There is always something pathetic about play in the underworld. We feel that there is something wanting in it, perhaps that something would come into it, if there were more opportunities of real and competitive play. Keeping shops, or teaching schools may do for girls to play at, but a lad, if he is any good, wants something more robust. I often find cripple boys playing "tip-cat," another game upon which the law has its eye, or hurrying along on crutches after something that serves as a football, and getting there in time, too, for a puny kick. But that kick, little as it is, thrills the poor chap, and he feels that he has been playing. I am sure that football is going to play a great part in the physical salvation of Tom, Dick and Harry, but they must have other places than the streets in which to learn and practise the game. We have heard a great deal about the playing-fields of public schools; we are told that we owe our national safety to them; perhaps it is correct, but I really do not know. But this I do know, that the non-provision of playing-fields, or grounds for the male youthful poor, is a national danger and a menace to activity, endurance, health and pluck. Nothing saves them now but the freehold of the streets. Rob them of this without giving them something better, and we shall speedily have a race of flat-footed, flat-chested, round-shouldered poor, with no brains for mental work, and no strength for physical work. A race exactly qualified for the conditions to which we so freely submit it in prison. And above those conditions that race will have no aspirations. So give them play, glorious play, manly strife; let their hearts beat, and their chests expand that they may breathe from their bottom lungs, that their limbs may be supple and strong, for it will pay the nation to give Tom, Dick and Harry healthy play. And they long for it, do Tom, Dick and Harry! Did you ever see hundreds of them on a Sunday morning coming up from their lairs in Hoxton, Shoreditch, Spitalfields and Bethnal Green, to find a field or open space in the suburbs where they might kick a football? I have seen it scores of times. A miserable but hopeful sight it is; hopeful because it bears testimony to the ingrained desire that English lads have for active healthy play. Miserable because of their appearance, and because of the fact that no matter what piece of open ground or fields they may select, they are trespassers, and may be ejected, or remain on sufferance only. Happy are they if they can find a piece of land marked for sale, where the jerry-builder has not yet commenced a suburban slum. Like a swarm of locusts they are down on it, and quickly every blade of grass disappears, "kicked off" as if by magic.