But often all the Job Lady’s efforts fail.  The child is incurably sick of school, the parent remains obdurate.  Or, perhaps, there is a very real need of what little the son or daughter can earn.  Often some one can be found who will donate books, or a scholarship ranging from car-fare to a few dollars a week.  Over four hundred dollars is being given out in scholarships each month, and every scholarship shows good returns.  But often no scholarship is forthcoming; and there is nothing for the Job Lady to do but find a position for the small applicant.

Then begins the often difficult process of fitting the child to some available job.  The process starts, really, with fitting the job to the child, and that is as it should be.  The Job Lady always tries to place the boys and girls that come to her office where there will be some chance for them to learn something.  But jobs with a “future” are few for the fourteen-year-old worker.  The trades will not receive apprentices under the age of sixteen; business houses and the higher-grade factories won’t bother with youngsters, because they are too unreliable; as one man put it, with unconscious irony, too “childish.”  So the Job Lady must be content to send the boys out as office and errand boys or to find employment for the girls in binderies and novelty shops.  But she investigates every position before a child is sent to fill it; and if it is found to be not up to standard in wages or working conditions, it is crossed off the Bureau’s list.

The Job Lady has established a minimum wage of four dollars a week.  No children go out from the Bureau to work for less than that sum, excepting those who are placed in the part-time schools of some printing establishments, or in dressmaking shops, where they will be learning a useful trade.  This informal minimum-wage law results in a raising of the standard of payment in a shop.

In such manner, the Bureau makes over many a job to fit the worker.  But the fitting process works both ways.  The Job Lady knows that it is discouraging, often demoralizing, for a child to be turned away, just because he is not the “right person” for a place.  So she tries to make sure that he is the right person.  That she succeeds very often, the employers who have learned to rely on the Bureau will testify.

“If you haven’t a boy for me now,” one man said to Miss Davis, “I’ll wait until you get one.  It will save time in the end, for you always send just the boy I want.”

The secret of finding the right boy lies, first of all, in discovering what he wants to do; and, next, in judging whether or not he can do it.  Very often, he has not the least idea of what he wants to do.  He has learned many things in school, but little or nothing of the industrial world in which he must live.  To many boys and girls, especially to those from the poorest families, an “office job” is the acme of desire.  It means to them, pitifully enough, a respectability they have never been quite able to encompass.  As a result, perhaps, of our slow-changing educational ideals, they scorn the trades.