Florida FAST Practice Test 13

A Plea for the Children's Commons — by Silas Underwood

¹There is in every great American city a class of citizens who own no property, cast no votes, and hold no office, and who are nevertheless the city's most important inhabitants. I mean the children. Walk any evening through the crowded wards along our river, and you will find them by the hundreds—playing ball between the wheels of carts, chalking games upon the paving stones, perched on fire escapes four stories above the street. They play there not because they are reckless but because there is nowhere else for them to play.

²It will be said that the city has parks. It has, and fine ones: broad lawns, shaded drives, and ponds where swans glide for the pleasure of those who can afford a carriage to reach them. But the nearest of these lies two miles from the tenement districts, and a child of eight does not walk two miles to play, nor can a working mother spare the carfare to send him. A park that the poor cannot reach is, for the poor, no park at all.

³What I propose is modest in cost and great in consequence. Let the city buy, in every crowded ward, a single block of ground—even a vacant lot—and fence it, level it, and fill it with sand, swings, and open space. Let it hire a sensible man or woman to keep order there in the afternoons. Such places have been tried in other cities, and where they have been tried, the reports agree: fewer children are struck in the streets, fewer boys are hauled before the magistrate for petty mischief, and the neighborhoods themselves grow quieter and more neighborly.

⁴Some will object that the taxpayer has burdens enough already. I answer that he is paying now, and paying more. He pays for the hospital ward that mends the child run down by a wagon; he pays for the police court and the reform school that receive the boy whose trouble began as idleness. The city will spend its money on these children in any case. It may spend it on playgrounds, or it may spend it on prisons.

⁵Nor is the matter one of dollars alone. A republic depends upon citizens who have learned to take turns, to keep rules they did not write, and to win and lose with grace. Where do children learn these things, if not at play? The child who has never had a fair game has never had a lesson in fairness. Give him a playground, and you give the republic a citizen; deny it to him, and you should not be surprised by the man he becomes.

⁶The children of the river wards cannot petition the council; they cannot write to the newspapers. Someone must speak for them. Let it be us, and let it be soon.