came home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and mothers
who toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub and
were too weary to know or care what the girls did after school. For
social opportunity the girls had "going downtown." Perhaps you know
what that means. It means trooping up and down the main street in lively
groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a
cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street
accident or a fight.

About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South Chicago
and turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men. Some of
these were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old. They, too, went
"downtown." There was no other place for them to go.

As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral situation
would you expect to evolve out of these materials?

Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood. Many
of the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described in
these pages were so young that their cases were tried in the Juvenile
Court. Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals.
Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join the
never-ceasing procession of prodigals.

This is what "no previous occupation" really means in nine cases out of
ten. It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all,
according to the ideals of you who read these pages.

Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags. Sometimes it
was an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a space not large