Possibly no social work in America is more sanely constructive than that of the playground movement. In the few years of its existence it has made ample proof of its worth in humane and beneficent results; and our city governments are hastening to acknowledge--what has been too long ignored--the right of every child to play. It is only to be regretted that the play movement has not centered about our public schools for it constitutes a legitimate part of education. The survivors who reach high school and college receive relatively a good deal of attention in physical training and organized play, but the little fellows of the elementary grades who have curvatures, retardation, adenoids, and small defects which cause loss of grade, truancy, and delinquency receive as yet very meager attention. In dearth of opportunity and in cruel oversight of the normal play-needs of boyhood, there probably has never been anything equal to our modern American city. But the cost of industrial usurpation in restricting the time and area of play is beginning to be realized; and the relation of the play-time and of the playground to health, happiness, morality, and later to industrial efficiency, begins to dawn upon our civic leaders. If "recreation is stronger than vice," it becomes the duty of religious and educational institutions to contribute directly and indirectly to normal recreative needs. But what can the minister do? He can help educate the church out of a negative or indifferent attitude toward the absorbing play-interests of childhood and youth. He can publicly endorse and encourage movements to provide for this interest of young life and may often co-operate in the organization and management of such movements. Every church should strive through intelligent representatives to impart religious value and power to such work and should receive through the same channels first-hand information of this form of constructive and preventive philanthropy. He can partly meet the demand through clubs and societies organized in connection with his own church. He can plead for a real and longer childhood in behalf of Christ's little ones who are often sacrificed through commercial greed, un-Christian business ambition, educational blindness, and ignorance. He can preach a gospel that does not set the body over against the soul, science over against the Bible, and the church over against normal life; but embraces every child of man in an imperial redemption which is environmental and social as well as individual, physical as well as spiritual. In short, he can study and serve his community, not as one who must keep an organization alive at whatever cost, but as one who must inspire and lead others to obey the Master whose only reply to our repeated protestations of love is, "Feed my lambs." CHAPTER VI THE BOY'S CHOICE OF A VOCATION[7]