Work in a bag-factory or any one of the thousand, but to
the employes profitless, industries of a great city is eagerly sought,
and hardships cheerfully endured which if enforced by a mistress would
lead to a riot. To be a shop-girl seems the highest ambition. To have
dress and hair and expression a frowsy and pitiful copy of the latest
Fifth Avenue ridiculousness, to flirt with shop-boys as feeble-minded
and brainless as themselves, and to marry as quickly as possible, are
the aims of all. Then come more wretched, thriftless, ill-managed
homes, and their natural results in drunken husbands and vicious
children; and so the round goes on, the circle widening year by year
till its circumference touches every class in society, and would make
our great cities almost what sober country-folk believe them--"seas of
iniquity."
Happily, to know an evil is to have taken the first step in its
eradication. The work only recently begun--the past five years having
seen its growth from a very humble and insignificant beginning to its
present promising proportions--holds the solution of at least one
equation of the problem. To have made cooking and industrial training
the fashion is to have cleared away at a leap the thorny underbrush and
tangled growth on that Debatable Ground, the best education for the
poor, and to find one's feet firmly set in a way leading to a Promised
Land to which every believer in the new system is an accredited guide.
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