LONDON SQUARES IN SUMMER TIME [To the Editor of the
SPECTATOR.] SIR,—A year ago you published (the Spectator, July 4th, 1925) a letter from five associations, including the Sunlight League, urging the use of the London Squares during the school holidays for school children, and you kindly sup- ported our appeal in a cogent editorial article. I venture now to repeat that plea. The case is more urgent. During the past year the evidence in favour of sunlight as the supreme ruling agent in the nutrition of the young has become even stronger than ever, and my category of " diseases of darkness " must certainly be extended far beyond the point to which I have confidently carried it in past years ; the number of school children has increased ; the strike prejudices the prospects of their nutrition by means of food, thus making its correlative light more valuable ; the streets are more crowded and dangerous than ever, and fuller of the noxious effluvia of motor-cars ; and the weather of recent months has notably deprived us all of sunlight.
We of the Sunlight League therefore wish to state the ease again, adding that school playgrounds should be used during the holidays as school playgrounds—if the idea is not too perverse or paradoxical ; and we ask for your readers' co- operation in money for propaganda and in advice and con- sultation, to this end. It would be good if we could save up some of the coming sunlight, in our children's blood and bones and brains, against the coming darkness and threatened distress of next winter.—I am, Sir, &e.,
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