in which New York has been able to gain spiritual, ethical, and patriotic rent from its school plant is full of rare suggestion for the executives or selectmen of other corporations, townships, and hamlets.

The change for the better in this matter, though for a decade it was but a puny use of afforded opportunity, began some years ago. Evening schools-elementary and, to a limited extent, secondary-were put into operation. This plan, which showed good results almost immediately, made use of a few buildings three hours a night, ninety evenings in the year. Then the lights went out until the next fall. Later, and more or less as

an outgrowth of the night schools, came the free lectures to the people, known for some years as the "Lectures to Working Men and Women" in order to avoid the ever-ready cry of "fad" from a very mixed democracy. The lecture courses, which now are remarkable both for comprehensive treatment and numbers reached, occupied a few more buildings one or two evenings a week for several months a year. On the remaining five or six evenings-for a building week is seven days, whatever may be a school week-- these "educational" structures were distinguishable principally by their invisibility after sundown. The qualities

of darkness and tightly sealed doors and windows were still characteristic of most of the New York schools. The public, however, was quite used to the tombstone quality of the buildings, and made no complaint.

The next step forward in reducing waste of plant came from persons outside the official pale. The idleness of the school buildings in summer and the lack of play-places for children at the same season grated on the nerves of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, a body very sensitive to the needs of the masses. They connected

going home when the noon bell concluded the exercises.

The city, tiring of the disgrace of having a charitable organization do its proper work, finally assumed control of these institutions. This was done under the late Mayor Strong's administration, and very soon after, when the system gained for its scholastic head Dr. William H. Maxwell, who is not afraid of being called a "faddist" when he believes that he is in the right, radical expansion became the rule. The number of schools was greatly increased, and as an offshoot a score of school-houses were thrown open as play

the two conditions as cause and effect, and one summer borrowed ten school buildings in the "Ghetto" and the "Bend," and opened in them "Vacation Schools," at that time a novelty. In these schools children were taught manual arts, nature study, constructive work, and kindergarten subjects, intermingled with dancing and gymnastics of a rudimentary character. The sessions were three hours a day for five or six weeks in summer, according to the amount of money contributed by the charitably inclined. The experiment was successful, not only in that it brought six hundred to a thousand children to school, but also in the sense that the pupils protested strongly against

grounds, which differ from the vacation schools proper in that they maintain no regular classes and rely for their success entirely upon general gymnastic and athletic instruction, the stimulation of children's games, the provision of some few books and a little play apparatus, and the following out of the kindergarten curriculum. This system was quickly copied by Brooklyn Borough, then under sepa

pedagogical control. Each year showed increasing registration and greater demand, until now there are some sixty play-places in operation, with the promise. of twenty-five or thirty more before the hot season is over. The appropriations allowed for these purposes have been

increased each year, and even Tammany Hall, in the face of a several point boost in the tax rate just before election, did not dare to hinder the growth of this branch of public utility.

From outsiders, too, came the second lesson in making school buildings a more profitable investment, and this time it was the women who had clearer vision than the men of officialdom. The Public Education Association, of which Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer is President, needed meeting-places for the excess of their boys' and girls' clubs-social-literary organizations of juniors. The Association, to meet this demand, petitioned the Board of Education to allow the use of one or two school buildings for the purpose on certain evenings each week. The Board, after some hemming and hawing over outside influences, at last granted the use of two buildings, rent free. The Association operated these evening play-centers with complete success. The school-houses, prophecy to the contrary notwithstanding, were not torn apart and wrecked, and, beyond slight accidental breaking of glass in the basement where basket-ball was played, the damage was negligible. This success

started the superintendents thinking, and it was determined to open official evening centers. The city charter apparently did not permit this, so Charles C. Burlingham, then a member and now President of the Board of Education, secured a change in the statute which sanctions the use of school-houses for almost any purpose. The next summer the Board of Education opened some half a dozen of these evening play-centers on the lower East Side; for the East Side, it must be remembered, stretches up to the Harlem River, with half a dozen plague-spots along the line. In these centers clubs of youths of both sexes were given meeting rooms, and in the basement play-grounds regular classes or clubs were instructed in gymnastics, and for the thousand other young people books, quiet games, and other means of amusement were provided. Before the authorities knew how successful these centers really were, the different schools and rival clubs were holding athletic, chess, checker, and crokinole tournaments and joint forensic meetings. The finale was a monster

open-air athletic meet in one of the parks, where some five hundred children from all the vacation schools ran races, performed on apparatus, boxed, or participated in aesthetic and gymnastic drills. The evening play-centers, therefore, were continued throughout the winter, with a nightly attendance of thousands. This meant that this number of young people were being weaned from the evil influences of saloons, cider-stubes, immoral candy-shops, tobacco-rooms, and the indiscriminate associations of crowded streets and tenement halls, and were being entertained nightly in a clean, healthy atmosphere. The system of evening recreation and instruction is to be broadened considerably next winter. In most of the centers for girls complete instruction in cooking, home-making, housekeeping, sewing, personal hygiene, and care of babies for the benefit of little mothers will probably be given, and some useful trade may be taught to the boys. As an instance of the value of domestic science in tenement districts may be cited the experience of the trained nurses in charge of the summer courses. These teachers, before they could make personal cleanliness practicable, were forced to teach the girls how to bathe their bodies modestly in a crowded room. As one of the girls put it, "Bathing is all right, but where I live two or three men are always in the room."

The general usefulness and the educational, civic, and sociological value of the play-places are now beyond question, and the stigma "fad," which for a time in New York was attached to everything pedagogical which was not moth-eaten, is never used in connection with the summer activities.

A visit to the vacation schools proper, where the girls are taught domestic science in all branches, millinery, crocheting, basketry, drawing, designing, and brushwork, and where the boys learn carpentry, knife-work, chair-caning, fret-sawing, ironbending, and other useful arts, will convince the most perverse doubter that money so spent is money unusually well spent.

He will find the younger children, happy as larks and busy as bees, making articles of paper, constructing toys, or performing the Froebelian ritual plays. In the less formal playgrounds, a glance at