ize their school education in rapid deductions, business
letters, accounts, and trade transactions. The public school offers such
children a general education which will be completed in the eighth
grade, but the majority leave before that time. For varying reasons,
such as their foreign birth, irregular attendance, the impossibility of
much personal attention in the crowded classes of a great city, poor
conditions of health, and the desire of the pupils to escape the routine
of school as soon as the law will allow, the greater number of them, who
go early into trade, have not had a satisfactory education for helping
them in their working life. Year after year are they found wanting, and
yet young workers still come from the schools at fourteen with poor
health, little available hand skill, unprepared to write business
letters or to express themselves clearly either by tongue or pen,
uninterested in the daily news except in personal or tragic events,
unaware of municipal conditions affecting them, ignorant of the simple
terms of business life, and with their arithmetic unavailable for use,
even in the simple fundamental processes when complicated with details
of trade. The mechanical processes, therefore, which they do know are
now useless unless they can first think out the problem.

These boys and girls have no regret at leaving the schools, and are, as
a rule, glad to get to work. The tragedy of life, however, begins when
they become wage-earners, for they are only fitted for unskilled and
poorly paid positions. A little fourteen-year-old girl finds it
difficult to obtain a satisfactory occupation in the teeming workrooms
of New York. She, or some member of her family, eagerly searches the
advertising sheet of one of the daily papers. Most of the "Wants" are
entirely beyond her crude powers to supply. An unskilled worker is
perhaps desired in some business house, but the applicant finds that
hundreds of other girls are flocking to obtain the same position, and
her chance is too remote for hope. Or perhaps, after weary days of
wandering about from place to place, she is recommended to the boss of
some shop, and finds herself in the midst of machines which rush forward
at 4,000 or more stitches a minute. She assists a busy worker on men's
shirts, her duty being to pin parts together, to finish off, or to run
errands. From early morning to late afternoon, with an interval for
lunch, she must be ready to lend a hand. She c