his
devotion and monotonous existence she made the acquaintance of a girl
who was a chorus singer in a cheap theater and the contrast between
her monotonous drudgery and the glitter of the stage broke down her
allegiance to her helpless family. She left the city, absolutely
abandoning the kindred to whom she had been so long devoted, and
announced that if they all starved she would "never go into a factory
again." Every effort failed to find her after the concert troupe left
Milwaukee and although the pious Scotch father felt that "she had been
ensnared by the Devil," and had brought his "gray hairs in sorrow to
the grave," I could not quite dismiss the case with this simple
explanation, but was haunted by all sorts of social implications.

The second line of revolt manifests itself in an attempt to make up
for the monotony of the work by a constant change from one occupation
to another. This is an almost universal experience among thousands of
young people in their first impact with the industrial world.

The startling results of the investigation undertaken in Massachusetts
by the Douglas Commission showed how casual and demoralizing the first
few years of factory life become to thousands of unprepared boys and
girls; in their first restlessness and maladjustment they change from
one factory to another, working only for a few weeks or months in
each, and they exhibit no interest in any of them save for the amount
of wages paid. At the end of their second year of employment many of
them are less capable than when they left school and are actually
receiving less wages. The report of the commission made clear that
while the two years between fourteen and sixteen were most valuable
for educational purposes, they were almost useless for industrial
purposes, that no trade would receive as an apprentice a boy under
sixteen, that no industry requiring skill and workmanship could
utilize these untrained children and that they not only demoralized
themselves, but in a sense industry itself.

An investigation of one thousand tenement children in New York who
had taken out their "working papers" at the age of fourteen, reported
that during the first working year a third of them had averaged six
places each. These reports but confirm the experience of those of us
who live in an industrial neighborhood and who continually see these
restless young workers, in fact there are moments when this constant
changing seems to be all that