which she may turn in time of need, for help and advice through those
long and dangerous periods of unemployment which are now so inimical to
her character.

This same British commission divided all of the unemployed, the
under-employed, and the unemployable as the results of three types of
trades: first, the subsidized labor trades, wherein women and children
are paid wages insufficient to maintain them at the required standard of
health and industrial efficiency, so that their wages must be
supplemented by relatives or charity; second, labor deteriorating
trades, which have sapped the energy, the capacity, the character, of
workers; third, bare subsistence trades, where the worker is forced to
such a low level in his standard of life that he continually falls below
self-support. We have many trades of these three types in America, all
of them demanding the work of young and untrained girls. Yet, in spite
of the obvious dangers surrounding every girl who enters one of them,
little is done to guide the multitude of children who leave school
prematurely each year into reasonable occupations.

Unquestionably the average American child has received a more expensive
education than has yet been accorded to the child of any other nation.
The girls working in department stores have been in the public schools
on an average of eight years, while even the factory girls, who so often
leave school from the lower grades, have yet averaged six and two-tenths
years of education at the public expense, before they enter industrial
life. Certainly the community that has accomplished so much could afford
them help and oversight for six and a half years longer, which is the
average length of time that a working girl is employed. The state might
well undertake this, if only to secure its former investment and to save
that investment from utter loss.