In a report upon the physical conditions of child workers in Pennsylvania, the Rev. Peter Roberts has discussed at some length the moral dangers of factory employment for children. He quotes an Allentown physician as saying, “No vice was unknown to many of the girls of fifteen working in the factories of the city;” and another physician in the same city said, “There are more unhappy homes, ruined lives, blasted hopes, and diseased bodies in Allentown than any other city of its size, because of the factories there.” Another physician, in Lancaster, is quoted as saying that he had “treated boys of ten years old and upwards for venereal affections which they had contracted.”[134] In upwards of a score of factory towns I have had very similar testimony given to me by physicians and others. The proprietor of a large drug store in a New England factory town told me that he had never known a place where the demand for cheap remedies for venereal diseases was so great, and _that many of those who bought them were boys under fifteen_. Nor is it only in factories that these grosser forms of immorality flourish. They are even more prevalent among the children of the street trades, newsboys, bootblacks, messengers, and the like. The proportion of newsboys who suffer from venereal diseases is alarmingly great. The Superintendent of the John Worthy School of Chicago, Mr. Sloan, asserts that “One-third of all the newsboys who come to the John Worthy School have venereal disease, and that 10 per cent of the remaining newsboys at present in the Bridewell are, according to the physicians’ diagnosis, suffering from similar diseases.”[135] The newsboys who come to the school are, according to Mr. Sloan, on an average one-third below the ordinary standard of physical development, a condition which will be readily understood by those who know the ways of the newsboys of our great cities—their irregular habits, scant feeding, sexual excesses, secret vices, sleeping in hallways, basements, stables, and quiet corners. With such a low physical standard the ravages of venereal diseases are tremendously increased. [Illustration: SILK MILL GIRLS AFTER TWO YEARS OF FACTORY LIFE ]