The aphorism that "morals fluctuate with trade" was long considered
cynical, but it has been demonstrated in Berlin, in London, in Japan, as
well as in several American cities, that there is a distinct increase in
the number of registered prostitutes during periods of financial
depression and even during the dull season of leading local industries.
Out of my own experience I am ready to assert that very often all that
is necessary to effectively help the girl who is on the edge of
wrong-doing is to lend her money for her board until she finds work,
provide the necessary clothing for which she is in such desperate need,
persuade her relatives that she should have more money for her own
expenditures, or find her another place at higher wages. Upon such
simple economic needs does the tried virtue of a good girl sometimes
depend.

Here again the immigrant girl is at a disadvantage. The average wage of
two hundred newly arrived girls of various nationalities, Poles,
Italians, Slovaks, Bohemians, Russians, Galatians, Croatians,
Lithuanians, Roumanians, Germans, and Swedes, who were interviewed by
the Immigrants' Protective League, was four dollars and a half a week
for the first position which they had been able to secure in Chicago. It
often takes a girl several weeks to find her first place. During this
period of looking for work the immigrant girl is subjected to great
dangers. It is at such times that immigrants often exhibit symptoms of
that type of disordered mind which alienists pronounce "due to conflict
through poor adaptation." I have known several immigrant young men as
well as girls who became deranged during the first year of life in
America. A young Russian who came to Chicago in the hope of obtaining
the freedom and self-development denied him at home, after three months
of bitter disillusionment, with no work and insufficient food, was sent