About ten years ago a may-pole was introduced, which revolutionized the school. A small organ was carried into the yard and as many as forty children took part in this dance at the same time. About five years ago, fearing that this dance would become monotonous, other folk dances were introduced, and now one may see during all intermissions, groups of boys and girls dancing the gavotte der kaiserin, Irish reel, Highland fling, sword dance, dance of the Alpine peasants and the minuet. In order that even these should not become uninteresting, costumes have been provided for each dance, and this is bound to be the greatest aid in discipline; for what boy will play truant when he can impersonate Washington in the minuet or some Scottish hero in the sword dance or Highland fling. To defray the expense of the costumes, a play was given,—Spyri's Heidi. This met with such success that they now have a dramatic club, whose members have presented Old-Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins and Little Baron to large audiences in the Opera House. Many unruly boys have become docile, after impersonating some genuinely honest boy character. The manners and dress of both boys and girls have been much improved since they have taken part in these plays.
The folk-dances have been used in this school for so many years that all are prepared to say that they are a success with the boys in as great a degree as they are with the girls. A boy seldom refuses to join in the dances. The most enjoyable period during the session is the time of the rhythmic play. They need no other punishment for disobedience than to threaten to refuse to play for the folk dances.
THE STANDARD FOR A CITY'S SURVEY
GRAHAM TAYLOR
Social research on a city-wide scale is a contemporary product. Appropriately old London was the first to have its living conditions comprehensively investigated. To Charles Booth belongs the credit of having initiated and set the type of such enquiry. His great work in seventeen volumes on Life and Labor in London standardized methods and results in some lines of civic investigation. Its data were almost entirely derived from secondary documentary sources furnished by official records and the reports of voluntary agencies, but the originality with which it is everywhere stamped lies in the handling and verifying of the material thus acquired. The whole great analysis and synthesis of the largest city population of the world, thus attempted for the first time, deserves to be ranked as one of the greatest achievements of the closing decade of the nineteenth century. That this brave pioneering was attempted by one of London's great shippers, and that it was so successfully carried through to completion at a cost of twenty years of labor and a quarter million of dollars, also sets a standard of self-exacting citizenship worthy alike of the world's greatest city and of one of its most modest and personally resourceful citizens.
The extent to which this survey of London afforded intelligent incentive and basis for the reconstructive civic spirit and work which attended and followed it is demonstrated by contemporary history. The voluntary efforts to improve conditions, and the London County Council's achievement in increasing open and street spaces and in furnishing housing and other equipment for city life, were on a scale befitting the foundation in fact substantially laid by Mr. Booth's monumental work. Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham and many provincial cities received impetus and direction in their heroic efforts to ascertain and improve their own conditions.
Seebohm Rowntree followed Mr. Booth's example in his study of poverty in York, but went beyond his methods in making a first hand investigation of the facts. Robert W. deForest and Lawrence Veiller set the type for American enquiry into city conditions by their investigation and reports of the Tenement House Problem in New York. And now the Pittsburgh Survey registers the most inclusive standard thus far set in ascertaining the facts of living conditions in a typical industrial community. In cooperating to carry through this constructive survey the Russell Sage Foundation and this magazine achieve the most noteworthy fulfilment of their common purpose to improve social and living conditions in the United States.
PREACHING AND PRACTICE
JACOB A. RIIS
