It was not expected that immature girls of fourteen or fifteen years of age would, immediately on entering the market, make large salaries or be broad-minded citizens. The hope was to give them a foundation which would enable them to adapt themselves to situations best fitted to their abilities and to make possible a steady advance toward better occupations, wages, and living. In order to do this, each girl on entering the school must be regarded as having capacity for some special occupation. This aptitude must be discovered that she may be placed where she can attain her highest efficiency as rapidly as possible. She must be treated individually, not as one of a class. Her own efforts must be awakened, her handicaps, such as inadequate health and unadaptable education, must be removed, and her training proceed in a way to give her possession of her powers. Conditions among the Workers The conditions of life among many of the wage-earners of New York City are, briefly stated, as follows: Thousands of families are so poor that the children must go to work the moment the compulsory school years are over. In 1897, 14,900 boys and girls dropped from the fifth school grade, most of them going to work from necessity more or less pressing. To rise to important positions in factories, workrooms, or department stores will require a practical combination of any needed craft with the ability to utilize their school education in rapid deductions, business letters, accounts, and trade transactions. The public school offers such children a general education which will be completed in the eighth grade, but the majority leave before that time. For varying reasons, such as their foreign birth, irregular attendance, the impossibility of much personal attention in the crowded classes of a great city, poor conditions of health, and the desire of the pupils to escape the routine of school as soon as the law will allow, the greater number of them, who go early into trade, have not had a satisfactory education for helping them in their working life. Year after year are they found wanting, and yet young workers still come from the schools at fourteen with poor health, little available hand skill, unprepared to write business letters or to express themselves clearly either by tongue or pen, uninterested in the daily news except in personal or tragic events, unaware of municipal conditions affecting them, ignorant of the simple terms of business life, and with their arithmetic unavailable for use, even in the simple fundamental processes when complicated with details of trade. The mechanical processes, therefore, which they do know are now useless unless they can first think out the problem.