are attracted, many of whom stand wistfully outside a roped circle,
for it requires five cents to procure within it for five minutes the
sense of allurement and intoxication which is sold in lieu of innocent
pleasure. These coarse and illicit merrymakings remind one of the
unrestrained jollities of Restoration London, and they are indeed
their direct descendants, properly commercialized, still confusing joy
with lust, and gaiety with debauchery. Since the soldiers of Cromwell
shut up the people's playhouses and destroyed their pleasure fields,
the Anglo-Saxon city has turned over the provision for public
recreation to the most evil-minded and the most unscrupulous members
of the community. We see thousands of girls walking up and down the
streets on a pleasant evening with no chance to catch a sight of
pleasure even through a lighted window, save as these lurid places
provide it. Apparently the modern city sees in these girls only two
possibilities, both of them commercial: first, a chance to utilize by
day their new and tender labor power in its factories and shops, and
then another chance in the evening to extract from them their petty
wages by pandering to their love of pleasure.

As these overworked girls stream along the street, the rest of us see
only the self-conscious walk, the giggling speech, the preposterous
clothing. And yet through the huge hat, with its wilderness of
bedraggled feathers, the girl announces to the world that she is here.
She demands attention to the fact of her existence, she states that
she is ready to live, to take her place in the world. The most
precious moment in human development is the young creature's assertion
that he is unlike any other human being, and has an individual
contribution to make to the world. The variation from the established
type is at the root of all change, the only possible basis for
progress, all that keeps life from growing unprofitably stale and