The municipal lodging-house in Chicago in addition to housing vagrants, makes an intelligent effort to put them into regular industry. A physician in attendance makes a careful examination of each man who comes to the lodging-house, and one winter we tried to see what connection could be genuinely established between premature labor and worn-out men. It is surprising to find how many of them are tired to death of monotonous labor, and begin to tramp in order to get away from it--as a business man goes to the woods because he is worn out with the stress of business life. This inordinate desire to get away from work seems to be connected with the fact that the men started to work very early, before they had the physique to stand up to it, or the mental vigor with which to overcome its difficulties, or the moral stamina which makes a man stick to his work whether he likes it or not. But we cannot demand any of these things from the growing boy. They are all traits of the adult. A boy is naturally restless, his determination easily breaks down, and he runs away. At least this seems to be true of many of the men who come to the lodging-house. I recall a man who had begun to work in a textile mill quite below the present legal age in New England, and who had worked hard for sixteen years. He told his tale with all simplicity; and, as he made a motion with his hand, he said, “I done that for sixteen years.” I give the words as he gave them. “At last I was sick in bed for two or three weeks with a fever, and when I crawled out, I made up my mind that I would rather go to hell than to go back to that mill.” Whether he considered Chicago as equivalent to that, I do not know; but he certainly tramped to Chicago, and has been tramping for four years. He does not steal. He works in a lumber camp occasionally, and wanders about the rest of the time getting odd jobs when he can; but the suggestion of a factory throws him into a panic, and causes him quickly to disappear from the lodging-house. The physician has made a diagnosis of general debility. The man is not fit for steady work. He has been whipped in the battle of life, and is spent prematurely because he began prematurely. Yet the state makes no careful study as to the effect upon children of the subdivided labor which many of them perform in factories. A child who remains year after year in a spinning room gets no instruction--merely a dull distaste for work. Often he cannot stand up to the grind of factory life, and he breaks down under it.