Dr. Lee's social assistants found that a good many of these girls had no habits of eating. It was not that their habits were so bad, but that they had none of any kind. Sometimes they ate very well and sometimes they did not. Then he found, as of course one would know that he would, the psychical factors in many of these cases--their love affairs and other worries which were often much more deleterious to their health than their habits of sleep or food or even their industrial conditions. When, therefore, one tries to consider industrial disease, one must realize how complex a thing it is, how essential it is to go beyond the inspection of the factory and to study all the conditions of the lives of the people that one is concerned with. In a big Western American town that I visited recently, where the automobile tire industry was employing some fifty thousand hands in factories, the most obvious cause for ill health was the tremendous congestion in that town, and as a result the fearful state of the available lodgings. Again most of the factory hands were foreigners; very few of them spoke English; they were wholly dislocated from normal family life, from any connection with their own countries and from their own previous interests. That is in itself a dangerous condition for hygiene as well as for morals. Factors like that must be taken account of when we want to help anybody to get free of the troubles, the fatigue or strain or debility, which we are apt to attribute to industry. We are keen, and rightly keen, to find and to abolish poisons, such as lead, such as phosphorus, such as carbon monoxide. We ought to be keen to study poisons of that kind, and more interest has lately been concentrated upon them through war work and war industries than ever before. But there are moral poisons which we do not notice or mention. _Monotony, for instance._ Monotony is not altogether a horrible or hateful fact. Most of us want _some_ monotony in our day. We want a rhythm and a certain recurrence in it, whereby our work comes to seem familiar to us and we do somewhere near the same thing each day. There is rest in that. But _how much_ we need is individual; the dose of monotony, the amount that is good for you and for me is limited. People often get too much, and when they get too much, then it is a moral poison. One of the most appalling things, I think, is its effect upon the mind. I have often wondered whether I ever had or ever would have any mind again, when I have come to the end of such a day. Any one of us, of course, can duplicate that experience, and it certainly ought to make us think hard about the lives of manual workers whose days are quite likely to be like that right along. At the end of such a monotonous day a person may be pretty reckless, may feel that he does not care what happens to him. I have met that in a great many histories. It is not so much that monotony makes machines of them as that it makes wild animals of them.