Far enough below the surface, in every one of us there lives, very often almost forgotten, the child, who, like Peter Pan, "never grows up." It is this everlasting child in us that keeps the keys which open for each his Kingdom of Heaven, and sad it is for those of us who have lost sight of the keeper of the keys. The sweetest and loveliest things in our lives are the simplest things. They do not abide in the excitable enjoyment of luxuries and entertainments to be bought with money; they lie in the living and eternal interest of the homeliest things of daily life, wherever people are simple, and sincere of heart, and full of loving, kindly thought and care for the concerns of others; where people do things themselves instead of paying for them to be done; where wealth is counted in love, in thoughtfulness, and in interest in other people, and not in many possessions. These things are the heritage of all children, and we are happy if we can carry our heritage with us through our life; for this indeed is to be of the Kingdom of Heaven.

A child who is unspoiled by the false and ignorant estimates of others with regard to the rank and standing of those among whom he lives, is perhaps our truest socialist. He comes into the world possessing nothing, so far as he is aware, save his own identity; he knows no distinction of class; his ideas of rank are based solely on the beauty, charm, and kindness which are in due proportion the characters of those he lives with. He makes his own little kingdom if he is encouraged to work it out, or play it out, for himself; and happy is the child and happy is the parent of that child who learns to play independently, and to gather together his kingdom, without a continual cry for assistance from others. Here is one of the first great landmarks in education, and a child who is unspoiled by too many possessions in the way of toys will be one well provided, for his mind should at once move to create these possessions for himself. This power to create, this moving of the spirit to make something out of chaos, is in all healthy human beings, and it is the happiest faculty we have. It is, in fact, one of the most vital sides of religion in us, and perhaps the most important to us. It brings us into direct kinship with the Great Creator of all things. This moving of the Holy Spirit over the chaos of the world, in our businesses, in our workshops, in our shipyards, in our buildings, in all craftsman's work in our factories, is probably never realized by the churchmen among us, and only vaguely apprehended by the educational authorities. Yet does not this very power of creative thought amongst even the humblest of us constitute religion of the most living vitality? This Holy Spirit moving, and living, and creating anew in every trade and craft, and in every place where men are busy, should be better realized by us, and more respected; we should then be better men and women. The inventive minds among us are indeed our prophets, answering to the call of those whose labor is too long and heavy, and producing what will lessen the burden. Answering again the call for more light, more beauty, more music in the world, and producing our arts and our playgrounds, our games, our schools and colleges. Answering again the call for freedom from pain, and we have our hospitals, and our great doctors, and all who work for the betterment of the world. Here is the real and living church of God on earth. They say we are leaving the churches behind us. Say rather that the church is more with us, and all are its ministers who are working for the world's welfare.

We rebuke far too often that habit of children of asking questions. We say, "Be quiet," and "You will see some other day"! Yet it is by questions that the child shows most his interest in life, and his inclinations and desires and tendencies.

We instruct a child for years in the writings, doings, sayings, and contrivings of others who have gone before us. How rarely do we realize that in these little ones there may be as great, or greater, light within, only needing care and encouragement to develop and flame up, and show its creative strength? It is sad to think how often these little lights are snuffed out in their first flickerings by the thoughtless things we say, by the foolish way we tease them at the slightest sign of independent thought, by our ignorant habit of commending and praising those who give up their independence, and conform to the commonplace habits and customs we have adopted as convenient.

Many very young children show astonishingly developed faculties in certain directions even before they can express themselves in speech. I know a little boy who, in his second year, showed such an interest in machinery that his elder relatives had to learn the parts of a locomotive engine in order not to betray their own ignorance; and over and over again we see the faculties of the creative mind so strong in young children that it is difficult to persuade ourselves that they have not some previous experience to draw upon. Especially is this the case in music and the arts, for here there is perhaps less dependence on tools and previous technical training required, than in other constructive work. But it is sad to see, and very common also, that these bright beginnings too often flicker out, not because the spirit is lacking, but because these children are only too often driven to hide their lights, because they feel conspicuous, are teased, and rebuked, and chidden for their non-conformity, and are made to feel themselves outcasts if they pursue the way their spirit tends to lead them; and they lose their light, these finer little spirits, and subside into the twilight of mediocre minds.

It is indeed difficult, in these times of over-crowded schools and over-worked teachers, to foster and develop the personalities of these little ones, but we all look to a time when education may be a stronger force among us, more respected and more desired, when those who teach in our elementary schools may be the finest men and women we have, those of the greatest hearts, and the widest understanding (for into their hands we place the most precious thing we have); a time, when, realizing that the laborer is worthy of his hire, we must also be brought to realize that the hire must be worthy of the laborer.

We become more and more socialistic in our community life in these days, and a child is now so little left to the charge of his mother that his life, almost from babyhood upwards, is just a passing on from one trained hand to another till he is able to support himself independently, and often long after that. His years of school grow longer and busier, and now even his playtime is to be more closely guarded and supervised. Yet it is to be hoped that here the guarding and supervising will be specially directed to preserving his independence and his choice of leisure occupation.

Games are good for all, yet playtime should emphatically not be all games: this is where our public schools have failed us; they have given too much importance to games, and almost none to private enterprise in constructive play. In the little contrivances of children lie the germs of vast mechanical and artistic enterprises. The marvelous crafts passed on to us from ancient days in every land were never the result of training in schools, they partook more of the qualities of what I would call "constructive play," passed on from parent to child, each new thing a little different from any other, changing and varying in every age, yet all through a pleasure and a joy to their makers. Our trades and our crafts have all their beginnings in the immature constructions we make as children. We build houses, we furnish them, we make instruments of music (and un-music), we make ships, we fashion vessels of clay, and wood, and metal; we weave and we paint; we dimly foresaw the days when men should fly like birds, and we made kites. All this went on for countless generations, and then we laid captive the steam and the electric current, and lo! a change; all things are possible. Yet we have had a set back; we have forgotten awhile that the spirit in all of us is greater than the machine. We have allowed our machines to make our toys, and instead of being toy-makers our children have to some extent become toy breakers, not because they are really trying to destroy, but because they have the right and natural desire to see how a thing is made. It is not enough, however, to know this; it is very essential that a child should make for himself, and the probability is that if the thing is easily bought he will not take the trouble to make it. He will be inclined to take it for granted that just because it is a "commercial" article, a thing to be bought in a shop, he cannot make it. Toys imported from abroad have been so plentiful and so cheap of late years that the children of to-day rarely attempt to make them for themselves, and they are immensely the poorer, intellectually speaking, for the lack of this necessity to make them. It is for this reason that I have gathered together a small collection of the contrivances of past generations, and the present generation too, not in order that they serve as mere subjects for copy, but because in making such things children develop ideas for improving upon them, and for making new things.

This little collection of works and enterprises is brought together as a suggestion for what Scottish folk so aptly call "ploys," which the children may undertake without much help or instruction. Later on it may be possible to collect a more mature series of suggestions for recreative work in evening schools and continuation classes. There are people everywhere whose work during the day is so taxing that they cannot continue to strain mind and hand at the usual subjects given in evening schools, and yet they can learn to employ their leisure time very profitably by work which does not demand either mental strain, nor highly developed skill, nor any elaborate outfit, nor noisy methods of construction. It must be truly "leisure" work, and be planned to give refreshment and stimulation and "play" to weary brain and body.

Such gentle fireside crafts as the decoration of pottery, and coarse and effective needlework are delightful to practice of an evening, and need give no trouble to the tidy and anxious Marthas of the household. No evenings are more pleasant than those I have spent with friends all busy at quiet crafts round the hearth, chatting a little, or listening to a reader, or singing simple songs in parts, and with no accompaniment of instruments. Constructive design for either of these two crafts is a delightful thing for either men or women of any age. We are never too old to learn to design patterns so long as our hands are able to guide a pen. For what is writing but pattern. Each of us writes his or her name to an individual design, easily recognized so soon as our hand has learned to control our instrument. Patterns for these simple crafts should therefore emanate from the minds of the workers themselves, and should never be copied if it is possible to avoid it.

This spirit of creativeness and invention should find a special period for its development in the day's time-table, and it would be immensely helpful and interesting if teachers would make collections of "outstanding" productions from the children, and if little loan collections of these might travel round from place to place. The children themselves are always intensely interested in seeing such things—and sometimes the older folk who have not forgotten to be children are even more so. I have always urged that craft-work from our various educational centers should go "on tour" in this way, and I keep a large quantity of needlework which shows individuality, from all sorts of schools, going round the country. This usually is shown to teachers only, which limits its sphere, for the children themselves show a most enthusiastic interest in it, and whenever I have shown such work to children in elementary schools, the chorus of excited little voices usually repeats, "Oh, I could do that," which is exactly what is needed for a good beginning. How charming it would be if municipalities would have in every museum a section of "modern craft work," independent of the collections of antiquities we store up. For we also have beautiful things being created amongst us, no less beautiful because they result from the demands of modern needs and usages.

New habits of life produce new demands, and children quickly catch new ideas and adapt themselves to the use of hitherto unknown materials. This is especially the case in cities, and the suggested constructions for the playwork subjects in this book are almost all made out of the waste materials the children may readily find at hand, and they are put together as far as possible, without any particular need for skill, and with the fewest and simplest of tools. In the country there is always an immense wealth of superfluous material to play with, and the country child has a far greater treasury from which to supply the need of hand and mind than his neighbor of the city. Imagination can find an immensity of outlet and opportunity, even in the neighborhood of cities. I remember well my village of cave dwellings which I carefully hollowed out beneath the spreading roots of trees—very dirty trees—in a suburban wood in a Lancashire town. The caves were furnished with stones and twigs, and populated with earwigs or any creeping thing to be found and housed there. Later I owned an island in a Westmorland Lake, and had a beautiful house of woven branches of the growing rowan trees, with a garden planted with ferns and wild flowers among mossy bordered paths. And again, my sisters and brothers and I made fine wigwams of the branches of young oak and hazel trees found in those lakeland woods; they were tied together at the top with the fibrous stems of honeysuckle, spread tentwise at the base, and heaped outside with a covering of dead bracken and dry leafy twigs. In town too, for wet days there was always the house under the table, walled in with table cover and blankets: delightful dwellings all, and happy little "homes" to live in, for any place is a "home" to us when we look back to it with happy memory. And the garlands we made of daisies and red clover, thick as a man's arm and plaited strongly together, with which we decked the clothes-props on the drying green, and made them into Maypoles! We remember the joy these things gave, chiefly because we made them; we remember them far better than the games we played, or the entertainments we went to.

At school again, my best personal experience, and one that I have found valuable above all the other education I got, was not the lessons I learned from books; I have forgotten almost all I got from them. It was the great days when we had plays in school, and I was allowed to devise, and practically direct the whole making of the stage properties. A great time that. We made armor, and weapons, and crowns, and garments, and wings, and scenery. We had no assistance from teachers for this, and I know it taught me more than any of my teachers did. During school days I did not learn to draw because I had a drawing lesson once a week, and painfully and carefully drew perspectives of chairs and schoolrooms and other dull things. I learned to draw because I loved to scribble in my lesson books princes and princesses, and fairies, and because I had few playthings, and was always making and decorating little gifts for other people.

This practise of decorating the things we make is really far the best way to teach drawing to either children or others. We make our education in drawing a far too limited affair by directing it to a pictorial issue alone, and drawing is a far wider subject than concerns picture-making solely. If we go into our museums, we see from the ancient handicrafts left to us by primitive peoples, that in the beginning all art was purely applied to useful things. The clay jar modelled in the hands alone, with its lines and curves just emphasized with a few scratches or impressions made with a stick or a bone, what is this but just play? and yet it is art also and the art adds immensely to the value of that jar. So also to-day, if any child takes a piece of clay and makes a vessel by hand, the very same thing is produced. I have seen little pots made in schools which it is difficult to distinguish from some of those of ancient Egypt or Peru in our museums. They are not one whit less artistic, and yet the art is quite unconscious, the child was only "playing" with the clay.

We would be much the richer, commercially speaking, if schools would only take up this different side of art teaching—making patterns, instead of pictures. I am not condemning the drawing of pictures, but I am urging that pattern-making—constructive design in actual material, not on paper—should come first. Pattern is the mathematics of art, and it can develop the mathematical faculties far more widely than mere mental calculations can. It must be learned by wise gradations, and the learner must never be allowed to get out of hand or run riot with over-elaboration. If we can teach the children in their drawing lessons to decorate the useful articles they need for the home, we shall give a great impetus to the commercial arts. For example, if a child has one lesson at decorating a piece of pottery with a brush dipped in glaze paint and decorates it with nothing but a line of dots or strokes, he can have this fired and fixed and use it, and he also at once looks at every china shop with a sharply discriminating eye. In a very short time he will be able to choose between good decoration and bad, he will understand economy in production, he will very soon demand from the trade a higher class of design, and he will be willing to pay for better design because he understands the working of it.

The fashion for amateurs to practice photography did not do harm to the professional photographer, as was feared at first; it raised the standard of professional work, and brought more custom, and not less, to the professional worker. And this holds good in all work, the more widely and thoroughly it is "understanded of the people," the more desirable do the people find it.

There is a great education before art teachers, and they must realize that they must come into touch with science and mathematics and general constructive work. They must watch the changing needs and fashions of the day, and realize that not only in classic times was the art of the people a beautiful and desirable thing. They must realize, too, that in this Twentieth Century our hands are extending their powers, and that by the use of machines we are reaching a far larger public than unaided hands could do. The artist has spent two or three generations bewailing the machine; he forgot that no machine can, of its own powers, be artistic or inartistic. He left the machine alone, and therefore the machine-work has fallen into discredit. The artist craftsman is too often too conscious of his art, and does not subordinate himself sufficiently to modern ways and conditions. It is not the fault of the machine that much of our manufactured output is inartistic, it is the fault of the artist that he has not managed to control the machine. First and foremost, however, we must have some change in the training of artists, and must direct their attention to utility, rather than pictorial work. It is difficult to count the outlets possible to the decorative craftsman, provided he understands modern machinery and commercial demands. This training in handicraft begins, very rightly and naturally in the kindergarten schools, but there, unfortunately, it stops short. Now what we want to do is to plan out for our growing children such crafts as will develop intelligence and skill of hand, without demanding too great physical strength or technical training, and without undue expenditure of money upon materials and outfit.

For the younger children the easiest media to work in are clay and needlework. The clay-work should be directed to the most permanent and useful things that can be produced; pottery and tiles can be very easily made, and are very permanent if they are glazed and fired and decorated, and this can be done at very little expense. Needlework must be taught so that the worker develops intelligence and independence, and is no longer made to sew the multitudes of fine stitches which were once considered necessary, and which made the girls mere unthinking machines. There are endless new ways to be followed out in the sewing and embroidery and construction of garments and household textiles. Even the rather mechanical knitting is probably only in its infancy as yet, and we may see it do great things, and play a more beautiful part in our textile arts. To reform and renew the vitality of all these things we must realize that they have all their beginnings in the playwork of the little child, and that simply because the little child has no traditions to unlearn, and is therefore independent enough to think out new devices in his play, so must we all keep before us the fact that we have that light within us which is above, and independent of, traditions.

If we can see any way in which any work can be improved or altered, or beautified by some change in its treatment, we must be bold to try it, for only by courage and bravery of thought does the work of the world keep itself fresh and ever renewed and changing towards better things. Never be afraid that because you have not tried to do a thing you will be unable to do it. If the thought of doing it has come to you, it is a sign that some power is there, at any rate, and the impulse to improve and change a thing for the better is just that creative impulse stirring within, which I have pleaded for. Whose is that impulse? Not our own entirely. Then surely if it is good, we do right at least to try to carry it out. It is the Mind that changes matter, but it is not your mind nor mine, though it is in our charge. And happy is he who has faith to listen and give it force and visible expression.

There are in this little book things that many of the wiser folk shake their heads over—catapults for instance. Yet I have put them in; for surely if we older folk had not enjoyed our catapults we should probably have been sadder folk, as well as wiser. All children may some day or other handle instruments of offense and destruction, and it is part of their legitimate education to learn to do no harm with them, so I have put in the catapult. I enjoyed playing with mine, and I do not think I ever broke anything with it, I do not even remember hitting anything I aimed at, and probably this is the average experience. I have not attempted to enter into any lengthy suggestions as regards making boats, or other toys requiring much patience and skill and knowledge of tools. Boat-making is a most interesting thing for both boys and girls, and can be carried to great perfection by them, if they have perseverance. I see no reason why the making of model boats and mechanical toys should not be the special work of boys' manual classes, nor is there any reason why a great quantity of the craft-work and needlework in day and evening schools should not be commercialized, and disposed of by the educational authorities, both to the advantage of the teachers and the pupils. One field alone—that of providing souvenirs for sale to tourists—is a large one, and is at present open to the schools. Tourists do not come here with any desire to buy souvenirs made abroad; they would greatly prefer things with a local flavor, and preferably small and portable. I know from personal experience how immensely such a market encourages students to work at their classes in the evenings. We could keep the evening schools packed with students if they realized that their work, done in leisure hours, had some prospect of bringing in a return instead of involving outlay alone. This also is playwork; and though this small book deals only with such playwork in its infancy, yet it must be emphatically urged that it develops into great things, things that the nation needs, and which can only come to their full development because the nation's children have learned to play.

My thanks are due to my grandfather, grandmother, and my father and mother, and to my nurses whose names I have forgotten, but from whom I learned to make many things. Also to Mrs. Grisedale, Mrs. Wear, Mrs. Fry, Mrs. Fellows, Miss Allright, Miss Worsdell, Miss Douglas, Miss Arthur, Mr. J. T. Ewen, H.M.I., Mr. Forrester Wilson, and to Norman Guild, for many suggestions, and for their very practical help.