over the rest of the family, whose united earnings are slowly paying for a house and lot.  Psychiatry is demonstrating the after-effects of fear upon the minds of children, but little has yet been done to show how far that fear of the future, arising from economic insecurity in the midst of new surroundings, has superinduced insanity among newly arrived immigrants.  Such a state of nervous bewilderment and fright, added to that sense of expectation which youth always carries into new surroundings, often makes it easy to exploit the virtue of an immigrant girl.  It goes without saying that she is almost always exploited industrially.  A Russian girl recently took a place in a Chicago clothing factory at twenty cents a day, without in the least knowing that she was undercutting the wages of even that ill-paid industry.  This girl rented a room for a dollar a week and all that she had to eat was given her by a friend in the same lodging house, who shared her own scanty fare with the newcomer.

In the clothing industry trade unionism has already established a minimum wage limit for thousands of women who are receiving the protection and discipline of trade organization and responding to the tonic of self-help.  Low wages will doubtless in time be modified by Minimum Wage Boards representing the government’s stake in industry, such as have been in successful operation for many years in certain British colonies and are now being instituted in England itself.  As yet Massachusetts is the only state which has appointed a special commission to consider this establishment for America, although the Industrial Commission of Wisconsin is empowered to investigate wages and their effect upon the standard of living.

Anyone who has lived among working people has been surprised at the docility with which grown-up children give all of their earnings to their parents.  This is, of course, especially true of the daughters.  The fifth volume of the governmental report upon “Women and Child Wage Earners in the United States,” quoted earlier, gives eighty-four per cent. as the proportion of working girls who turn in all of their wages to the family fund.  In most cases this is done voluntarily and cheerfully, but in many instances it is as if the tradition of woman’s dependence upon her family for support held long after the actual fact had changed, or as if the tyranny established through generations when daughters could be starved into submission to a father’s will, continued even after the roles had changed, and the wages of the girl child supported a broken and dissolute father.

An over-restrained girl, from whom so much is exacted, will sometimes begin to deceive her family by failing to tell them when she has had a raise in her wages.  She will habitually keep the extra amount for herself, as she will any overtime pay which she may receive.  All such money is invariably spent upon her own clothing, which she, of course, cannot wear at home, but which gives her great satisfaction upon the streets.