Boys in American glass works are almost proverbially ill conducted. One manufacturer, in Ohio, said, in answer to an appeal for the education of the boys: “You can’t do anything for them. The little devils are vicious from their birth.” Statements of the same kind used to be made about the poor little victims in the English mills but it is not observed that the modern half timer, whose hours and health are protected by law, is any more vicious than other children. The principal of a Pennsylvanian school sets the corruption of the boys at a much later date than infancy. He says: “‘My observation is that when a boy leaves school and goes into the factory at twelve or thirteen, by the time he is fifteen or sixteen he is too foul-mouthed to associate with decent people.’”[51] Street occupations on the farther as on the hither side of the Atlantic are shown to form an easy avenue to worse things. “Although the street trades in Washington engage only one-fourth of the total number of children engaged in all occupations, yet of the number of children under 15 who have gone to the reform school, or who have been turned over by the courts to the care of the probation officers, over two-thirds have come from the ranks of the children engaged in the street trades.”[52] “A judge told the writer that one-third of all the delinquent boys brought before him had at one time or another served the public as messenger boys.”[53] Nor are those children of school age who go to work often found to be acquiring any sort of technical training or industrial skill. On the contrary, indeed; their employment is almost always of a kind that rather unfits them than prepares them to become industrially efficient. Sadly true are the words written by Mrs Kelley out of prolonged and wide experience. “The State which accepts the plea of poverty and permits the children of the poorest citizens to labour prematurely, accepts the heritage of new poverty flowing from two sources; namely, on the one hand, the relaxed efforts of fathers of families to provide for them, and on the other hand the corruption of weak children by inappropriate occupations which involve temptations beyond the child’s power of resistance and the exhaustion of strong children by overwork. It is exactly the most conscientious and promising children who are worked into the grave or into nervous prostration, or into that saddest state of all, the moral fatigue which enables a man to sit idly about for years while his wife or his sister or his children support him.”[54]