Already New York is preparing for such a campaign.  The newly-appointed Parks Commissioner, Charles B. Stover, looking over his office force, dismissed one secretary whose function seemed largely ornamental, and diverted his salary of four thousand dollars to recreation purposes for young people.  Commissioner Stover desires the appointment of a city officer who shall be a Supervisor of Recreations, a man or a woman whose entire time shall be devoted to discovering where recreation parks, dancing pavilions, music, and other forms of pleasure are needed, and how they may be made to do the most good.  A neighborhood that thirsts for concerts ought to have them.  A community that desires to dance deserves a dance hall.  In the long run, how infinitely better, how much more economical for the city to furnish these recreations, normally and decently conducted, than to bear the consequences of an order of things like the present one.  The new order must come.  It is the only way yet pointed out by which we may hope to close those other avenues, where the joy of youth is turned into a cup of trembling, and the dancing feet of girlhood are led into mires of shame.

CHAPTER IX

THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE

According to the findings of the Massachusetts State Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose investigation into previous occupation of fallen women was described in a former chapter, domestic service is a dangerous trade.  Of the 3,966 unfortunates who came under the examination of the Bureau’s investigators, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been in domestic service.  No other single industry furnished anything like this proportion.

From time to time reformatories and institutions dealing with delinquent women and girls examine the industrial status of their charges, always with results which agree with or even exceed the Massachusetts statistics.  Bedford Reformatory, one of the two New York State institutions for delinquent women, in an examination of a group of one thousand women, found four hundred and thirty general houseworkers, twenty-four chamber-maids, thirteen nursemaids, eight cooks, and thirty-six waitresses.  As some of the waitresses may have been restaurant workers, we will eliminate them.  Even so, it will be seen that four hundred and seventy-five—­nearly half of the Bedford women—­had been servants.

In 1908 the Albion House of Refuge, New York, admitted one hundred and sixty-eight girls.  Of these ninety-two were domestics, one was a lady’s maid, and nine were nursemaids.

Of one hundred and twenty-seven girls in the Industrial School at Rochester, New York, in 1909, only fifty-one were wage earners.  Of that number twenty-nine had worked in private homes as domestics.  Bedford Reformatory receives mostly city girls; Albion and Rochester are supplied from small cities and country towns.  It appears that domestic service is a dangerous trade in small communities as well as in large ones.