" Play, in the kindergarten
scheme, is the "normal occupation of the child through which he first
begins to perceive moral relations." Nice kind of morals burrowed
there for him! There was, in the whole of Manhattan, but a single
outdoor playground attached to a public school, and that was an old
burial-ground in First Street that had been wrested from the dead
with immense toil. When I had fed fat my grudge upon these things,
I could still go where the public school children came, and learn,
by a little judicious pumping, how my friend, the professor, had
stored their minds. That is, if they did not come to me. Many
hundreds of them did, when under Roosevelt we needed two thousand
new policemen, and it was from some of them we learned that among
the thirteen States which formed the Union were "England, Ireland,
Wales, Belfast, and Cork"; that Abraham Lincoln was "murdered
by Ballington Booth," and that the Fire Department was in charge
of the city government when the Mayor was away. Don't I wish it
were, and that they would turn the hose on a while! What a lot of
trouble it would save us in November.
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