“So many of our children to-day,” Mrs. Braucher says, “are somehow missing the childlike fancy, the buoyant self-forgetfulness, which comes from living in a half-real world. Perhaps they are poor rich children with mechanical toys and so many opportunities to see stupendous productions of the old fairy tales behind real footlights that the home plays seem crude. Perhaps they are rich poor children who live so close to the pain and the burden and the specter that the airy forms of fairy life have quite flitted away. Or, perhaps, they are just normal healthy children whose childlike realism, for want of the suggestive touch of fancy, has shut out the dim fairy figures--whoever they are, wherever they are, do you want them to lose this unreal, very real part of their lives? Books and stories will help--will plant the seed--but only the appeal to the dramatic instinct will cause it to blossom as the rose.” Dramatic play prevents the emotional nature from becoming inert, and thus keeps the possibility of joyousness forever alive. It retains the imagination and fancy that are so essential to perpetual youth. It is the only possible door to romance and mystery that will remain open for many. It satisfies the human craving to realize the meaning of life regardless of its environment. It is the best way to have life and to have it more abundantly. Says Mrs. Herts: “A majority of young people as well as children experience a hunger of the soul to live out impulses denied expression in their personal lives. Eternal Personality restricts and shapes us into the limits of our environment. Youth chafes against such limit. The impulses of humanity stir beyond the reach of mere personality, time, and circumstance. Johnnie wants to be a pirate, Miss Smith a queen, young Harry a martyr. This is nature’s provision against spiritual isolation. This hunger of the soul for experience is as elemental a demand for nourishment as the hunger of the body for food. The dramatic instinct is an expression of this elemental hunger.” Continuing she says: “It is the common, ordinary, free heritage of every child, unconsciously operative in every human being from the cradle to the grave. It is among the great basic forces whereby God shapes humanity.... It is the force which makes the soldier on the battlefield grasp his country’s flag, and raising it high above his head, cry out, ‘On to victory,’ even though that victory includes the death of his own body. It sustains the monk in his vigils, the statesman in his patriotism, the preacher in his pulpit.” In short, it is the power by which we make real our ideals.