the lack of comforts, the low pay, the absence of recreation, the sense of “good times” all about her which she cannot share, the conviction that she is rapidly losing health and charm, rouse the molten forces within her.  A swelling tide of self-pity suddenly storms the banks which have hitherto held her and finally overcomes her instincts for decency and righteousness, as well as the habit of clean living, established by generations of her forebears.

The aphorism that “morals fluctuate with trade” was long considered cynical, but it has been demonstrated in Berlin, in London, in Japan, as well as in several American cities, that there is a distinct increase in the number of registered prostitutes during periods of financial depression and even during the dull season of leading local industries.  Out of my own experience I am ready to assert that very often all that is necessary to effectively help the girl who is on the edge of wrong-doing is to lend her money for her board until she finds work, provide the necessary clothing for which she is in such desperate need, persuade her relatives that she should have more money for her own expenditures, or find her another place at higher wages.  Upon such simple economic needs does the tried virtue of a good girl sometimes depend.

Here again the immigrant girl is at a disadvantage.  The average wage of two hundred newly arrived girls of various nationalities, Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Bohemians, Russians, Galatians, Croatians, Lithuanians, Roumanians, Germans, and Swedes, who were interviewed by the Immigrants’ Protective League, was four dollars and a half a week for the first position which they had been able to secure in Chicago.  It often takes a girl several weeks to find her first place.  During this period of looking for work the immigrant girl is subjected to great dangers.  It is at such times that immigrants often exhibit symptoms of that type of disordered mind which alienists pronounce “due to conflict through poor adaptation.”  I have known several immigrant young men as well as girls who became deranged during the first year of life in America.  A young Russian who came to Chicago in the hope of obtaining the freedom and self-development denied him at home, after three months of bitter disillusionment, with no work and insufficient food, was sent to the hospital for the insane.  He only recovered after a group of his young countrymen devotedly went to see him each week with promises of work, the companionship at last establishing a sense of unbroken association.  I also recall a Polish girl who became utterly distraught after weeks of sleeplessness and anxiety because she could not repay fifty dollars which she had borrowed from a countryman in Chicago for the purpose of bringing her sister to America.  Her case was declared hopeless, but when the creditor made reassuring visits to the patient she began to mend and now, five years later, is not only free from debt, but has brought