug business, we shall get rid of, and we shall get rid of some
antediluvian ways that hamper our educational development yet. We shall
find a way to make the schools centres of distribution in our library
system as its projectors have hoped. Just now it cannot be done, because
it takes about a year for a book to pass the ten or twelve different
kinds of censorship our sectarian zeal has erected about the school. We
shall have the assembly halls thrown open, not only for Dr. Leipziger's
lectures and Sunday concerts (already one permit has been granted for
the latter), but for trades-union meetings, and for political meetings,
if I have my way. Until we consider our politics quite good enough to be
made welcome in the school, they won't be good enough for it. The day we
do let them in, the saloon will lose its grip, and not much before. When
the fathers and mothers meet under the school roof as in their
neighborhood house, and the children have their games, their clubs, and
their dances there--when the school, in short, takes the place in the
life of the people in the crowded quarters which the saloon now
monopolizes, there will no longer be a saloon question in politics; and
that day the slum is beaten.

[Illustration: Such a Ball-room!]

Very likely I shall not find many to agree with me on this question of
political meetings. Non-partisan let them be then. So we shall more
read