II. Day nurseries, kindergartens, and manual training or industrial schools, which, either without compensation or at moderate prices, relieve working women of the care of their children during the hours when they are em ployed.
III. Agencies for the promotion of thrift, which provide easy means of saving small amounts, thus lessening the temptation to extravagance, and making the way easy for the safe investment of small sums.
IV. Dispensaries, which afford medical and surgical treatment and medicines either free or at small charge, treatment being given at the dispensary, or, when neces sary, by visits at the home of the patients made by dis pensary physicians.
The free employment agencies have sprung in part from the desire to substitute normal employment both for relief and for artificially created work, and in part from the discovery of outrageous abuses practised upon those needing employment by some of the ordinary com mercial agencies, which take advantage of the necessity of the poor to compel them to accept exorbitant terms. As far as the first of these two objects is concerned, the free bureaus have had very limited success. In order to win the confidence of employers, they are under the necessity of recommending only competent persons who can provide satisfactory references, but such persons can ordinarily find employment themselves. The natural re sult is that the lists of persons who are really placed in positions do not, to any very great extent, overlap the lists of the beneficiaries of relief societies. The natural beneficiary of the free employment agencies is in a slightly higher class industrially than the beneficiary of public or private relief agencies. Nevertheless, both the free em ployment agency and those which aid with the under standing that payment may be made after employment is secured, render an important service, and constitute an element in the general system of aiding those who are in distress which cannot be neglected. One of the oldest of these agencies is the Industrial Aid Society for the Pre vention of Pauperism, which has been in existence in the city of Boston since 1835. It conducts a free employment bureau, places men and women, boys and girls, singly and in families, for every variety of work, transient and perma nent, in city and in country. In the winter it employs
men in cleaning ice and snow from the railroads, streets, and yards. It also pursues the policy of sending to fac tory towns families with several children over fourteen years of age.
The most instructive experiment of this kind was that of the New York Employment Society, which grew out of the unusual distress of the winter of 1893-1894. The society was incorporated under the above name and later merged in the Cooper Union Labor Bureau, conducted for five years as a department of the New York Association for Improv ing the Condition of the Poor, and discontinued on Sep tember 30, 1900, after the establishment of a Free State Employment Bureau, and a general improvement in busi ness conditions, resulting in a decrease in the number of unemployed.
The principles laid down by this agency were that no man should be registered who had not been at least six months in the state. It was not the intention that benev olent funds should be allowed to attract the unemployed from the country or from other cities. Evidences of competency were also demanded. It was felt to be in admissible that the inefficient should be pushed ahead of capable men by the special efforts of the bureau, although there might perhaps be no objection to the practice on the part of personal friends, missionaries, and visitors of sup plementing individual efforts of inefficient, shiftless men in the hope of gradually transforming and developing the qualities in which they were deficient. Investigation of moral character was also held to be essential. Even com petent workmen, if addicted to drink, gambling, or other evil habits, were not to be aided by the bureau, and, finally, married men with families, or those having others dependent upon them, were given preference over single men. Were there sufficient work for all who were willing and competent and of good character, this principle would be void, but during periods of industrial depression, when there are several applicants for every vacant position, a discrimination was believed to be legitimate.