The following letter was in reply to one inclosing a newspaper
clipping reporting a performance of The Prince and the Pauper, given
by Chicago school children.


To Mrs. Hookway, in Chicago:
Sept., 1908.
DEAR MRS. HOOKWAY,--Although I am full of the spirit of work this
morning, a rarity with me lately--I must steal a moment or two for a
word in person: for I have been reading the eloquent account in the
Record-Herald and am pleasurably stirred, to my deepest deeps. The
reading brings vividly back to me my pet and pride. The Children's
Theatre of the East side, New York. And it supports and re-affirms what
I have so often and strenuously said in public that a children's theatre
is easily the most valuable adjunct that any educational institution for
the young can have, and that no otherwise good school is complete without
it.

It is much the most effective teacher of morals and promoter of good
conduct that the ingenuity of man has yet devised, for the reason that
its lessons are not taught wearily by book and by dreary homily, but by
visible and enthusing action; and they go straight to the heart, which is
the rightest of right places for them. Book morals often get no further
than the intellect, if they even get that far on their spectral and
shadowy pilgrimage: but when they travel from a Children's Theatre they
do not stop permanently at that halfway house, but go on home.

The children's theatre is the only teacher of morals and conduct and high
ideals that never bores the pupil, but always leaves him sorry when the
lesson is over. And as for history, no other teacher is for a moment