When I turn back to an earlier page of my experience I almost wish that they had, but the fact is certainly the other way.

"The talk against annual elections of the legislature, and still more that against annual sessions, is a pernicious part of the campaign against paternalism. A legislative hiatus every other year is a check on every movement. . . . You can't carry on crusades on that principle. You might as well try to make love biennially. Biennial sessions won't hurt the grafter at all. He will always be there. He does not depend on a continuous campaign. But you will kill off your popular movements for the expression of the moral purpose of the community."

For a Class report issued in 1933 on the Fiftieth Anniversary of graduation Lee responded to the Secretary's request for an account of his activities since 1913, the year of the last previous Class report. Fortunately Lee did not confine himself to the period, 1913-1933, but covered a wider field. He wrote:

"My obsession since 1913 has been, as always, with social work-dealing with who gets born and what happens to him afterwards, generally known as selection and education.

"In selection I have done little but help to finance Prescott Hall and Robert deCourcy Ward-and more recently R. M. Bradley and Ward's son, Henry deCourcy Ward-in their very effective work in securing laws that have cut down the annual European influx of about 500,000 by about two-thirds. In these years of depression such immigration, owing to administrative action, is now a minus quantity. When their efforts to cut down the present quota laws have become successful and similar laws applying to Mexico and to Latin America generally have been secured and the birth rate of the chocolate races has been put in low, which it is now beginning to approach, the '83 and generally American brand of citizen may last for quite a while.

"In education I put in nine years (1908-17) on the Boston School Committee, where I helped to get the backward, forward, stammering, tuberculous and otherwise peculiar individuals put in special classes where they could get the treatment they required and not bother the teachers and everybody else. In administrative matters I was ineffective, partly because I

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aimed at good administration instead of being contented with the attainable mediocrity. But I was bad at it anyway.

"My main educational work, however, has been for playgrounds, meaning such forests, oceans, mountains, brooks and other libraries -not omitting back yards, roofs, and vacant lots and playgrounds proper-together with the facilities, obstructions, hazards, sunsets, human inspiration and suggestion appurtenant thereto, as may provide the fullest opportunity for boys and girls to grow up as human beings according to the curriculum that nature has marked out.

"For nature knows a thing or two upon this subject, not so much as we do, of course, but quite a lot. She has learned by trial and error, and many of us are errors, I confess, but she has been a long time at it, and her course of study is based upon results. It is the required course in education. Without our various additions to it our children would not grow up as we should like; without her ground work they will not grow up at all.

"The teaching of nature we call play, but it is not easy and it is not secondary; its chief courses are in exploration and experiment, in creation, art and music, in love and nurture, in war and hunting and in team play. It sows the arts of war and peace, and aims at those ends that men will die for and in pursuit of which all human genius is expressed.

"Recreation is not alone for children but for the aged also, because the aged know enough to learn. Consider how docile we all are now compared with freshman year.

"The playground movement began in the late nineties and has spread all over this country and to many others. My contribution has been in putting two leaders on a Boston playground, in the years from 1900 to 1906, and working out the various stunts and games, in writing a book and many shorter things, in getting various laws passed in Massachusetts permitting or requiring certain play provisions, and in starting Community Service of Boston which, guided by the genius of Mrs. Eva White and managed first by her and then by W. Duncan Russell, Jr., has by close cooperation with the Park Department, raised the number of boys and younger children carrying on games and athletics on the city playgrounds to 16,200 last year, from about one-tenth of that number. It

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has also for nine years conducted the annual Fourth of July Pageant at the Frog Pond on the Common-afternoon and evening performances, music and, in the evening, colored lights. The papers say the audiences are 35,000, and they must be nearly that. It has put on Nativity plays at the Public Library in Christmas week, the first being an eleventh-century play of Canterbury. Last year it got the Park Department to send a Christmas play on a truck to different sections of the city, where it was met by local choruses who sang the music. It has helped many organizations including, one year, fiftyseven churches in their dramatic work.

"It runs an international music festival on Washington's Birthday at Symphony Hallmostly choruses, including Armenians and many other nationalities.

"I have also acted as president, or figure head, of the National Recreation Association founded by Luther H. Gulick and Henry S. Curtis in 1906, and developed almost wholly by Howard S. Braucher, its executive head.

"The Association has led and guided the playground movement practically from the start, sending this year its field secretaries to 684 cities, and giving help and advice to 5,714 communities through its correspondence and consultation service. Its community drama service handled 7,059 requests for advice and material on amateur drama problems and gave 45 cities personal help in planning community drama programs and in training amateur drama leaders.

"Most of the countries of Europe, Asia and South America have asked and got its advice -as to how to run a mining camp in Uruguay or organize a baseball league in Siam. (These are about authentic, certainly characteristic, according to my memory.)

"The Association did the recreation work outside the camps in this country for the army and navy during the war and is still doing the same work for forts and training stations. It is also working by request for the United

States Departments of Education and Agriculture and for similar departments in some thirtyfive of the states.

"In 1897 I organized the Massachusetts Civic League with the purpose of getting the people who wanted better laws to work together and consecutively for them. They have done so, and about a hundred such laws are on the statute book, of which thirty-two were passed in 1931. They have also choked off some fifty others. The work of the Civic League has been done by E. T. Hartman, Mrs. Wenona O. Pinkham and Miss Katharine Lyford. I have done very little of it for the last fifteen years.

"Almost everything I have accomplished has been through legislation. Now everybody knows that laws are bad-all laws, any laws, especially those suggested by reformers. All laws interfere with liberty and what we all need is to be let alone.

"A pathetic case, illustrative of this wellknown axiom, is a law that the Civic League got passed this present year. It provided that anybody who led a child astray-sex pervert, opium seller, or the like-would not only get, as already provided, what was coming to him, but would thereafter be watched and would have a sentence suspended over him, calculated to put him out of circulation if ever caught doing such a thing again. The liberty of certain of our citizens has thus been severely and unsympathetically curtailed. The thirty-two laws passed in 1931 have had a similar disheartening effect. One Civic League law has even robbed the cradle by providing an additional institution where the class of feeble-minded women who drifted in and out of almshouses,

contributing a child a year to the general supply of misery, could be taken care of. Thus all laws conflict with liberty and all are therefore bad. Yet if my classmates were to study every law that I have fought for, and if the General Court of Massachusetts were to be filled exclusively from 83, I do not think that one of them would be repealed."

us of two old Boston families, the Lowells and the Cabots. Little, however, is heard outside the immediate neighborhood of the Hub of another very quiet, old Boston family which has been since Colonial days serving the community. Generation after generation, many men of the Jackson famliy have become eminent physicians, and recently one of them led in making the helpful discovery of how to cure pernicious anemia. The Associated Charities, now the Family Welfare Society of Boston, is preeminently a Jackson institution. The first president, Robert Treat Paine, was a Jackson; the second president, Dr. Charles P. Putnam, was a Jackson; and two women, Miss Marian Jackson and her cousin, Miss Frances Morse, bore the burden for years of making the Society succeed. Another Jackson, perhaps better known to the world, was Henry Lee, senior partner of the great firm of Lee, Higginson and Company, and rated by those who knew him the first citizen of Boston. Following Mr. Lee as senior partner of the firm and also as first citizen of Boston was yet another Jackson, Henry Lee Higginson, best known as the founder and for many years the supporter of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Succeeding Mr. Higginson, both as head of the firm and as first citizen, was James Jackson Storrow, to whom the City is indebted for its beautiful Charles River Esplanade and for most useful service in the conduct of the public schools of the City. Better known still throughout the country was the revered Oliver Wendell Holmes, long Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, who was also a Jackson.

Joseph Lee, son of Henry Lee, was on his mother's side a Cabot of the Cabots; but the strain dominant throughout his life was the Jackson strain. He loved a quiet life and public service. Admired in his youth by all the other boys, and not less profoundly by the girls who knew him, the door of every fashionable club and house was wide open to him; but he

seemed hardly to know that they existed. His father owned a fine house on an exclusive promontory on the fashionable North Shore of Massachusetts Bay; the son bought for himself on the other side of the bay a little house known as "The Collar Box," planted on a small beach with other houses as close to it as was physically possible. He pointed out shrewdly that, if a child is to be happy in his play, he must be where other children are; for, the child who comes from a distance of over a quarter of a mile remains a stranger.

The training of a child's mind through play was to him a real drama. Very early he made a plea before the Massachusetts legislature for a Children's Bureau which would separate delinquent children from vicious adults, and give the former a fair chance for healthy development. In this effort he did not succeed, but he pointed the way to what became afterwards the Boston Juvenile Court over which his brother-in-law, Judge Frederick P. Cabot, presided long and successfully. Very early, too, turning his back on the fashionable part of the City, he secured the right to equip a vacant lot in a congested section. Thither he went day after day to watch the children at play, and was so deeply impressed by the plight of the little ones, who were forever being brushed aside by the big ones, that the rights of the little ones were thereafter protected, and as we all know, his work for children led to his becoming known as the "Father of the Playground Movement."

Lee's house was not only a home but a workshop. There, every day, he went to work with as much zest as others showed for gainful occupations. The more he did the more there was to do, for the problems of this world can never be fully solved.

Americans know little about his quarter of a century and more of labor in behalf of restricted immigration. In fact, many of his best friends did not sympathize with this labor; but he was a prophet in foreseeing that immigration at the rate of a million a year would develop just such a conflict between classes and

masses as this country now faces. And he foresaw that the rich would grow richer and the poor poorer unless both the quantity of immigration should be restricted and the quality improved.

The world outside Boston probably knows little about his many years of work in behalf of improving the public schools of Boston. He was the principal contributor to the Boston Public School Association which for many years elected excellent members of the School Committee. For twelve of these years he was himself a member of that Committee, where he served with singular devotion, and always kept in mind the play side in the life of children, making it a point that every public school should have a playground either beside it or on its roof.

He created, and for years was the main support of, the Massachusetts Civic League which sought to bring about wise and to prevent unwise legislation.

He was a devoted friend of the Associated Charities of Boston, and was, in fact, the largest contributor to the Society; while his wife, Margaret Lee, was the backbone of the organization.

Two bits of biography have long since been forgotten, if ever known outside a small circle. Early in his manhood, an enterprising real estate syndicate had bought the pews in Park Street Church (known as "Brimstone Corner" because of the doctrines long preached there); and, having bought the pews, the syndicate contended that it owned the property which was perhaps the most valuable real estate in the City. The steeple seemed to young Lee singularly beautiful, and, as it was visible to everybody approaching it across Boston Common, it was a landmark which should not be destroyed. He undertook to buy out the syndicate. "It will cramp my style," said he, "for the rest of my life, but I see no other way of keeping that steeple for the citizens of Boston." Fortunately the court subsequently held that the purchase of pews in a church which had been spared taxes did not give legal ownership of a church, and Lee's style was thereafter far from cramped. The other bit of biography was this: President Coolidge's patience with Mexico was at one time so nearly exhausted that he threatened to intervene with fire and sword. A group was hastily organized to prevent such

intervention. This group waited on Senator Butler, who had been Coolidge's campaign manager, and apparently impressed him with the advisability of trying a more humane method. The group then organized with Senator Norris as Honorary President and with various other senators showing marked sympathy. Lee was one of two men who paid all the expenses of this organization. Whether it was a case of post hoc or propter hoc can never be known, but, shortly afterwards, Coolidge appointed Dwight Morrow ambassador to Mexico; and thus was begun the "Good Neighbor" spirit with all Latin America which is now one of the bright spots in a dark world.

The contrast between Joseph Lee and his father was marked. The father was not only the first citizen of a great city, but he was perhaps the best dressed man there. The son took no more interest in fine raiment than he did in fine houses and fashionable society. In fact, for formal occasions, he owned only one-half a cutaway coat, the other half being owned by a classmate who lived at a distance of several miles. Practically never entering a club, no one liked better to join his cronies at luncheon in a hotel which supplied such liberal portions of food that these cronies were economizing by ordering fewer portions than there were people to eat them, and, rich as he was, he would invite himself to become a member of what he called the "Grub Bund and Tip Verein." He was so little on his dignity and thought so little about himself that when a year before his death, his friends and admirers met to do him honor, he stood patiently at the door of the banquet hall till someone spied him and took him to the seat of honor. Then he remarked to a neighbor, as if in surprise, "They are trying to make me out something of a personage!" In his Massachusetts Civic League work he was strongly opposed to biennial sessions of the legislature on the ground that, between sessions, legislators would lose interest. "You cannot," he argued, "make biennial love to a girl!" Someone said to him in his youth, "Joe, why don't you buy a steam yacht and spend your money on things which will give you a good time?" "A good time!" he exclaimed in reply, "nothing would interest me less. But the problems of this world. and the solution of those problems seem to me to have unending interest." When, at last, he did invest in a tumbled down little boat, he