that certain streets are “not respectable,” but a furtive look down the length of one of them reveals only forlorn and ill-looking houses, from which all suggestion of homely domesticity has long since gone; a slovenly woman with hollow eyes and a careworn face holding up the lurching bulk of a drunken man is all she sees of its “denizens,” although she may have known a neighbor’s daughter who came home to die of a mysterious disease said to be the result of a “fast life,” and whose disgraced mother “never again held up her head.”

Yet in spite of all this corrective knowledge, the increasing nervous energy to which industrial processes daily accommodate themselves, and the speeding up constantly required of the operators, may at any moment so register their results upon the nervous system of a factory girl as to overcome her powers of resistance.  Many a working girl at the end of a day is so hysterical and overwrought that her mental balance is plainly disturbed.  Hundreds of working girls go directly to bed as soon as they have eaten their suppers.  They are too tired to go from home for recreation, too tired to read and often too tired to sleep.  A humane forewoman recently said to me as she glanced down the long room in which hundreds of young women, many of them with their shoes beside them, were standing:  “I hate to think of all the aching feet on this floor; these girls all have trouble with their feet, some of them spend the entire evening bathing them in hot water.”  But aching feet are no more usual than aching backs and aching heads.  The study of industrial diseases has only this year been begun by the federal authorities, and doubtless as more is known of the nervous and mental effect of over-fatigue, many moral breakdowns will be traced to this source.  It is already easy to make the connection in definite cases:  “I was too tired to care,” “I was too tired to know what I was doing,” “I was dead tired and sick of it all,” “I was dog tired and just went with him,” are phrases taken from the lips of reckless girls, who are endeavoring to explain the situation in which they find themselves.

Only slowly are laws being enacted to limit the hours of working women, yet the able brief presented to the United States supreme court on the constitutionality of the Oregon ten-hour law for women, based its plea upon the results of overwork as affecting women’s health, the grave medical statement constantly broken into by a portrayal of the disastrous effects of over-fatigue upon character.  It is as yet difficult to distinguish between the results of long hours and the results of overstrain.  Certainly the constant sense of haste is one of the most nerve-racking and exhausting tests to which the human system can be subjected.  Those girls in the sewing industry whose mothers thread needles for them far into the night that they may sew without a moment’s interruption during the next day; those girls who insert eyelets into shoes, for which they are paid two cents a case, each case containing twenty-four pairs of shoes, are striking victims of the over-speeding which is so characteristic of our entire factory system.