blank wall. No
kind of concern is shown of the degree in which the occupation enlarges
the interests of the growing minds, or fritters them away and leaves for
a later use nothing but a dead machine, capable only of spasmodic
excitement; does not think of the effect of long hours or of large wages
and their consequent premature freedom from home restraints on
character.

The last mentioned evil has been greatly accentuated by the absence of
soldier fathers. The indictable offenses committed by the young have
increased markedly during the war, and surely we are responsible for
this lapse of children into crime.

We have permitted heavy and nerve-exhausting work to be done in just the
years when the adolescent was making the always difficult passage of the
boy to the man, of the girl to the woman. And for this reason their
suppressed, not-understood, thwarted instincts have broken out in
unpleasing and often dangerous ways. Is it any wonder if in such
circumstances boys turn to petty robberies and other unsocial acts,
while girls display some of the less estimable characteristics of the
prostitute?

Our ideal is to ignore sex in industry; to deny the strong and necessary
separations that nature's wisdom places as barriers between boy and
girl, between man and woman. We make our sons and daughters compete in
education and in industry. No doubt education and industry are
ill-fitted for males, but at any rate they were intended for males.
Intellectually inferior to the boy or the man, the girl or woman is not.
She is exasperatingly observant, often understands character with
unconsidered quickness, feels spontaneously; but it does not follow that
there is any value for her in the collection of dead facts, stored by
abstract-minded professors--all the futile things we call education,
which show in every direction the most coarse lack of understanding of
the needs of the child and of life. And the girl suffers more than the
boy, for the girl-student does as she is told much more conscientiously
than boys. Similarly in industry: tapping or pushing at a machine until
she taps or pushes on in her dreams; all the more monotonous kinds of
machine-tending will wear feminine nerves, naturally more irritable than
those of men, more than the same work will wear the male nerves. Not
that I believe in subordinating the worker of either sex to the machine.
What I want to prevent is the same stupid sacrifice of girls and women
in indus