Show SKATING RINKS What the Sensible Mayor of Philadelphia Phila-delphia JTIiinlcs About Them The hardest blow the roller skating craze has yet received is administered in a general order issued yesterday by Mayor Smith to the police department However deficient the law may be in making clear provisions for stopping slugging matches and closing gambling houses the Mayor does not propose > to tolerato the subtle undermining of pub lic morals by the skatingrink Accord ingly word having reached him that cer tain policemen had participated in skat ing competitions he has put his foot firmly down and prohibited any repetition of the scandal It will at once be sup posed of course that his Honors mo tive for this stern order is a desire to prevent any contamination of the morals or any detriment to the manners of our police force But this will be an error Doubtless the Mayor has too sure a con fidence in the average policemans recti tude and suavity to fear for him even when exposed to the fierce temptations of the rink What he mistrusts is the fascinating effect upon the unregenerate world of the skating policeman the lat ter participation will he says add to the attractions of such places of amusement amuse-ment The horror with which a public officer like the Mayor contemplates such a result as this will be easily appreciated We have ourselves called attention to two unlovely aspects of popular rinking In the first place it throws young people of both sexes together under circumstances circum-stances calculated to strain to its utmost limit our American practice of trusting the conduct of young people to their own selfrespect instead of constantly watch ing them In any other circumstance i t save now and then an exceptional case our young people are more or less watched over in an unconscious sort of way whenever when-ever there is any need of it With us occasions oc-casions where there is any need of it are from a variety of causes far less frequent than in older societies The rink presents pre-sents such an occasion however pre sents it every night and presents it un der circumstances that render supervision impossible In the second place rinking is calculated to break down old distinc tions in social life and though it may be said that as a democracy we have no business with social distinctions it is a sufficient answer to reply that people of breeding are forced to hedge themselves in by the intolerable manners of people with no breeding The rink which would be a civilizing force if it levelled up since 0 4 we are greatly in need of popular amusements amuse-ments is a vulgarizing influence because it i levels down We confess however that we never fancied roller skating to be a worse evil than slugging matches and gambling dens On the contrary its evils seem chiefly to consist in the exaggeration and lack l of organization of something in itself harmless if not commendable To shut up all our rinks at once as doubtless the mayor in what we cannot but think an excess of zeal born of Puritan habits of thought would like to do would have I many disadvantages It would suddenly I subject the thousands of people who have been enjoyn themselves wisely or unwisely un-wisely to ti humdrum and inertness which are acknou ledged to be a bane of our American social life Candidly speaking we believe the rink has possibilities possi-bilities and might be reformed instead of abolished But th mayor appears inexorable in-exorable and not content with robbing it i of the attractiveness it owes to police participation adds some very severe comments on rinking morality In a matterof this kind however one naturally nat-urally defers to the mayors nice and sensitive judgment and it is perhaps better on the whole that the police should not be stained in public esteem by being supposed to lend the rink their moral support and physical attractions Still the gamblinghouse abuse seems to us quite as urgent The gambling house is i a vicious thing in itself Philadelphia Press April 7 |