Springfield Weekly Republican

Antidote to Vicious Amusements.

Some months ago the opening of a coffee-room at Chicago, with free reading and sitting rooms attached, attracted much attention, as an attempt to furnish a place of innocent resort and entertainment to young men, and so save them from the temptations of the drinking saloons and other haunts of vice. Of the success of the experiment we have seen no reports, and we fear it may have failed, and from the same cause that has led to the failure of other similar experiments—the too serious aspect given to it. The Young Men's Christian associations accomplish much good for those within their influence, but they do not reach the classes most exposed to evil. There is need of effort several grades lower down, and it must be of a character to attract and interest those who are illy prepared to feel the force of religious motives.

An experiment is now making in the first ward of New York, where vile resorts most abound. A reading and coffee-room have been opened, with a room for smoking and conversation attached, all free to the public, under certain necessary restrictions. It is also proposed to establish in connection with the establishment a bowling alley, and billiards and other popular games of skill and chance, where no gambling will be allowed. The success of such an establishment depends very much upon the character of the men conducting it, who must know how to be free and easy and genial, without vulgarity or profanity, and how to preserve order and decorum among visitors without any arrogant use of authority. Well managed, such an institution will furnish a place of resort and amusement to many who would otherwise go to the gambling, drinking and low concert saloons for want of other means of amusement.

There is continually increasing necessity for places of proper recreation in our cities, because of the social separation of merchants and their clerks, artisans and their journeymen and apprentices. In former years employers felt it their right and duty to exercise a sort of paternal care over their employes, and either took them into their own families or placed them where they knew they would find good homes and safe associates. Now, for the most part, the young men in our cities are left to take care of themselves, and the employer considers his obligations fulfilled when he has paid the stipulated wages. The young men eat and sleep in crowded boarding-houses, and seek amusement in their leisure hours wherever it is most accessible and within their means: and as the large majority of those whose occupation it is to gratify the desire for pleasure, have no care but to draw custom and make money, the gilded haunts of vice in all its various forms draw in the thoughtless crowd, and too many find a short and easy road to drunkenness, debauchery and ruin. The changed condition of society requires new measures and new institutions to meet these new dangers to which our young men are exposed. They will have and should have amusements, and if they can find only such as are vicious in their tendency, it may be quite as much their misfortune as their fault that they are early led to vice and ruin.

The Germans understand this matter better than we do, and their beer gardens, where a man may take his family without fear of moral contamination, and all classes meet together for free conversation, innocent games, and temperate conviviality, furnish a model, which it were well if we could copy, with such variations as would suit the differing tastes of our people. The great difficulty with us is that those who naturally feel most interest in the welfare of the young, go into the matter too seriously. It is true that we should be Christians in our amusements, as in the sober work of life, but we may be Christian without being serious in our play, for play is just as legitimate as work in its time and place. Our churches, acting on John Wesley's principle that the devil must not be allowed to monopolize all the good music, spend as much money in the line of cultivated singers as used to be required for the entire expenses of Sunday worship a quarter of a century ago. They know that good music attracts many who will not go to church to hear the best preaching. Why should not John Wesley's theory be applied to amusements also? Why should the control of these great means of influence, which reach nine-tenths of the whole community, be left exclusively in the devil's hands? In some shape they will be had, and will continue to exert a vast influence over private character and social life. It is for Christians to see to it that they are Christian, or at least not unchristian, in character and effect. There will be difficulties in every undertaking of the kind, but it is clear that the divorce of the church from general society, of Christian and moral men and influences from the favorite recreations of the people, involves the most disastrous consequences for the present, and still worse for the future, if the separation shall grow continually wider and deeper.