All day through the busy streets of the shopping district they passed--the city's handicapped girls. Some were held back from the best that life can give by poverty, which like a great yawning chasm lies between the girl and all her natural desires and ambitions, some held back from the joy of simple, natural living by the forced, artificial social system of which they are a part, some pitiful specimens of physical and mental handicap and some who showed the strain of the handicap of sin, mingled in that Christmas crowd.
Through the open door of great sea-port cities there have poured during the years past steady streams of handicapped girls. They are poor, they are plunged into a life whose manners and customs they cannot grasp, they are handicapped by a language they do not understand and by great expectations seldom destined to be fulfilled.
According to our government statistics during nineteen hundred twelve, ninety three thousand, two hundred sixty-one (93,261) girls from fifteen to twenty-one years of age came to us from across the sea and in three years an army of two hundred forty-six thousand, five hundred fifty-four (246,554) became a part of the girl problem our country must meet. It is hard to picture in concrete fashion how great this host of girlhood is. Sometimes when one looks into the faces of a thousand college girls at Wellesley, Vassar, or Smith and realizes that in a single year more than ninety three times as many girls from fifteen to twenty-one came to test the opportunities of a new land, the significance of the figure becomes a little more clear to him. When he realizes that in three years enough young girls land in this country to found a city the size of Rochester or St. Paul, when he tries to imagine this army of girls marching six abreast through city streets for hours and hours until the thousands upon thousands, representing scores of tongues and nations, have passed, some conception of the great task facing any organization attempting to direct that army of unprepared, unequipped and largely unprotected girlhood comes to him.
[Illustration: UNCONSCIOUS OF HER HANDICAPS SHE ANTICIPATES KEENLY LIFE IN THE NEW WORLD]
Where will they be in another year--those ninety-three thousand and more who came to us in nineteen hundred twelve? What an array of factories and kitchens, what rows of dingy tenements, the moving picture film could reveal to us if it followed these handicapped girls! It does not follow them--they come in over the blue waters of the bay, look with shining eyes at Liberty with her promise of fulfilment of all the heart's desires, they sit in the long rows of benches at Ellis Island, pass through the gate and are gone, the majority to be lost in the mass that struggles for a mere livelihood--just the chance to keep on living.