There are juvenile court records that show the value of this investment. Playgrounds were located in the stock yards district of Chicago five years ago. Since then, according to figures furnished by Prof. Allen T. Burns of the Sage Foundation, boyish crime has been reduced an amount that averages 44 per cent. for the whole district-a reduction that is 70 per cent. for the neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of a playground and 28 per cent. in the regions farthest outlying from it. Cincinnati in 1906 had 1,460 delinquent children brought to the bar of the juvenile court. In 1909, when play grounds had been established just two years and a half, the number of child delinquents had been diminished to 993. Rochester found that, when a social centre was fully in operation, the neighborhood juvenile court record dropped 50 per cent.

THE SOCIAL CENTRE

Play facilities are no longer limited to the sand pile and the swing and the ball field. The vast sums the cities are spending cover a much wider range of recreational activity. The social centre has been added to the playground, and young and old of the neighborhood have been invited in. It was the settlements that first saw the need. In those city districts that are populated 700 and 1,000 people to the acre, the front parlor has of course utterly vanished from family experience. It is the lost appendage of an older social order. Courtship, however, goes on forever. And sweethearts with no facilities for lovemaking at home must find them elsewhere. The girl of the tenements and her "young man" - millions of them millions of them

when the whistle blows that ends the long day of toil, turn with the yearning heart of youth to the night for joy. The cheap theatre flares out in brilliant electric light, the dance hall piano strikes up a lilting strain, and the saloon with the "sitting room" sign beams a welcome. The settlement was the counter influence to these attractions. The social centre to-day is the settlement under city direction.

Chicago leads all other cities in this public provision for recreation. The beau

tiful "field houses," located in the great parks there, are the neighborhood club houses that are the meeting places for the people. In the assembly halls the young people hold their dancing parties, there are rooms for their club meetings, reading rooms, refectories, gymnasiums, and swimming pools within doors, while outside. are the vast playgrounds with skating ponds, athletic fields, running tracks, and ball fields. Philadelphia in 1911 dedicated Starr Garden, its first neighborhood club house, and planned for three more. There are other cities that, without investing in new buildings, are making use of the school houses as evening recreation centres. Rochester has been most successful in this school extension. Boston last year opened its first public school social centre. New York has used its school buildings for this purpose since 1902. The attractions offered there have been literary club meetings, gymnastics, and athletics for the boys, and folk dancing for the girls.

Very recently the programme has been enlarged by an innovation that was at first adopted with some caution. In all the movement to provide social opportunities, one fact has stood out clearly: There is no other form of recreation that appeals to youth like the dance. All over the country within the last few years, the dance halls have opened to meet the demand. Chicago has 250, New York has more than 500. That the municipality must give the working girl a decent place to dance has been determined by the New York Committee on Amusement Resources for Working Girls, of which Mrs. Charles H. Israels, a secretary of the Playground Association of America, is chairman. Through this committee's influence, mixed dancing has been for the last two years permitted in six of the New York recreation centres. When, one night, Supervisor Edward W. Stitt, visiting a school house, found 150 boys and girls enjoying themselves in wholesome waltzing, while the notorious dance hall across the way had only thirty dancers on the floor, the new function of the public school seemed to have vindicated itself. During last summer, every Friday evening, from 500 to 700 young people danced in the

open court yard of School No. 63, just off from First Avenue. This winter, it is planned to make neighborhood dancing a feature at several more of the recreation centres.

Cleveland has inaugurated a municipal dance hall with regular paid admission. At this dancing pavilion, opened at Edgewater Park last August, with three cents a dance charged, the first night's receipts were enough to pay the expenses for a week. The enthusiastic promoters immediately planned to convert the pavilions of all the city parks into municipal dance halls. And Dance Inspector Robert V. Bartholomew started a campaign to permit dancing in the public school buildings themselves.

THE DANCE HALL CHAPERONE

To a Chicago settlement worker who protested with a packing house girl against going to a certain beer garden, the girl, who had spent the week labelling several thousand cans of meat, made reply: "I'm that tired when Saturday night comes I don't care a damn where I go." The girl like that, who has been speeded up by industry until she recklessly "does not care," is a social menace for which a city pays. It is really for her chaperonage that the police woman has arrived. There are at least six cities in the United States with regular police women. Before this statement can get into print, there will be more. Representatives from thirty women's clubs in San Francisco the other day called at the office of the police commissioner there to ask for the appointment not of one but of twenty-one police women. Forty other California cities are also demanding them. Baltimore, the first city in the East to adopt the innovation, was empowered by the last legislature to employ a police woman.

In Seattle, which has just appointed five police women at a salary of $85 a month apiece, they are patrol women who cover definite beats. Elsewhere, however, they are usually detailed to theatres, skating rinks, dance halls, city parks, and amusement places in general. They wear no helmet and brass buttons, and carry no club. Their work is preventive rather

than punitive, though when occasion demands, they make arrests as does the policeman. In personal characteristics, they may be said to differ very greatly from the usual conception of that public official who maintains law and order in the city streets. The police woman is a sociologist. She relies on a cultivated brain rather than on muscular brawn to cope with the tasks that she meets. For example, Mrs. Alice Stebbins Wells, appointed to the police force of Los Angeles in September, 1910, had her training in the New England Theological Seminary. She was assistant pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, and later for two years pastor of a church in Oklahoma. When, in Los Angeles, she decided to ask for the appointment as police woman so that she

could do things instead of talking about them," all the churches of the city backed her request.

The women find their special field in the rescue work for girls. In Minneapolis, the police woman's position was created on the recommendation of the Grand Jury and the vice commission, who urged that there should be a woman officer to look after the young girls on the streets at night, in the dance halls and cafés. Miss Emilie L. Glorieux was appointed.

So the municipality is enlisting women for numerous activities formerly reserved for men. Three large cities Chicago, Cleveland, and Denver-have within as many years entrusted their school systems to women superintendents. New York City's Division of Child Hygiene of the Department of Health is in charge of a woman, Dr. Josephine Baker. And the Children's Bureau at Washington, to be the clearing house for information on which to base all public work in behalf of the American child, has been placed under the direction of Miss Julia C. Lathrop, the first woman to head a government department.

It appears that in the care of the child as in other industries that have gone out from the home, women have again followed their work. And demanding that the city must give to every home education, health, and happiness, they are writing large the twentieth century's Declaration of Children's Rights.

KLAHOMA City, which hardly existed in 1890, had 10,000 population in 1900, and has 72,000 inhabitants now. So

intent were its citizens upon building a city that they overlooked the question of developing the adjacent country, and as a result, food prices had increased in Oklahoma City, up to the spring of 1912, almost as rapidly as the population had increased. Then the Chamber of Commerce brought a bright young man, Mr. W. B. Moore, from Dayton, O., to fill the post of Secretary-Manager of this organization of city "boosters," and young Mr. Moore called attention to a few things that had theretofore been overlooked in the development of the town.

"There's plenty of food being raised all around this part of Oklahoma," said Mr. Moore, "but the farmers haven't any way of selling it to our people and the city people haven't any way of buying it from the farmers. What this town needs worse than anything else is a public market, and there's no use waiting to issue bonds and put up a market house let's set a couple of blocks of California Street aside as a market place and send out word to the farmers to come in and sell their produce."

It took Oklahoma City about as long to act on Mr. Moore's suggestion as it took him to offer it. The market was opened on Saturday, May 21, 1912. Eighty farmers backed their wagons up to the curb on that day and several hundred thrifty city housekeepers quickly bought all the produce offered for sale, at prices far below what they had been accustomed to pay; the farmers, nevertheless, getting higher prices than they had previously obtained.

On the next market day there were more wagons and more buyers. It became the fashion in Oklahoma City to buy food supplies direct from the producers. All kinds and conditions of women came to the markets. Electric coupés filled with

market baskets are familiar on California Street on market day, as are the many women who carry their own provisions home. home. By mid-August three squares on California Street were being occupied by the market, and more than three hundred farmers were selling produce every market day.

The success of the market idea having been fully demonstrated, the farmers and truck gardeners formed an association and leased a large building, 75 feet wide and 200 feet deep, which has been converted into a market house with more than two hundred stalls, where not only the farmers, but dealers in meat and fish and bakery products, are brought into direct contact with consumers.

Actual figures, comparing the retail cost of all kinds of food supplies in Oklahoma City with those of a year ago, show decreases ranging from 25 to 50 per cent; nor is this the only benefit the city has obtained through the establishment of the market, for the facilities for the sale of farm and garden produce has greatly stimulated agricultural settlement in the vicinity. Since the market was established more than twenty-five families have taken up small tracts adjoining the city for truck gardening, and hundreds of inquiries from others who wished to take advantage of the market have been received by the Chamber of Commerce, The truck growers of the county have organized a coöperative shipping association, and this, with a produce shippers' association, organized by Oklahoma City commission merchants, will enable the surplus produce not absorbed by the local market to be sent to other consuming points at the minimum of expense.

Oklahoma City has thus found the solution of two of the most vital problems that confront American municipalities — the high cost of living and the development of agricultural territory adjacent to the city to be simple when intelligently approached.

fuel reduces the average cost of clearing and fitting the land to less than $15 per acre (exclusive of removing the larger stumps).

The strong loam soil has been enriched by forest mold. There is a good deal of surface stone but conditions are in general excellent for the growing of corn, cotton, forage crops, vegetables and fruits-small and large. The climate is healthful and pleasant and the rainfall wholly adequate.

There is good local demand for all farm products, and larger markets can be reached over the Rock Island Lines. On newly cleared land, peanuts for hog pasture are good preparation for later cropping. Dairying and poultry raising open good opportunities. Of course the type of farming must be chosen with reference to topography, elevation, local soil conditions, etc

The country is undeveloped and life there must naturally be more or less pioneering for a few years. But the selling company is apparently coöperating with and assisting settlers in many ways to hasten successful development. The proposition is worth at least a trip of inspection and serious consideration.

52.-Q. Can you give me an idea as to (a) the cost per acre, (b) the fertility of the soil, of farms of about 200 acres in eastern Massachusetts, suitable for dairying? (2) Are the social and educational advantages and the highways good?

A. (a) Considering the buildings and other improvements often found on such farms, the nearness of markets, etc., prices are extremely low. Of a number of farms for sale in Worcester County, ranging in size from 150 to 220 acres, and all less than three miles from a railroad, the average price was $31 per acre. (b) In some cases the soil is liable to be run down but rarely, if ever, is it worthless. It has, however, the characteristic diversity of all New England glacial formations, loam, sand, clay, and muck often being found on the same farm. Accumulations of surface stone and gravel are common. But all the soil is rich in mineral matter and with care can be made highly productive. (2) The County has not only excellent high and elementary schools, but also several colleges and a number of agricultural schools. Its proximity to Boston promotes social development and there are five agricultural fair associations and many granges. There are some typical country roads, but the majority are of the type that has placed Massachusetts at the top as a "good roads"

state.

53.-Q. (a) What must I expect to pay

for five acres of land for English walnut growing in Southern California? (b) Where can I get information about raising the nuts there and (c) is there a Walnut Growers' Association in the state?

A. This crop demands a highly favored locality, a deep, rich soil, and a climate free from extremes. Land embodying these conditions is limited and therefore high priced. A bearing orchard may bring $2,000 an acre; acreage suitable for development will cost from $250 per acre upwards. (b) You can get information about raising walnuts from Professors C. A. Reed and E. R. Lake of the Bureau of Plant Industry, Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C., and the California. Agricultural Experiment Station, Berkeley, California. (c). There are a number of local walnut growers' associations, a list of which you can obtain from the Experiment Station or the California State Agricultural Society, Sacramento, Cal.

54.-Q. When will the land on the Government irrigation project at Elephant Butte, N. M. be open for settlement, what kind of farming is it good for, and how can it be acquired?

A. All unentered Government land on the Rio Grande Project near Elephant Butte has been withdrawn from entry, pending the completion of the storage works, which will take five or six years. Until the cost of the entire work is known the price of water rights cannot be determined, therefore it cannot be said when the land will be available for homestead entry. Any acreage now irrigated is under private ownership. Possibly some is for sale. Conditions are suitable for alfalfa, grain, vegetable, and fruit growing.

I pro

55.-Q. I have just bought a farm on which are 200 bearing apple trees. pose to set several acres of new trees. The expenses of caring for the former will naturally be "running expenses." But should I charge the same work on the new trees before they come to a bearing age to capital or to running expenses to be taken from the profits from the old trees?

A. Until an orchard is of bearing age all expenses upon it should be listed as investment and charged to capital — or, if you prefer, to an "improvement fund." This will avoid unfair charges against the old trees and permit new blocks of different ages, as they become productive, to pay their proportionate shares of the expenses.