According to Miss Mary Van Kleeck’s estimate in her study of “Working Girls in Evening Schools,” less than one per cent. of those attending were restaurant workers. They simply have not the physical strength for outside activities and interests. Time after time in answer to the question “What do you do in the evening?” came the reply, “Oh, I go right to bed.” One girl, who left the work because of broken health, said, “If I went out in the evening I’d be sick the next day, and the boss would say I couldn’t expect to do good work if I stayed out late at night.” The report on restaurants of the Chicago Juvenile Protective Association, emphasizes a truth too much ignored when it says: “The entire investigation revealed once more the hideous risks of the excessively fatigued and overworked girl, who is able to obtain the rest and comfort she craves only through illicit channels.”[6] [Illustration: Restaurant Kitchen Opening on Row of Toilets. Loaned by the Tenement House Department of the City of New York.] NIGHT WORK AND ONE DAY’S REST IN SEVEN. Although the number of women employed in restaurants at night is not great, night work in this occupation is a factor to be seriously considered. The restaurants which employ women at night are the small establishments in the tenement districts of the city where hours are longest and surroundings most trying; the cheaper restaurants in the theatre districts where the employment of women is an added attraction to after-the-theatre supper parties; and restaurants in railway stations which are necessarily open all night. The law makes it illegal to employ women in factories and mercantile establishments between 10 p. m. and 6 a. m. The reasons which caused the state to exercise its police power to safeguard the health and morals of these classes of workers apply equally to the employment of women in restaurants. The very fact that only four per cent. of the workers interviewed were employed at night proves that night work for women in restaurants is not a necessary evil. That it is an evil is beyond question. The dangers of night work are two-fold. First, it is a distinct menace to the health of the worker. The Factory Investigating Commission in its Report to the Legislature for 1913, states: “The chief danger to health from night work is ... due to the inevitable lack of sleep and sunlight. Recuperation from fatigue takes place fully only in sleep, and best in sleep at night. Hence night work is, in a word, against nature. This injury to health is all the greater because sleep lost at night by working women is never fully made up by day. For, in the first place, sleep in the day time is not equal in recuperative power to sleep at night.... Moreover, quiet and privacy for sleep by day is almost impossible to secure. Upon returning home in the middle of the night or at dawn the workers can snatch at most only a few hours’ rest.”