in which to properly receive callers.
An investigation was recently made in Kansas City of 411 lodging-houses
in which young girls were living; less than 30 per cent. were found with
a parlor in which guests might be received. Many girls quite innocently
permit young men to call upon them in their bedrooms, pitifully
disguised as "sitting-rooms," but the danger is obvious, and the
standards of the girl gradually become lowered.

Certainly during the trying times when a girl is out of work she should
have much more intelligent help than is at present extended to her; she
should be able to avail herself of the state employment agencies much
more than is now possible, and the work of the newly established
vocational bureaus should be enormously extended.

When once we are in earnest about the abolition of the social evil,
society will find that it must study industry from the point of view of
the producer in a sense which has never been done before. Such a study
with reference to industrial legislation will ally itself on one hand
with the trades-union movement, which insists upon a living wage and
shorter hours for the workers, and also upon an opportunity for
self-direction, and on the other hand with the efficiency movement,
which would refrain from over-fatiguing an operator as it would from
over-speeding a machine. In addition to legislative enactment and the
historic trade-union effort, the feebler and newer movement on the part
of the employers is being reinforced by the welfare secretary, who is
not only devising recreational and educational plans, but is placing
before the employer much disturbing information upon the cost of living
in relation to the pitiful wages of working girls. Certainly employers
are growing ashamed to use the worn-out, hypocritical pretence of
employing only the girl "protected by home influences" as a device for
reducing wages. Help may also come from the consumers, for an increasing
number of them, with compunctions in regard to tempted young employees,
are not only unwilling to purchase from the employer who underpays his
girls and thus to share his guilt, but are striving in divers ways to
modify existing conditions.

As working women enter fresh fields of labor which ever open up anew as
the old fields are submerged behind them, society must endeavor to
speedily protect them by an amelioration of the economic conditions
which are now so unnecessarily harsh and dangerous to health an