Other states having the advanced type of child labor law prohibit the employment of children under fourteen years in the messenger service during the day and under sixteen years at night. The states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Wyoming do not yet provide any age limit for this work. The evil effects of the messenger service have also been noted in Great Britain. A schoolmaster of Edinburgh says, "Insolence, coarse intonation, swearing, lying, pilfering and lewdness are the chief products of message going by boys."[76] A London health officer has testified as follows: "There is a very large employment of boy labour now, boys employed as messengers and errand boys, which teaches them nothing useful for their future life; and when they have outgrown the age at which they can be employed in this way, the risk of drifting into the ranks of the unskilled labourer is a very large one."[77] "The government post office telegraph messengers are not employed unless they have passed the seventh standard at school and each candidate has to provide a satisfactory certificate of health from his own medical attendant. A boy of fourteen must also be over four feet eight inches in height. The minimum starting wage in London is seven shillings a week, rising by a shilling a week annually to eleven shillings. On reaching the age of sixteen the boy has to pass a further examination in order to qualify for retention. The various _private_ telegraph companies offer much the same terms, though in some cases they are able to get boys slightly cheaper, as the qualifying standard is not such a high one. It is only during the rare periods when the supply of boy labour is more plentiful than usual that the private telegraph companies will refuse a boy on account of his size. The varied nature of the work they are called upon to perform is an undoubted attraction in the eyes of many.... That it is bad for them morally is less open to doubt. Even when they are more actively employed the most that they can hope to learn is a very small amount of discipline. A more serious point is the future of the boys when they cease to be messengers."[78] "It is well to point out that the commonest of these occupations, that of errand boy or messenger boy, is seldom a desirable one, quite apart from the fact that it generally leads nowhere. It lacks almost necessarily what the boy most needs--the compulsory training of the habit of disciplined effort."[79] As Mrs. Florence Kelley says, "The test of the work, however, should be not whether boys can do it, but what it does to boys."[80] CHAPTER VI EFFECTS OF STREET WORK UPON CHILDREN