Each of the large parks in Chicago’s system is provided with a municipal dance hall, spacious buildings with perfect floors, good light, and ventilation.  Any group of young people are at liberty to secure a hall, rent free, for dancing parties.  The city imposes only one condition,—­that the dances be chaperoned by park supervisors.  Beautifully decorated with growing plants from the park greenhouses these municipal dance halls are scenes of gayety almost every night in the year.  Park restaurants in connection with the halls furnish good food at low prices.  Of course no liquor is sold.  Nobody wants it.  This is proved by the fact that saloon dance halls in the neighborhood of the parks have been deserted by their old patrons.

Women have recognized the debt to youth and the joy of life, and they are preparing to pay it.

In this latest form of social service they have entered a battlefield where the powers of righteousness have ever fought a losing fight.  Men have grappled with the social evil without success.  They have labored to discover a substitute for the saloon, and they have failed.  They have tried to suppress the dance hall and they have failed.  They have made laws against evil resorts, and they have sent agents of the police to enforce their laws, but to no effect.

The failure of the men does not dishearten or discourage the women who have taken up the work.  They believe that they have discovered an altogether new way in which to fight the social evil.

They propose to turn against it its own most powerful weapons.  The joy of life is to be fed with proper food instead of poison.  Girls and young men are to be offered a chance to escape the nets stretched for them by the underworld.  In many cities women’s clubs and women’s societies are establishing on a small scale amusement and recreation centers for young people.  In New York Miss Virginia Potter, niece of the late Bishop Potter, and Miss Potter’s colleagues in the Association of Working Girls’ Clubs, have opened a public dance hall.  The use of the large gymnasium of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls was secured, and every Saturday evening, from eight until eleven, young men and women come in and dance to excellent music, under the instruction, if they need it, of a skilled dancing-master.  A small fee is charged, partly to defray expenses, and partly to attract a class of people who disdain philanthropy and settlements.  The experiment is new, but it is undoubtedly successful.  As many as two hundred couples have been admitted in an evening.  In half a dozen cities women’s clubs and women’s committees are at work on this matter of establishing amusement and recreation centers for young people.  In New York a Committee on Amusement and Vacation Resources of Working Girls has for its president a social worker of many years, Mrs. Charles M. Israels.  Associated with the committee are many other well-known social economists,—­women of wealth and