acter sufficient to overcome the difficulties of a long and unpaid or low-paid apprenticeship period.

Millinery is also a highly skilled trade with limited opportunities in Worcester, as it now exists. Consisting of small shops with a few helpers, it doubtless affords better opportunities proportionately than dressmaking, with the exception that the seasons are very short. But the call is chiefly for the skilled maker and the trimmer. The girls who now enter are usually more mature and less self dependent, but the apprenticeship training is apparently unsatisfactory. One or two year courses therefore seem desirable, and a scheme for dullseason courses would probably be distinctly popular.

4. A trade school for girls in Worcester should certainly emphasize the courses in machine operating and part-time instruction. Here is a field for constructive work and distinct initiative. The city must face the problems of all large industrial centers, but it differs from Boston or New York in that it does not have the large demand for the highest type of feminized industries. On the other hand, it differs, probably, from the textile centers in that it has a very large and rapidly growing industry which demands the skill gained in the factory. In this respect it will therefore doubtless teach such centers as parts of Boston, the shoe centers of the State, and similar industrial towns.

The trade school can not properly duplicate the Boston trade school. It will contain the same trades, but the emphasis and proportion must be different. The Boston trade school did and should accentuate the dressmaking and the millinery as the best fields for girls with certain aptitudes, and as unrestricted in types of development. The Worcester trade school must offer these trades with guarded care as to numbers, types of girls, and types of opportunities. The Boston trade school offered machine operating, but it has been properly an outgrowth of experience and dependent on the increase in size of the school. The Worcester trade school should attack this trade as its most important and most immediate problem.

These conclusions suggest, therefore, the establishment of a trade school with a short course in machine operating. Instruction should be given to a fairly large group at once in order to demonstrate its efficiency. It may prove necessary to secure part-time cooperation with some machine-operating industry as an entering wedge, or to consider such a scheme as feasible for the immediate future. It should look forward to rapid development in the variety of specialized machines; to rapid increase in the number to whom instruction could be given; and in the length of course which shall be offered, either increasing the unit of time or introducing larger units. The trade school should also offer one-year courses in dressmaking and millinery at once. These will be doubtless limited in size at first by

the number of applicants, but the effort should be to restrict the number admitted to these courses, and development should distinctly be in the introduction of longer unit courses. Dull-season courses and evening courses will doubtless in time demand consideration. The trade school will surely feel itself bound in due time to meet the needs of the larger number of workers in the machine-operating industry, through part-time courses. It also will have before it in the future the welfare of the young workers in textiles and in the mercantile establishments, unless they may have been drawn away from these less desirable occupations. The necessity for the immediate and intensive attention to machine operating indicates the importance of securing opportunity for solid permanent and expanding housing, in order that installing machines should be conducted as economically as possible.

VIII. PRESENTATION OF MATERIAL IN TABULAR FORM. TABLE I. Showing women-employing industries of Worcester. (Based on factory inspector's report.)

Miscellaneous: 2 emery factories; 4 piano factories; 1 drug; 2 food; 1 printer; 4 casket factories; 1 machinery brush; 1 comb; 1 cigar; 1 yeast; 1 dyeworks; 6 paper-bag factories; 1 bookbinding; 6 newspaper; 1 heel; 1 unclassified.

Included under men.

* Included under women.

Of the women-employing industries of Worcester, envelopes and paper goods, narrow fabric, textiles, thread, and wire and metal goods employ almost one-half (47 per cent). Boots and shoes, clothing, corset, and muslin underwear employ about two-fifths (43 per cent) of the women.

TABLE II. Showing women-employing industries visited.'

1 The difference in the date of visit may explain the discrepancies between these figures and those reported by the factory inspector, as shown in Table I. This statement does not iuclude some establishments visited which were not on the inspection list. Hence, totals used in the text are often formed by a combination of the reports of the inspector and of the investigator. * Miscellaneous: 1 leather-goods factory; 1 thread factory; 1 wire factory; 1 fancy-biscuit factory.

The representative character of the study will be seen from the following proportion of industries which were visited and studied: Boots and shoes.-3 out of 7 establishments employing 27 per cent of the women in the trade.

Clothing. All the clothing establishments.

Corsets.-3 out of 6 establishments employing more than the total number reported by the factory inspector.

Envelopes and paper goods.-3 out of 10 establishments employing 57 per cent of the women in the trade.

Textiles.-5 out of the 18 textile manufacturing establishments employing 55 per cent of the women in the trade.

Muslin underwear.-All of the underwear factories.

TABLE III.-Showing ages of girls (727) leaving school during the year September, 1909, to September, 1910, according to age and schooling certificates.1

TABLE IV. Showing grade of leaving school during the year September, 1909, to September, 1910, according to age and schooling certificates.

1 Sixty per cent of these girls who had left school were only 14 years old.

Under 14 years of age, 7, viz: 11 years 10 months, 13 years 2 months, 13 years 5 months, 2 of 13 years

10 months, and 2 of 13 years 11 months.

So far as the age and schooling certificates enlighten us, 17 per cent of those who reached the ninth grade remained until the end of the year, but the statistics on this point are undoubtedly incomplete.

Twenty-one per cent of the girls withdrawing from school the past year left before completing the sixth grade. About one-third dropped out in the sixth and seventh grades. More than one-half dropped out before reaching the ninth grade.

Educated...

Intelligent..

TABLE V.-Showing educational status of 214 families visited.

Number.

6

124

Ignorant...

44

Unclassified.

40

Fifty-eight per cent of the girls leaving in the past year who were visited came from intelligent families.

TABLE VI.-Showing types of homes, on same basis as Table V.

Fifty-five per cent of these girls visited came from really comfortable homes.

One-half, on a very conservative estimate, left school without economic pressure; and of these almost one-half were 14 years old, 25 per cent had not reached the seventh grade, and 60 per cent could not have passed the ninth-grade test.

TABLE VIII.-Showing occupation of girls who left school during the year 1909–10. (Based on age and schooling certificates.)

Manufactures into which girls go from school (showing the predominance of one

great type of industry—machine operating—as a girl-employing industry).

Of the 727 girls, 22 per cent entered mercantile establishments, 75 per cent went into manufactures, 38 per cent entered machine-operating trades, and 28 per cent entered corset factories.