AMERICAN RECREATION 191

round/' and there was a good deal of horse play
among the big boys and girls, I noticed also
that all the shrubberies had been recently cut down
so that the whole place looked bare and desolate.
This was so different from what I was accustomed
to see elsewhere that I asked my conductor
for an explanation. Whereupon he told me the
following story. " Not so long ago," he said,
*' those playgrounds were as good as any in
America and the scene of the city's happiest life.
But owing to difficulties caused by the economic
depression the Municipality got rid of their
Supervisor of Recreation and now there is nobody
to look after the playgrounds but a few old men
dressed up in uniforms and armed with sticks.
Since then they have steadily gone down ; all
the fine games, that hundreds of people used to
take part in, have died out. Some of them have
become haunts of vice so that decent mothers
won't let their children go near them, You
don't need to know much about unsupervised
playgrounds in big cities to understand why the
shrubberies have had to be cut down. And I can
tell you this: the crime that is hatched among
young people in those playgrounds is costing our
City annually ten times the salary of the Super-
visor of Recreation." And he gave me some
statistics about the cost of juvenile delinquency
in Kansas City which I have forgotten, though I
remember thinking they were terrible.

That evening I addressed a large audience on