the insignificance of the individual life, and youth, with that intense
self-consciousness which makes each young person the very centre of all
emotional experience, broods over this as no older person can possibly
do. At such moments a black oppression, the instinctive fear of
solitude, will send a lonely girl restlessly to walk the streets even
when she is "too tired to stand," and when her desire for companionship
in itself constitutes a grave danger. Such a girl living in a rented
room is usually without any place in which to properly receive callers.
An investigation was recently made in Kansas City of 411 lodging-houses
in which young girls were living; less than 30 per cent. were found with
a parlor in which guests might be received. Many girls quite innocently
permit young men to call upon them in their bedrooms, pitifully
disguised as "sitting-rooms," but the danger is obvious, and the
standards of the girl gradually become lowered.

Certainly during the trying times when a girl is out of work she should
have much more intelligent help than is at present extended to her; she
should be able to avail herself of the state employment agencies much
more than is now possible, and the work of the newly established
vocational bureaus should be enormously extended.

When once we are in earnest about the abolition of the social evil,
society will find that it must study industry from the point of view of
the producer in a sense which has never been done before. Such a study
with reference to industrial legislation will ally itself on one hand
with the trades-union movement, which insists upon a living wage and
shorter hours for the workers, and also upon an opportunity for
self-direction, and on the other hand with the efficiency movement,
which would refrain from over-fatiguing an operator as it would from
over-speeding a machine. In addition to legislative enactment and the