ily find our way out of the delusion that national politics have any
place in municipal elections or affairs, a notion that has delayed the
day of decency too long. We shall grow, along with the schools, and by
and by our party politics will be clean enough to sit in the school
seats too. And oh! by the way, as to those seats, is there any special
virtue in the "dead-line" of straight rows that have come down to us
from the time of the Egyptians or farther back still? No. I would not
lay impious hand on any hallowed tradition, educational or otherwise.
But is it that? And why is it? It would be so much easier to make the
school the people's hall and the boys' club, if those seats could be
moved around in human fashion; they might come naturally into human
shape in the doing of it. But, as I said, I wouldn't for the world--not
for the world. Only, why is the dead-line hallowed?

I am willing to leave it to the Board. We are singularly fortunate in
having just now a mayor who will listen, a Board of Education that will
act, and a superintendent of school buildings who can and will build
schools to meet neighborhood needs--if we will make them plain. The last
time I dropped into his office I found him busy, between tiffs with
contractors, sketching an underground story for the schoolhouse, like
the great hall of the Cooper Institute, that should at the same time
serve the purpose of an assembly hall, and put the roof garden one story
nearer the street. That was his answer to the cry of elevators. "We do
not need municipal boys' club houses," said Mayor Low in vetoing the
bill to build them last winter, "we have the schools." True! Then let us
have them used, and if the classroom is not the best kind of place for
them, the experience of the settlements will show us what kind is. They
carry on no end of such clubs. And let the Board of Education trustily
leave the rest to Superintendent Snyder, who knows. Isn't it enough to
make a man believe the millennium has come, to find that there is at
last some one who knows? Not necessarily all at once.

In a copy of _Charities_ which just now came in (did I not say that it
goes that way all the time?) I read that the Chicago Small Parks
Commission has recommended nine neighborhood parks at a cost of a
million dollars,--wise City of the Winds! we waited till we had to pay a
million for each park,--but that the playgrounds had been left to the
Board of Education, which body was "not c