"During the past year we have sought to discover, not by theorizing, but by uncovering the facts, what is the effect of street work on the boy. School records of 230 Buffalo newsboys were secured. Eighteen per cent were reported as truants; 23 per cent stood poor or very poor in attendance and deportment. Twenty-eight per cent stood poor or very poor in scholarship, while only 15 per cent of the other children in the same schools failed in their work. An investigation at the truant school showed that 46.6 per cent of the boys there had been engaged in the street trades. On the basis of these facts and studies made in connection with the schools, juvenile courts and reformatories elsewhere, we hope to secure legislation raising the age below which boys may not engage in the street trades to twelve years, and making it illegal for boys under fourteen to sell after 8 P.M. We are also striving to secure better enforcement of this law in Buffalo and other cities."[83] This folder also states that circular letters were sent to all Buffalo school principals asking about the effect on scholarship of the early morning delivery of newspapers by their pupils, and also to physicians inquiring about the effect of such work on physical development. The hours for such newspaper delivery were from 4.30 A.M. to 7 A.M. Eight principals and six physicians denounced such work to every one who favored it. Referring to the occupational history of reformatory inmates, a recent report for New York City says: "The parental school (school for truants) statistics show that 80 out of its 230 inmates were newsboys, while 60 per cent of the entire number have been street traders. The Catholic Protectorate, full of Italians (noted as street traders), gives us a record of 469 or 80 per cent out of their 590 boys interviewed, who have followed the street profession, and 295 or 50 per cent had been newsboys selling over three months. The New York Juvenile Asylum gives us 31 per cent of its inmates as newsboys and 60 per cent as street traders. The House of Refuge repeats the same story: 63 per cent of those committed to that institution had been street traders, of whom 32 per cent were newsboys. If 63 per cent of the House of Refuge inmates have been street traders, and if the majority of such have begun their so-called criminal careers, which end invariably in the state penitentiary, why do we permit children to trade on our streets?"[84] Another American writer says: "Whatever the cause, the effect on the newsboy is always the same. He lives on the streets at night in an atmosphere of crime and criminals, and he takes in vice and evil with the air he breathes. If he grows into manhood and escapes the tuberculosis which seizes so many of these boys of the street, the things that he has learned as a professional newsboy lead in one direction,--toward crime and things criminal. The professional newsboy is the embryo criminal."[85]