neighboring buildings.  A public landscape architect should have supervision over and give expert advice for the planting of trees and shrubbery and the beautifying of yards back as well as front.  Factories and shops should be confined to certain designated portions of a town (and the smoke nuisance strictly controlled); disfiguring billboards and overhead wires done away with; parks laid out and kept intact from intrusion of streets or buildings.  Fortunately, the majority of our American houses, built of wood, are temporary in character; and most city buildings at present have a life of but a generation or two.  In this evanescence of our contemporary architecture lies the hope for an eventual regeneration of American towns.  In the city and village of the future, life will be so bosomed in beauty that there will be less need of artificial beauty-seeking and gaslight pleasures.  A healthy local pride will be fostered and community life come into its own again.

(2) Municipalities should provide facilities for wholesome recreation out of doors.  Children, in particular, ought not to be obliged, for lack of other space, to play upon city streets, where they impede traffic and run serious risks. [Footnote:  On New York City streets two hundred and thirty-one children were killed in twenty-one months, according to recent figures.] Schoolyards should be larger than they generally are, and bedtime; in the big cities the roofs should be utilized also.  Every neighborhood should have its ample playgrounds.  For want of such provision children of the poor grow up pale and pinched, without the normalizing and educative influence of healthy play, and with no proper outlet for their energies, so that crime and vice flourish prematurely.  With proper foresight open spaces can be retained as a city grows, without great expense; the economic gain, in a reduced death-rate, reduced cost for doctors and nurses, police, courts, and prisons, and increased efficiency of the next generation of workers, will easily balance the outlay, without weighing the gain in happiness and morality.[Footnote:  See on this point, the literature of the Division of Recreation of the Russell Sage Foundation, and of the Playground and Recreation Association of America (1 Madison Avenue, New York City).  Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets.  C. Zueblin, American Municipal Progress, chap ix.  J. Lee, Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy, chaps.  VIII-XII.  Outlook, vol. 87, p. 775; vol. 95, p. 511; vol. 96, p. 443.] But, indeed, adults stand also in need of outdoor life.  Grounds for ball games, bowls, and all sorts of sports should be generously provided if human life is not to lose one of its pleasantest and most useful aspects.  For evenings there should be attractive social meeting-places, neighborhood clubs, supervised dance halls, and the like, such as the social settlements now to a slight extent provide, with notably beneficial results.  As the poorer classes come more and more into their inheritance of the fruits of industry, these desiderata may perhaps be again left to private initiative; but at present there is a large class too pressed by poverty to get for itself these necessities of a normal life; and the need of the people makes the duty of the State.[Footnote:  Cf.  C. R. Henderson, The Social Spirit in America, chap.  XIV.]