difficult to make men see that the children of a modern city have
different needs from the country or village children of a generation
ago. Men remember their own boyhood, and scoff at the idea of organized
and supervised play in a made playground. Women have no memories of the
old swimming-hole. They simply see the conditions before them, and they
instinctively know what must be done to meet them. The process of
educating the others is slow, but this year in Philadelphia sixty public
schoolyards were opened for public playgrounds, and the city
appropriated five thousand dollars towards their maintenance. In a
hundred cities East and West the women's clubs have been the original
movers or have co-operated in the playground movement.

Out of this persistent work was born the Playground Association of
America, an organization of men and women, which in the three years of
its existence has established more than three hundred playgrounds for
children. In Massachusetts they have secured a referendum providing that
all cities of over ten thousand inhabitants shall vote upon the question
of providing adequate playgrounds. The act provides that every city and
town in the Commonwealth which accepts the act shall after July 1, 1910,
provide and maintain at least one public playground, and at least one
other playground for every additional twenty thousand inhabitants.
Something like twenty-five cities in the State have accepted the
playgrounds act. It is a good beginning. The slogan of the movement,
"The boy without a playground is the father of the man without a job,"
has swept over the continent.

[Illustration: STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD,
LOS ANGELES, CAL.]

This surely is a not inconsiderable achievement for so humble an