The school has to compete with a great deal from the outside in addition
to the distractions of the neighborhood. Nothing is more fascinating
than that mysterious "down town," whither the boy longs to go to sell
papers and black boots, to attend theatres, and, if possible, to stay
all night on the pretence of waiting for the early edition of the great
dailies. If a boy is once thoroughly caught in these excitements,
nothing can save him from over-stimulation and consequent debility and
worthlessness; he arrives at maturity with no habits of regular work and
with a distaste for its dulness.

On the other hand, there are hundreds of boys of various nationalities
who conscientiously remain in school and fulfil all the requirements of
the early grades, and at the age of fourteen are found in factories,
painstakingly performing their work year after year. These later are the
men who form the mass of the population in every industrial neighborhood
of every large city; but they carry on the industrial processes year
after year without in the least knowing what it is all about. The one
fixed habit which the boy carries away with him from the school to the
factory is the feeling that his work is merely provisional. In school
the next grade was continually held before him as an object of
attainment, and it resulted in the conviction that the sole object of
present effort is to get ready for something else. This tentative
attitude takes the last bit of social stimulus out of his factory work;
he pursues it merely as a necessity, and his very mental attitude
destroys his chance for a realization of its social value. As the boy in
school contracted the habit of doing his work in certain hours and
taking his pleasure in certain other hours, so in the factory he earns
his money by ten hours of dull work and spends it in three hours of
lurid and unprofitable pleasure in the evening. Both in the school and
in the factory, in proportion as his work grows dull and monotonous, his