es
away with the necessity for a marriage ceremony. Many others are told
that judgment for a moral lapse is less severe in America than in the
old country. The last month's records of the Municipal Court in Chicago,
set aside to hear domestic relation cases, show sixteen unfortunate
girls, of whom eight were immigrant girls representing eight different
nationalities. These discouraged and deserted girls become an easy prey
for the procurers who have sometimes been in league with their lovers.

Even those girls who immigrate with their families and sustain an
affectionate relation with them are yet often curiously free from
chaperonage. The immigrant mothers do not know where their daughters
work, save that it is in a vague "over there" or "down town." They
themselves were guarded by careful mothers and they would gladly give
the same oversight to their daughters, but the entire situation is so
unlike that of their own peasant girlhoods that, discouraged by their
inability to judge it, they make no attempt to understand their
daughters' lives. The girls, realizing this inability on the part of
their mothers, elated by that sense of independence which the first
taste of self-support always brings, sheltered from observation during
certain hours, are almost as free from social control as is the
traditional young man who comes up from the country to take care of
himself in a great city. These immigrant parents are, of course, quite
unable to foresee that while a girl feels a certain restraint of public
opinion from the tenement house neighbors among whom she lives, and
while she also responds to the public opinion of her associates in a
factory where she works, there is no public opinion at all operating as
a restraint upon her in the hours which lie between the two, occupied in
the coming and going to work through the streets of a city large enough
to offer every opportunity for concealment. So much of the recreation
which is provided by commercial agencies, even in its advertisements,
deliberately plays upon the interest of sex because it is under such
excitement and that of alcohol that money is most recklessly spent. The
great human dynamic, which it has been the long effort of centuries to
limit to family life, is deliberately utilized for advertising purposes,
and it is inevitable that many girls yield to such allurements.

On the other hand, one is filled with admiration for the many immigrant
girls who in the midst