n, man or woman, in this commercial
atmosphere who speaks to her of the care and protection which she
craves, is seeking to betray her. Because she is young and feminine, her
mind secretly dwells upon a future lover, upon a home, adorned with the
most enticing of the household goods about her, upon a child dressed in
the filmy fabrics she tenderly touches, and yet the only man who
approaches her there acting upon the knowledge of this inner life of
hers, does it with the direct intention of playing upon it in order to
despoil her. Is it surprising that the average human nature of these
young girls cannot, in many instances, endure this strain? Of fifteen
thousand women employed in the down-town department stores of Chicago,
the majority are Americans. We all know that the American girl has grown
up in the belief that the world is hers from which to choose, that there
is ordinarily no limit to her ambition or to her definition of success.
She realizes that she is well mannered and well dressed and does not
appear unlike most of her customers. She sees only one aspect of her
countrywomen who come shopping, and she may well believe that the chief
concern of life is fashionable clothing. Her interest and ambition
almost inevitably become thoroughly worldly, and from the very fact that
she is employed down town, she obtains an exaggerated idea of the luxury
of the illicit life all about her, which is barely concealed.

The fifth volume of the report of "Women and Child Wage Earners" in the
United States gives the result of a careful inquiry into "the relation
of wages to the moral condition of department store women." In
connection with this, the investigators secured "the personal histories
of one hundred immoral women," of whom ten were or had been employed in
a department store. They found that while only one of the ten had been
directly induced to leave the store for a disreputable life, six of them
said that they had found "it was easier to earn money that way." The
report states that the average employee in a department store earns
about seven dollars a week, and that the average income of the one
hundred immoral women covered by the personal histories, ranged from
fifty dollars a week to one hundred dollars a week in exceptional cases.
It is of these exceptional cases that the department store girl hears,
and the knowledge becomes part of the unreality and glittering life that
is all about her.

Another class of youn