South Chicago is a fairly good place to begin.  Its ugliness and forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large city.  South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,—­enormous drab structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke.  The steel workers and their families live as a rule in two and three family houses, built of wood, generally unpainted, and always dismally utilitarian as to architectural details.

In South Chicago, four years ago, there was not such a thing as a park, or a playground, or a recreation center.  One lone social settlement was just seeking a home for itself.  There were public schools, quite imposing buildings.  But these were closed and locked and shuttered for the day as soon as the classes were dismissed.

In a certain neighborhood of South Chicago there lived a number of young girls, healthy, high-spirited, and full of that joy of life which always must be fed—­if not with wholesome food, then husks.  For parents these girls had fathers who worked twelve hours a day in the steel mills and came home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and mothers who toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub and were too weary to know or care what the girls did after school.  For social opportunity the girls had “going downtown.”  Perhaps you know what that means.  It means trooping up and down the main street in lively groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street accident or a fight.

About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South Chicago and turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men.  Some of these were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old.  They, too, went “downtown.”  There was no other place for them to go.

As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral situation would you expect to evolve out of these materials?

Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood.  Many of the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described in these pages were so young that their cases were tried in the Juvenile Court.  Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals.  Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join the never-ceasing procession of prodigals.

This is what “no previous occupation” really means in nine cases out of ten.  It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all, according to the ideals of you who read these pages.

Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags.  Sometimes it was an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a space not large enough for four.  Some of these homes were never warm in winter.  In some there was hardly any furniture.  But we need not turn to these extreme cases in order to show that in many thousands of American homes virtue and innocence are lost because no facilities for preserving them are possible.