Every one is agreed that play does two things for the young child--it promotes its physical welfare and it facilitates its budding imagination. More than this, it contributes materially to its education and, particularly, it develops its constructive faculties. It teaches older children and youths who participate in games of skill and control the principles of give and take, bear and forbear, and it shows them how to be victors without arrogance and losers without venom. It instils principles of honesty, favors frankness and directness, and generally paves the way for successful dealing with their fellows socially, commercially, and politically in mature life. When one considers the pains and money that are expended in our own country and in England to teach young people how to play, it is astonishing how apathetic the Italians have been toward the matter. My belief is that Italy is awakening to the fact that play is one of the most important factors in the development of the people, and if this war had not come on I should most likely not have had occasion to make these observations and to draw conclusions from them. I am told that a few years ago they began to have mixed schools, that is, schools where children of both sexes are assembled during school hours, and in many cities there were stadia where sports of all sorts were encouraged and fostered. There are many factors that have tended to impede the development of play in this country and the recognition of its importance, but aside from that there is something in the Italian temperament or nature that is antipathic to the play instinct and inimical to sports. Pedagogy has recognized its importance but it has not succeeded in promoting and developing it. I have often wondered whether the suppression of the play instinct practically to the point of abnegation is not manifest in the energies and success of a people. Aside from the field of mechanical application as represented by that in the profession of engineering, I do not know of any realm in which the Italian of the past three or four generations has signally distinguished himself. There have been poets, artists, architects, physicians, priests, statesmen, philosophers, explorers, or interpreters of life and events whose names have taken permanent places in the world. I mean to say that in this period there have been many Italians who have attained eminence and earned immortality, but there has been no one from whom an epoch dates: no Pasteur, no Deisler, no Thompson, no Devries, no Stanley, no Edison, no Langley, no Wright, no Morgan, no Eddy--to enumerate only a few of those that are legitimately put in the class of supermen.