Perhaps I should stop here, but I can not lose the opportunity of saying just a word to connect this topic with the great playground movement, and therefore in behalf of providing facilities for winter and summer sports alike, for our boys and girls—our young people.
Do you realize fully that the boys and girls of to-day—yours and mine, yes, and just as truly those less favored—those into whose lives there comes but little cheer, into whose stomachs there goes but little nourishing food, and into whose lungs, but little oxygen—do you realize, I ask, that these boys and girls are to be the men and women of to-morrow, with all the responsibilities of the world resting upon their shoulders? Do we want them to enter upon the duties of life stoop-shouldered, flat-chested, spectacle-eyed? Do we want them to be anæmic, pessimistic, nervous wrecks? Do we want them to be mental weaklings and moral cowards? Do we want them even to approximate these conditions? No? Then, with all our provisions for their wants and their needs, let us be sure to develop those things which minister so largely to the development of the opposite characteristics. Prevention is not only cheaper than cure, it is also better. Let us see that our parks are developed with provisions for our boys and girls as well as for the adults. Let us see that playgrounds are scattered over our city and provision made for both winter and summer sports.
In addition to the Riverside Park skating rink, I wish the City Council or the Board of Education would establish one on the grounds of the Winship school, another at the Central building, and still a third on the Belmont grounds. This could be done at nominal cost. What a splendid opportunity it would give to all the children of the city to engage in this most healthful and invigorating sport! It would give them their needed entertainment and relaxation in the pure, invigorating, out-of-door air. It would surround them with an emotional atmosphere that is at once normal, natural, and spiritually health-giving. Instead of these conditions, what do we find? Many of our young boys and girls and very many of those a little older—those just entering upon manhood and womanhood, when both emotional and physical atmosphere count for so much in the forming of habits and the choosing of ideals—many of these future men and women are finding their entertainment and their relaxation (and mind you, at the close of a day in school or in the evening after a day spent in the poorly ventilated office or store) in the moving-picture show or at the vaudeville. And in these places the air is apt to be both hot and impure, and all the physical conditions enervating. The emotional atmosphere, too, is sure to be abnormal, unnatural, and spiritually deadening. We find here, and in too large quantity to be a negligible factor, the atmosphere, the conditions, the associations, that help greatly to breed incorrigibles, truants, and laggards in our schools; that develop juvenile delinquents, hasty marriages, and early divorces; that send into the world paupers, grafters, and criminals. Not all the conditions are such in all such places, it is true, but as affecting young life these are usually the dominating ones.
I am not condemning the theater. It has its legitimate place, and a large place it is, in normal, healthy, American life. I am merely declaiming against these lower forms as usually conducted for commercial gain—these perversions of the true theater idea—these institutions that deal so largely in the sensational elements and appeal so strongly to the passions. I am told that the cheap theater is the poor man's club. I very much doubt if that is its chief function or, rather, that its chief result is a wholesome quickening of the better nature of this poor man—that its chief accomplishment is to send him back to his home kinder, truer, and stronger, thru either the relaxation or the instruction, to grapple with the difficulties of life. I greatly fear that, as usually conducted, its influence upon the adult is at best but the temporary slaking of an unhealthy and never-satisfied thirst, and that upon the child and the adolescent it is a distinct blunting of all the finer sensibilities and elements of character. But even these lower forms are not all bad. There is enough of good in them to warrant an attempt at improvement rather than elimination. They can be improved, made clean, and wholesome, and thus become a positive factor in the development of right character. I doubt if it will be done, however, until some other motive than personal gain shall be responsible for their management. Still, as they are, they might be very greatly bettered if in some way those most deeply interested in the outcome could have a choice in the selection of the material to be used.
One of the best ways to counteract the harmful influence of the poorly conducted moving picture show and the vaudeville is to develop something better to take their places. Let it be something that contains the life-giving principles, something that will appeal with equal force to the impressionable youth, and yet be clean and wholesome and natural. Shall we not look upon the public playground for the children, and the park system, for all, as a promising hope? And, properly developed, would they not soon come to act on the young, both physically and psychically, as a prevention, thus making a later cure unnecessary? And upon adults, might we not reasonably expect their use to tend toward making less attractive, and so to the eventual abandonment of, many of these practises and forms of entertainment and recreation that are now so sapping of both physical and psychical life?