If you suggest reading, she will reply:  “You can’t be reading all the time.”  In other words, there is no intellectual impulse, but instead an instinct for action.

The crowded tenement, the city slum, an oppressive system of ill-paid labor, these are evils which a gradually developing social conscience must one day eliminate.  Their tenure will not be disturbed to-day, to-morrow, or next day.  Their evil influence can be offset, in some measure, by a recognition on the part of the community of a debt,—­a debt to youth.

The joy of life, inherent in every young creature, including the young human creature, seeks expression in play, in merriment, and will not be denied.

The oldest, the most persistent, the most attractive, the most satisfying expression of the joy of life is the dance.  Other forms of recreation come in for brief periods, but their vogue is always transitory.  The roller skating craze, for example, waxed, waned, and disappeared.  Moving pictures and the nickelodeon have had their day, and are now passing.  The charm, the passion, the lure of the dance remains perennial.  It never wholly disappears.  It always returns.

In New York City alone there are three hundred saloon dance halls.  Three hundred dens of evil where every night in the year gallons of liquid damnation are forced down the throats of unwilling drinkers!  Where the bodies and souls of thousands of girls are annually destroyed, because the young are irresistibly drawn toward joy, and because we, all of us, good people, busy people, indifferent people, unseeing people, have permitted joy to become commercialized, have turned it into a commodity to be used for money profit by the worst elements in society.  Could a more inverted scheme of things have been devised in a madhouse?

New York is by no means unique.  Every city has its dance hall problem; every small town its girl and boy problem; every country-side its tragedy of the girl who, for relief from monotony, goes to the city and never returns.

It is strange that nowhere, until lately, in city, town, or country, has it occurred to any one that the community owed anything to this insatiable thirst for joy.

Consider, for instance, the age-long indifference of the oldest of all guardians of virtue, the Christian Church.  To the demand for joy the evangelical church has returned the stern reply:  “To play cards, to go to the theater, above all, to dance, is wicked.”  The Methodist Church, for one, has this baleful theory written in its book of discipline, and persistent efforts on the part of enlightened clergy and lay members have utterly failed to expurgate it.  The Catholic, Episcopalian, and Lutheran churches utter no such strictures, but in effect they defend the theory that joy, if not in itself an evil, at least is no necessity of life.