kind ever passed by any community of persons or by any state, Massachusetts may claim the honor of having originated the free public school."

This notable law seems to have given voice to the convictions of the people, as it was generally and cheerfully obeyed, and on every side, as the ancient forests gave way before the hardy pioneers in their slow but sure advance from the seaboard into the interior, the meeting-house and the schoolhouse arose side by side with the log huts of the settlers, thus converting the desolate places of the wilderness into the homes of a Chris

tian people-the "seed-plots" of a higher and purer life for ages yet to come. No grander spectacle in the history of any people is presented than that of these men thus struggling for a scanty subsistence amid the privations and dangers of border life, against the attacks of a stealthy and relentless foe, and yet, as if with at prophetic vision of the future, sparing no effort, and in their poverty shirking no sacrifice to plant the pillars of the new Commonwealth, their "beloved New England," on the everlasting foundations of universal intelligence and virtue.

EDITOR'S

TABLE.

Ο

UR attention has been called

to the fact that the article printed in our October issue under the title "The Colonial Parson," is taken almost bodily from Mrs. Alice Morse Earle's "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," published and copyrighted by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1891. We have the kind assurance of author and publishers that they hold us guiltless of intention in this, but we feel that we owe it to them to state thus publicly the wrong to which we have been made party, our regret at appearing as receivers and purveyors of stolen goods and our appreciation of the most friendly way in which they accept our apologies.

It is our custom when accepting manuscript for publication to ask the

author for references. The offer of "The Colonial Parson" was made on the letter paper of a leading university with allusion to the writer's connection therewith as a student under one of its best known professors, and we took it without question, for, as Mrs. Earle generously says, "no editor can know all the books that are written." Too late we were confronted with deadly parallel columns from book and magazine, showing clumsy paraphrasing or word for word transfer of almost every sentence.

In the index to our Volume XXVII, which will be published in the number for February next, the article in question will appear as "The Colonial Parson, taken from Alice Morse Earle's 'The Sabbath in Puritan New England,' by Homer J. Webster."

THE EDITOR.

NEW SERIES

VOL. XXVII No. 5

T

HE story of our Boston playgrounds goes back at least to the time, just preceding the Revolutionary War, when, as the school history used to tell, the boys of Boston appeared before General Gage and made successful remonstrance against being prevented by his soldiers from playing football on the Common. Our earliest playground is, therefore, an inheritance from old England, being simply the piece. of common land which our tors, as far back as history knows them, had always set aside in every

ances

*The principal facts stated in this article are selected from very complete statistics collected by a committee of the Massachusetts Civic League, the sources of information being the Charities Directory published by the Associated Charities and the different departments and societies having charge of the matters dealt with.

manor, sometimes as perpetual pasture, sometimes to be used in severalty for agriculture from Lady Day to Michaelmas and for pasturage during the rest of the year. How early our own Common began to be used by the boys for their games history says not; but presumably it was so used from the beginning; so that we can claim a municipal playground dating almost from the Elizabethan age.

So much had England and the middle ages done for us. What have we done for ourselves?

From the setting aside of the Common as public property it is a very far cry to the next step in our public provision for play and athletics, a step that brings us to a very