In certain of its aspects the problem of the playground is not unlike that of the boys’ club. Each exists primarily to give the boy opportunity of activity, spontaneous and largely self-directed, yet under supervision, adequate but not meddlesome. The playground, however, is vastly the more important of the two. Our artificial city life fails, more than anywhere else, in its handling of boys. We have parks and boulevards and speedways, public baths and golf courses and wading-pools and sand piles, free museums and art galleries and libraries, not, to be sure, in any profusion, but often in number fairly adequate to the demand. The one thing our cities commonly lack is enough places where growing boys can indulge in a wholesome game of ball without getting themselves into some sort of trouble. To be of any use to boys, a playground must be large. A small ground, with swings and teeters and sand piles, is for children. But the gang needs room to play the specialized group games against its rivals. How the city gang is to get this is another question, and one worthy of very careful consideration by those having the welfare of boys at heart. _The Gang and the Summer Camp_ It might be inferred from what I have already written in praise of camp life for boys that I place the boys’ summer camp high on the list of favorable environments for youth. This is by no means the fact. The typical summer camp, such as is advertised by the score in every magazine, is altogether too much an affair _de luxe_ to be of much real value. It is too apt to be merely a school under canvas, or worse still, a summer hotel. So much is done for the boys that they lose all the training in skill of hand, in woodcraft, in self-reliance, in gumption, which a proper camp ought to give. Worst of all, they have little chance to “endure hardness.” Life is nearly as soft as in the city; and for all the primitive manliness that the camp puts into them, they might as well have stayed at home. Summer camps, also, for business reasons, are likely to be too large. The ideal arrangement is six or eight, or at most ten, boys who have already made themselves into a gang, with a man leader. A natural group, in short, with a natural man added on, is far superior to a selection on any other basis. If for any reason, the group must be larger, then there should be two or more men leaders, and provision for the group to break up into several natural gangs. The best time to camp is late in the summer. Boys when left to their own impulses build their camps in the fall, urged thereto by as blind an instinct as that which sets the birds to building nests in the spring. Late summer is as near the natural building-time as the school system of civilization permits us to get; and besides this, the camping trip at the end of the vacation serves as the climax to be looked forward to all through the hot weather.