kind of a moral situation
would you expect to evolve out of these materials?

Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood. Many
of the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described in
these pages were so young that their cases were tried in the Juvenile
Court. Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals.
Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join the
never-ceasing procession of prodigals.

This is what "no previous occupation" really means in nine cases out of
ten. It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all,
according to the ideals of you who read these pages.

Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags. Sometimes it
was an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a space not large
enough for four. Some of these homes were never warm in winter. In some
there was hardly any furniture. But we need not turn to these extreme
cases in order to show that in many thousands of American homes virtue
and innocence are lost because no facilities for preserving them are
possible.

Annie Donnelly's case will serve as further illustration. Annie
Donnelly's father was a sober, decent man of forty, who drove a cab from
twelve to fifteen hours every day in the year, Sundays and holidays
included. Before the cab drivers' strike, a year or two ago, Donnelly's
wages were fifteen dollars a week, and the family lived in a four-room
tenement, for which they paid $5.50 a week. You pay rent weekly to a
tenement landlord. Since the strike wages are fourteen dollars a week
for cab drivers, and this fall the Donnelly rent went up fifty cents a
week.

The Donnelly tenement was a very desirable one, having but a single
dark, windowless room, instead of two or three, like most New York
tenements. There were three children younger than Annie, who was
fourteen. The family of five made a fairly tight fit in four rooms.
Nevertheless, when the rent went up to six dollars Mrs. Donnelly took a
lodger. She had to or move and, remember, this was a desirable tenement
because it had only one dark room.

One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance.
Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would not
allow her to go. Once a year the entire family, including the baby,
attended the annual ball of the Coachman's Union, but that was another
thing. Annie was too young for dances her mother declared.

The Don