Several considerations suggest the need for a systematic investigation into and improvement of housing conditions in Washington. The hidden residential alleys are breeding grounds of vice and disease, and should be opened into minor streets. For a number of years influential citizens have joined with the District Commissioners in the vain endeavor to secure laws permitting the condemnation of unsanitary dwellings. The local death-rates, especially from preventable diseases, are so unduly high as to suggest that the exceptional wholesomeness of Washington’s better sections is offset by bad conditions in her poorer neighborhoods. A special “Commission on Housing and Health Conditions in the National Capital” would not only bring about the reformation of existing evils, but would also formulate an appropriate building code to protect the city from mammoth brick tenements and other evils which threaten to develop here as they have in other cities. That the Nation’s Capital should be made a model for other municipalities is an ideal which appeals to all patriotic citizens everywhere, and such a special Commission might map out and organize the city’s future development in lines of civic social service, just as Major L’Enfant and the recent Park Commission planned the arrangement of her streets and parks. It is mortifying to remember that Washington has no compulsory school attendance law and that careful inquiries indicate the habitual absence from school of some twenty per cent of all children between the ages of eight and fourteen. It must be evident to all who consider the problems of neglected child life, or the benefits of compulsory education in other cities, that one of the most urgent needs of the National Capital is a law requiring the school attendance of all children, this law to be enforced by attendance agents directed by the Board of Education. Public playgrounds are necessary means for the development of wholesome citizenship in modern cities. It is important that the work inaugurated here through voluntary efforts should be taken up and extended through Congressional appropriation of funds sufficient to equip and maintain numerous convenient small playgrounds upon land which can be secured without purchase or rental. It is also desirable that small vacant places be purchased and reserved as small-park playgrounds in densely settled sections of the city which now have no public open spaces and are destined soon to be built up solidly. All these needs should be met immediately. To meet them would entail expenses; but a corresponding saving could be made by stopping the building of streets and leveling of ground for purposes largely speculative in outlying parts of the city.