Two appalling facts are staring us in the face today: One is the large number of children who are killed or injured annually while playing in city streets, and the other is the number of young men who are found every year among the ranks of the criminals. You may read every report that has ever been written on the subject of motor-vehicle casualties, study every survey that has ever been made of juvenile delinquency; and, when you get through, the probabilities are that you will come to one simple conclusion: There is no place for the children to play except in the streets and no place for them to gather by themselves except in the movies or in a cheap candy store where the five-cent bagatelle game is the chief form of recreation. You all know the story about the woman who was such a good housekeeper that she swept her children out into the street and refused to let them come in again because they might scratch the hardwood floors or get the rugs dirty. Well, that is what America has done. It has become so highly civilized, so thoroughly motorized, and so much devoted to the interests and pleasures of adult life that its children have been swept out into the streets. You may find it difficult to believe but it is a fact that, in one of the city of New York school districts having a population of nearly a quarter of a million people, play space, except for one small park, is practically unknown. The chief concern of the local superintendent in charge of the district is for the health and the safety of his children. In other words, he cannot begin to give them the advantages of an education until he has first assured himself of their health and safety. In yet another district the supervisors find that their most baffling and ever-present problem is the underprivileged children-underprivileged with respect to oppor-