air
rate of interest upon the money invested. Otherwise they would fail of
any truly philanthropic object.

As to their conduct as institutions there should be no rules, no
regulations which are not in full operation in the Waldorf-Astoria or
the Hotel St. Regis. The curse of all such attempts in the past has been
the insistence upon _coercive morality_. Make them not only
non-sectarian, but non-religious. There is no more need of conducting a
working girls' hotel or lodging-house in the name of God or under the
auspices of religious sentiment than there is necessity for advertising
the Martha Washington Hotel or any fashionable bachelor-apartment house
as being under divine guidance.

A clean room and three wholesomely cooked meals a day _can_ be furnished
to working girls at a price such as would make it possible for them to
live honestly on the small wage of the factory and store. We do not ask
for luxuries or dainties. We do not get them in the miserable, dark
warrens where we are now obliged to sleep, and we do not get them at the
unappetizing boarding-house tables where countless thousands of us find
sustenance. I do not know--I suppose nobody does know--how many working
girls in New York City live in lodging-and boarding-houses. But they are
legion, and very few of them are contented with that life.

The most important necessity of the model working woman's hotel or
lodging-house would be, not a luxurious table, not a dainty
sleeping-room, but a parlor! The number of young girls who go wrong in a
great city like this for want of the various necessities of a parlor
must make the angels in heaven weep. The houses where the poorly paid
girl lives have no accommodations for the entertainment of her male
friends. If the house is conducted with any respect for the conventions,
the girl lodger must meet her young man on the "stoop" or on the street
corner. As the courtship progresses, they must have recourse either to
the benches of the public parks, provided the weather be favorable, or
else to the light and warmth of the back room of a saloon. The average
cheap lodging-house is usually conducted, however, with but scant
regard for the conventions, and the girl usually is forced to adopt the
more convenient and, as it would seem to her, really more
self-respecting habit of receiving her company in her room. And either
one of these methods of courtship, it is evident, cannot but be in the
end demoralizing and degradi