Your great namesake, J.W., was so much a part of his day that he believed with most other great religious thinkers of his time that play was a device of the devil. His belief belonged to eighteenth-century theology and psychology. But even more it grew out of the vicious diversions of the rich and the brutalizing amusements of the poor. Both were bad, and there was not much middle ground. But here on Main Street we see people, most of them young, who feel, without always understanding why, that they simply must be amused. They feel it so strongly that they will pay any price for it if circumstances won't let them get it any other way. And Main Street is ready to oblige them. There could be no amusement business if people were not clamoring to be amused. And we know now why we have no right to say that all this clamor is the devil's prompting. Isn't it queer that the church is only now beginning to believe in the genuineness and wholesomeness of the play instinct, though it is a proper and natural human hunger? Literally everybody wants to play. "People pay more for the gratification of this hunger than they do for bread or shoes or education or religion. They take greater moral risks for it than they do for money. We have seen people who undoubtedly are going to the devil by the amusement route, unless something is done to stop them. They go wrong quicker and oftener in their play than in their work. Are we going to be content with denouncing the dance hall and the poolroom and the vile pictures and the loose conduct of the soft-drink places and Electric Park? Haven't we some sort of duty to see that every young person in Delafield has a chance at first-hand, enjoyable, and decent play?" All agreed that the pastor was right, though they were not so clear about what could be done. But commercialized amusement was not all they found in their quiet voyages of discovery up and down Main Street. The chain stores had come to Delafield--not the "5 and 10" only, but stores which specialized in groceries, tobacco, shoes, dry goods, drugs, and other commodities. Alongside of them were the locally owned stores. Altogether, Main Street had far too many stores to afford good service or reasonable prices. With all this duplication on the one hand, and absentee-control on the other, Main Street was a street of underlings--clerks and salespeople and delivery men. That condition produced low wages and inefficient methods, many of the workers being too young to be out of school and too dense to show any intelligence about the work they were supposed to do. Cheap help was costly, and the efficient help was scarcely to be found at any price.