a legal majority of 21 years; then, whatever may come to be the decision as to what the State shall do, or not do, in respect to women over 21, or in regard to women who have been employed over 5 years in a given trade, there can be no question that the workinggirl, flitting about from one bad employment to another, and not stopping in any one long enough either to learn its value or master its conditions, and flitting out of all organized industry back to the home in less than a decade, should be protected against evil conditions she neither understands nor can change. Legal protection, however, is only one side. Better training for more skilled and promising employments, those that pay better at first, and offer more rapid advance, is the other and quite as important side. The proof that ill health and consequent incapacity to give vigor to offspring does result from a long list of evils connected with the working life of young women, even when not continued above three or four years, is ample. That many trades are specially inimical to women's physique, that monotonous and too rapid machine-work injures the delicate nervous organism of young girls and produces a positive poison of fatigue, and that all this is connected with under-vitalization, the indolence of weakness, the general debility that does not kill but hopelessly incapacitates and which so invalidates motherhood-this is clear and sinister in suggestion.

Another quotation from a social worker's diary gives the story of Rosie J., which might be multiplied many thousand times. "Rosie J., aged 18, is found.

in hospital; she went to a Settlement class and her teacher visits her. She has worked hard ever since she can remember; helped 'make pants before she went to school'; got her working papers at 14; hadn't got through the sixth grade-was out so much 'taking care of the kids when mother was sick.' 'Liked school'? 'Yes, but didn't get on very well; teacher thought she was stupid; used to go to sleep in school sometimes; so tired. Worked in store, cash girl and bundle girl; had a place at counter at last.' 'Yes, the work was good enough; but father was took sick, went to hospital, died; mother, and the children, all younger than me, had to have all my wages; earned $4.75; didn't have much myself with eight of us till the two boys got to work; had bad cold; couldn't stay at home; doctor at dispensary said I must have milk and eggs; didn't tell how we could get 'em; got worse and worse; had to come here; doctor says he's going to send me away for two months, but they can't get along without my wages; must go home.'"

Is it not clear that Rosie and her like should be legally held as minors until 21 and that all power of social control we have achieved should be used to prevent such exploitation of girlhood?

The social demand for this prevention of healthdestroying overwork under bad physical conditions of the young girls who are potential mothers and whose vitality and vigor are our dependence for the people's strength, can need no argument for its support.

The third and fourth evils of poverty due to lack of moral and mental power and of work-efficiency are

distinctly traceable to defective homes, and defective homes everyone knows are largely the result of incompetence in the house-mother.

3 Dr. Warner gives us as "subjective causes of poverty," "shiftlessness," "unhealthy diet," "lack of judgment," and other elements of personal character which depend markedly for their eradication or substantial diminution upon an improved home environment in early youth. Those finer elements of relief which involve education and disciplinary measures to increase the personal power of the "charitable patient" are all the outgrowth of a clear perception that, in the case of many people, it is themselves and not their condition, that first needs mending. The inability rightly to use existing opportunities for bettering one's lot is a common complaint; one that no proposed mass-uplift, by change of circumstance, without any active coöperation of the classes or persons to be benefited, will wholly cure. The connection between the capacity to make the best and most of existing possibilities for personal advancement and family health and well-being, and the mental and moral power of the house-mother, needs only mention to be appreciated. But the connection between the untrained, unambitious, shirking, careless attitude of the girls at work for wages, and the lack of character and ability to manage a home afterward, is not often clearly seen. It is not alone the absence of that specific training which the old domestic forms of industry gave the girl in the specific processes she would later need in her own 3 Amos G. Warner, American Charities.

home that makes her brief wage-earning period ineffective as preparation for later responsibilities, it is also, and quite as important a factor, the positive injury to the work-sense, the demoralization of the faculty of true service, that her shallow and transitory connection with outside trade or occupation so often gives.

If a person has been really disciplined by her task in any form of effort, she can transfer that power of using means intelligently to ends, that mastery over obstacles, that capable and effective use of workprocesses, from one to another sort of effort, with an ease proportioned to native power and the thoroughness of this previous training. But if she has merely "held down a job" for three to five years without interest, ambition, mental grasp or moral faithfulness, she has acquired no principal of work-power to invest in the new occupation. Herein is the worst of all the effects, because the most subtle and far-reaching in moral character, of the short wage-earning experience of the average girl of the poorer classes.

Poverty resulting from character-weakness or mental deficiency depends for its substantial diminution not only upon radical economic reforms, not only upon the general disciplinary and educational influences of enlightened charity, but especially upon a training of young womanhood which shall raise the standard of the home environment in early life and produce a higher grade of mother, more definitely trained for her work with her children.

V. Poverty as related to the work of women after

marriage and in widowhood, is a vital concern. The fact that a decent standard of living cannot be maintained in many families without some compensated labor of married women, and the further fact that widows and deserted wives must generally use their full earning capacity in the care of self and children, definitely relate themselves to women's present industrial training and opportunity. The further fact that among the most pitiful of all "charity cases" are those of women of mature years suddenly confronted with the necessity for self-support and having only "general ability," and that of a low grade, to bring to the market, shows that the education of the average girl does not fit for "real life" because leaving out that great essential—the fitting for earning a "livelihood." If these three classes of women (married mothers, widowed and deserted wives, and middle-aged self-supporting women) are forced to take the "labor leavings," as it were, the poorest paid and most sweated kinds of work, it is a social evil as well as a personal

wrong.

The amount of work that a mother of young children can safely and properly do is a matter of dispute; but it is already clear that she is the last person in the world to leave untrained and unprotected to suffer the worst evils of industrial exploitation. The finest social use of the average house-mother needing paid occupation has not yet been devised, still less applied in work-opportunity; but it is already clear that any person who wants compensated labor, especially when past the bloom of youth, must not only be "good," but