Page:Solution of the Child Labor Problem.djvu/50

43 heard around the average saloon. One immoral person in a factory will easily contaminate the whole. Immorality is an infection which spreads quickly in a crowded workroom.

If the factory life is detrimental to the morals of the average boy, it is far more so to the average girl. One who believes otherwise should read "The Long Day," a story of a New York working-girl as told by herself.

One of the phases of the problem is aptly described by Juliet Wilbor Tomkins. "I know a ramshackle old building in New York in which the top floor is used by a manufacturer of electrical goods. On the floor beneath is a laundry, separated from the street by three long flights of stairs, which are utterly dark except for the gas jets insisted on by the authorities. At half-past five, every afternoon, the men come trooping down just as the laundry girls are let out, tired with the hardest kind of work, and flushed and warm with the long day in a steaming, enervating atmosphere. And night after night the gas