In the first place a common mark strikes the observer in the most of these young men they are thoroughly childish. This is absolute truth, and you can verify it easily. The portrait of the precociously serious and melancholy young Frenchman must be laid aside or destroyed. Here is a generation which, at sixteen or eighteen years, has very little desire to ape the man of forty. The boy's chief and almost exclusive interest is physical exercise, sport. At the age when our school companions were eagerly buying mauve, yellow, or green reviews, they buy sporting magazines. The result is, first, that they have a genuinely refreshing air of juvenile good health, and second, that their intellectual culture is sensibly feebler than that of their predecessors. At their age, the contemporaries of Jules Lagorgue had devoured libraries; they had reflected; the indigent erudition of their fathers had excited their compassion. The new brood snap their fingers at erudition. All sincere teachers will tell you that the average of scholarship is dropping lower every year. Let us face the naked fact. It is impossible to be a passionate devotee of football and of metaphysics at sixteen years. The joyous ignorance of these children is profoundly significant. Their robust health, their suppleness in physical exercises, excite their love, naturally, for movement and consequently for action. They are enterprising and courageous. Having come to the age of reason in the day of automobiles and of wireless telegraphy, no distance terrifies them. The world seems small to them. They think of nothing but rapid and sweeping changes. One can safely prophesy that they will not willingly choose sedentary occupations. It should be foreseen, also, that they will not be so easily satisfied as were their elders with the wages allowed by the state to its functionaries. Sport, which, I insist, is their principal preoccupation, demands leisure and money. Every boy of seventeen years takes for granted nowaday that a life without an auto is a cramped existence.

Delight in movement, then, delight in practical activity, desire to win a fortune; I see all this in the boys of today. The moral effect of these tendencies is, first, that they are not pessimistic. Without formulating a doctrine, the boys believe that life is good. Another moral effect is not less important, but requires more delicate handling. Their physical equilibrium and their need of movement, leaving them little opportunity for thinking, render them more puerile, in every sense of the word. The racket and the bicycle are their women, and women enough for the most of them. In this, as in many other respects, they are like their young neighbors on the other side of the Channel. In a school of South Croydon a friend of mine who was teaching French assured me that the pupils never spoke of girls. It is likely to be so with boys absorbed in autos, balls, and bicycles.

Shall we salute with joy this manifest transformation of the young Frenchman, less intellectual and more athletic, less sentimental and more healthy? At the present moment, and in view of the menaces of the future, yes, certainly. Such young men will be better fitted than would aesthetes to solve problems where it is more important to act quickly than to theorize learnedly. In a country like ours, surcharged with history and saturated with civilization, we must have from time to time a generation that cares more for living than for philosophizing. The important question with regard to this new brood of young cocks is undoubtedly whether they have solid spurs.-Marcel Prévost, "Collégiens en vacances," in Les annales politiques et littéraires, August 18, 1907; translated by R. T. House, Weatherford, Okla.

Assistant Director of the League for the Protection of Immigrants

The importance of the employment agency in the industrial or economic adjustment of the immigrant became apparent with the first work undertaken by the recently formed League for the Protection of Immigrants. Ignorant of our language, the country, and the American standard of wages, and compelled by his poverty to accept the first possible work, the immigrant is especially defenseless when he offers himself in the labor market. At no time does he need disinterested guidance and help more than in securing his first work, and yet he is dependent in most cases upon the private employment agent and he becomes, because of his ignorance and necessities, a great temptation to an honest agent and a great opportunity to an unscrupulous one. For this reason an investigation of Chicago agencies was made in order to determine what kinds of work may be obtained by the immigrant man or woman through this means, in what ways they are exploited, and what changes in the laws are necessary to reduce such exploitation to a minimum. According to the statement of the Commissioner of Labor, through whose department agencies are licensed, there were 289 licensed agencies in Chicago in June, 1908. Of this number 178 were investigated and 110 of them were found to make a specialty of placing foreigners. All the agencies in the neighborhood of any of our foreign colonies

were visited and also those in the down-town district so that it is believed that the 110 agencies visited are the only ones in the city which handle immigrants in any large numbers. Of these fifty-six furnished work for men, thirty-three for women, and twenty-one for both men and women. As the conditions and difficulties of the immigrant man and woman are quite different their relation to the employment agent must be separately considered. So far as the women are concerned, the kinds of work offered are few and there is very little financial exploitation as the following table shows:

TABLE SHOWING KIND OF WORK SUPPLIED IMMIGRANT WOMEN BY CHICAGO EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES

25

TABLE SHOWING FEES CHARGED IMMIGRANT WOMEN BY
CHICAGO EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES

No. of agencies charging from $0.50 to $1.00 .
No. of agencies charging $1.50 to $2.00 .

No. of agencies charging $3.00 .

No. of agencies charging a per cent. of wages

3

8

No. of agencies supplying women in which fees were not ascertained

Total number of agencies

54

The immigrant girl then usually pays the agent less than two dollars in contrast, as will be shown later, with the immigrant man who usually pays from three to fourteen dollars. The work offered her is almost without exception hotel or housework, so the small army of foreign girls at work in the stockyards and at the various clothing trades in the city must secure their posi

tions through other means. The mistresses of the better homes want girls who can speak English and furnish references, so the best places are not open to the immigrant. German and Scandinavian girls, however, because they are known to be excellent servants and because servants are difficult to secure, can often get good places although they are ignorant of the language. The Norwegian and Swedish National Societies both maintain employment agencies which place to good advantage many of the Scandinavian girls. The German girls are also well looked after by their friends. The Jewess will not go into service and the Italians are not adapted to housekeeping so the largest number placed by the private employment agents are either Poles or Bohemians and for this reason they are usually found in the neighborhood of these colonies. The restaurant or hotel work offered the immigrant girl means dishwashing or cleaning, for which she is paid from sixteen to twenty-five dollars a month and board; for housework she can get from twelve to twenty dollars a month and has board and room furnished her.

No direct evidence of the moral exploitation of the immigrant girl was secured, although there is reason to believe that there is in a few instances actual co-operation between the agent and the keeper of the house of prostitution. Undoubtedly the crusade against the so-called "White Slave Traffic" conducted by the federal authorities last summer, the prosecutions under the new "Pandering Law" which went into effect last July, and a few suits against employment agents for this offence—all of which were given much newspaper notoriety-made the agents cautious. Still we found several that were most suspicious and several more that make a practice of sending girls to cook and wash dishes in saloons and two cases which have come to the attention of the League this summer would indicate that the many forms of vice connected with some of our saloons make them as dangerous to the simple-minded and ignorant foreign girl as a house of prostitution. In most cases the agent who places women is herself a woman; her office is also her kitchen or her parlor1; the Out of the thirty-three agencies supplying women which were visited, twenty-seven were in family living rooms.

place is usually dirty and almost without exception unbusinesslike. But so far as the agent goes, her commonest offense is a careless disregard of the character of the places to which she sends a girl rather than an active connlvance in her ruin. The problem, then, so far as the immigrant girl is concerned, is to secure for her work where she will be morally protected, work which is congenial, and in which she will learn English and become rapidly Americanized. So long as there is the unique situation of an overdemand and undersupply of houseworkers, such as exists nowhere else in the labor market, she always has this work to fall back on.

With the immigrant man the situation is much more difficult. He finds himself much handicapped when he tries to obtain work in the country in which he has been led to believe work is most abundant. In the first place, because of his ignorance of English and consequent inability to give or receive directions he cannot work without an interpreter. Interpreters can be profitably employed only when large groups of immigrants work together. Such groups are employed by the foundries, at the stock yards, in mines, on railroad, car-line and building construction, in the harvest fields, in ice and lumber camps, and other similar kinds of work. Much of this work is seasonal and is located at a great distance from the city. A large number of men are needed for a few months or weeks to harvest Dakota crops, to build a railroad in Wyoming or Arkansas, to harvest ice in Minnesota, to pick Michigan berries, and to work in the oyster beds of Maryland. This work is most undesirable. The pay is not goodduring the past summer agencies were offering from $1.25 to $2.00, usually $1.40, a day. Board is expensive and poor in quality and the work lasts usually only a very short time. Worse than this, the men must come back to Chicago to get their next work, so return railroad fare must be counted on. Such work, because of its undesirability, can usually be obtained. The American workman does not want it because it places him at the mercy of contractors and employment agencies and makes of him a homeless wanderer. It is work the immigrant can do and, because in most cases he must have work immediately, he takes it gladly.