ment is necessary, but this sentiment-if it is to bring wise and permanent relief -must be informed, educated, directed. Information, education, direction, all involve organization. Sections of the country in which there has been little manufacture need the light of the experience which may have been gained by older industrial communities. False beginnings, inadequate and futile laws may be thus avoided; old mistakes may be left to one side; the whole industrial world may be laid under tribute, in behalf of the children, for the wisest and most effective methods of amendment. Such are some of the gains of centralization; a centralization of interests in the hands of a National Childlabor Committee; a centralization which will not attempt to dispense with the work of local committees, but which may well develop and strengthen them. It may operate as an aid to local initiative by (1) sympathetic counsel, by (2) acting as a clearing-house of information and methods, by (3) making specific independent investigations and by (4) extending through its agents-wherever requestedsupplementary aid and influence.

But such an organization, if it is to be of vital, permanent service, will stand for the truth of representation as well as for the truth of centralization. It will represent the individuality of industrial needs. Child labor is in one sense always the same, but the conditions of child labor vary from locality to locality as well as from industry to industry. If centralization were the only thing needed there might be a small committee with just a uniform and inflexible method for commending a uniform law; but varying industrial and social conditions must be borne in mind, the public opinion of different sections must be understood-inasmuch as public opinion is our one legislative force and the confidence of the humane and progressive men and women of every locality must, if possible, be assured. The membership of such a committee should be composed, therefore, not only of men and women with practical experience in the pressing of industrial reforms, but of men and women of accredited leadership in other departments of activity, East and West and North and South.

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A number of these were called together on the evening of April 14, 1904, at Carnegie Hall, New York city. The language of the call to which they made response was printed in substance in CHARITIES of April 23. It concluded with these suggestions as to the function of such a committee:

"(1) Not to act as a substitute for state committees nor to cross the lines of local initiative; but

"(a) To serve in relation to existent committees as a clearing-house of information and suggestion;

"(b) To call committees into existence at points where they are wanting; and

(c) To so aid in co-ordinating the work of local committees, old and new, that the duplication of effort may be prevented, and the experience of the past may be made more generally available for the future.

"(2) Not to duplicate the activities of other organizations or committees having in charge their already established methods of child relief, but to supplement them by taking up a work of special and distinctive interest in the child workers. The creation of fair industrial conditions for child life is, perhaps, the surest protection against much of the suffering and disease among the children of the poor. As the adult wage goes down with the general introduction of the cheap labor of the young, the restriction of child labor serves to remove one of the causes of poverty and one of the occasions for poorrelief.

"(3) Not to promote the interests of suggested federal legislation; but, by properly informing the public mind and quickening the public conscience, to aid in creating and interpreting a national sentiment upon the subject of child labor-a sentiment which may become intelligently operative under the local conditions and through the specific laws of each of our several states."

The present membership of the National Child-labor Committee is as follows: Felix Adler, New York.

Wm. H. Baldwin, Jr., New York. Edgar Gardner Murphy, Secretary Southern Education Board, Montgomery, Ala. Homer Folks, former commissioner of public charities, New York.

William E. Harmon, New York.

Jane Addams, Hull House, Chicago. Florence Kelley, secretary National Consumers' League, New York.

Mrs. Emmons Blaine, Chicago. Lillian D. Wald, head-worker of the Henry Street Settlement, New York.

Stanley McCormick, Chicago.

Hugh F. Fox, president of the State Board of Children's Guardians and of the Children's Protective League, New Jersey.

Cardinal Gibbons, Baltimore, Md.
Hoke Smith, Atlanta, Ga.

V. Everit Macy, New York.

John W. Wood, New York.

Robert W. de Forest, president of the Charity Organization Society, New York.

Bishop David H. Greer, New York.

Edward T. Devine, editor of CHARITIES, New York.

John Graham Brooks, Cambridge, Mass. Isaac N. Seligman, banker, New York. Paul M. Warburg, of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., New York.

Dr. C. B. Wilmer, Atlanta, Ga.

Dr. J. H. Kirkland, chancellor of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.

Talcott Williams, Philadelphia.
Judge N. B. Feagin, Birmingham, Ala. *
Senator B. R. Tillman, South Carolina.
John S. Huyler, New York.

Adolph S. Ochs, proprietor of the New York Times, New York.

Judge Ben B. Lindsey, of the Children's Court, Denver, Col.

A. J. Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Philadelphia.

Robert Hunter, Noroton, Conn. Former President Grover Cleveland, Princeton, N. J.

Pending the permanent organization of the committee, Homer Folks, former commissioner of public charities for New York, is acting-chairman, and Edward T. Devine is acting-secretary. The selection

of a permanent secretary who will open the formal headquarters of the committee will be made within a few weeks. The present address of the secretary is at 105 East Twenty-second street, New York city. The executive committee consists of Dr. Felix Adler, Homer Folks, Edward T. Devine, John S. Huyler, V. Everit Macy, Isaac N. Seligman, Paul M. Warburg, John W. Wood, Robert W. de Forest, Florence Kelley, William H. Baldiwn, Jr., and Edgar Gardner Murphy; the finance committee of Issac N. Seligman, William H. Baldwin, Jr., V. Everit Macy, Paul M. Warburg, and John S. Huyler.

The work of the national committee will necessarily take its character and its direction from needs as they arise. I have attempted no authoritative statement. That would be to bind, without license, the executive officers and the executive committee. I have written only to interpret from one standpoint some of the possibilities of its labor. It is well that the new and triumphant industrialism of our country should find, working within its work and coincident with its growth, a commanding social force ranged on the side of the child, a committee representing broader interests and sympathies. expressing that social conscience about the labor of the children which almost all men feel when dividends are not involved, or when they are not too busy. I am glad to say that I have found the second cause more operative than the first.

Determination, so essential in any undertaking, has played a leading part in the development of New York's park system. Whenever the advance has been marked, it has been in the face of strong opposition. Twenty years ago, the advocates of the extensive park system of the Bronx had to overcome the active opposition of two mayors.

On the other hand, the lack of determination, quite as much as the lack of

foresight, has delayed important park improvements for generations and has cost the city many millions. Nearly a century ago, in 1807, De Witt Clinton laid out a plan of parks for the island of Manhattan on a generous scale. He proposed to icrease the park area by about five hundred acres. His plan called for nearly four hundred acres of park land south of Fortieth street, a region in which we even now have only ninety acres, and in which we

are now laboriously acquiring small parks, at the rate of one million dollars per city block. Seward Park, of about three acres, cost more than two million dollars. Probably De Witt Clinton's plan could in his day have been carried out for the price paid for Seward Park. To realize that plan now would require several hundred millions.

It is now in the year 1904-proposed to establish a large ocean park at Rockaway. A public improvement like this, whose importance is so self-evident, will seem to most citizens capable of making its own way. But let all such easy-going minds ponder over the fact that for two and one-half centuries our municipality has been the leading maritime city of the western hemisphere, and never yet has taken up this matter of an ocean park with intelligent and invincible determination. We have turned our backs on old Neptune, as if our city stood in the midst. of the continent. It is high time for this municipality, like Venice, to go down to the sea, and become its bride in the cercmony of dedicating a great ocean park to our people's everlasting use and welfarc.

About thirty years ago, someone did show some foresight, and by legislation at Albany, seventy-five acres were set apart for a park on the shore of Coney Island, at the foot of Ocean Parkway. But the city authorities let the strong waves of the Atlantic continue to beat freely against this park land until now, as stated in Park Commissioner Kennedy's recent report, forty-five of the original seventy-five acres lie "under the waters of the Atlantic Ocean." Strong walls and bulkheads have recently been built for the protection of the remaining thirty acres. Of course, thirty acres at the seashore is nothing but a small park. Boston, having but onesixth of New York's population, has laid out in Revere Beach an ocean park three miles long. Mr. Young, the former Brooklyn park commissioner, strove to acquire such a park for New York. Hc Hc proposed to take all the land lying south of Surf avenue and stretching from Ocean Parkway to Sea Gate. He utterly failed. The combined opposition of private interests, having millions invested along that shore, could not be overcome. And were condemnation proceedings initiated, no

administration would assume the debt of many millions necessary to acquire this property.

Rockaway
the One

Remaining Site.

Rockaway is the one remaining site, where a large Ocean park can be acquired. I repeat and emphasize the words the one remaining site. The prop. osition is unique. Whenever it is proposed to acquire land for an inland park, objections can be urged with more or less reason against any particular site in favor of an alternate one. Thus, in the fifties, whea it was proposed to establish a great aptown park in New York, the first site selected was Jones's Woods. It was then urged, and successfully, that the land north of Fifty-ninth street, and between Fifth and Eighth avenues, should be preferred. Or, when it is proposed to establish park on the shore of Staten Island, it may be urged that the South Beach site is to be preferred to that at New Dorp Beach. And so it is in all park projects, except the one now under consideration.

Neither in Gravesend Bay, nor anywhere along the shores of Staten Island. is genuine ocean or surf bathing to be enjoyed. And, with Coney Island out of the question, there is no site for an ocean park, within our city, excepting the western end of Rockaway. We have let Coney Island slip out of our hands. Shall we let Rockaway go also? If we do, then the field of ocean parks will be lost completely.

The proposed Rockaway site embraces all the tongue of land stretching west of Belle Harbor. This site is about four miles long, and contains eight hundred and fifty acres, being of the same size as Central Park. Having Jamaica Bay on its northern shore, its entire water frontage, of about nine miles, will afford boundless opportunities for bathing and water sports of every variety.

Probably no incident in the growth of New York is oftener recounted than the great distance of a particular public improvement from the centre of population at the time of its inception. And yet, with every new project, the same wearisome objection of "inaccessibility" is reiterated. When will the generation arise that will profit by the experience of the past? A century ago, the park De Witt Clinton proposed, between Twenty-third