Often, given the honesty and intelligence, she must manufacture a child to fit the description. Sometimes all that is necessary is a hint about soap and water and a clean collar. Sometimes the big cupboard in her office must yield up a half-worn suit or a pair of shoes that some luckier boy has outgrown. Occasionally, hers is the delicate task of suggesting to a prematurely sophisticated little girl that some employers have an unreasonable prejudice against rouge and earrings; or that even the poorest people can wash their underwear. Manners frequently come in for attention.
When the boys or girls are placed, the Bureau, unlike most employment agencies, does not wash its hands of them. Its work has only begun. Each child is asked to report concerning his progress from time to time; and if he does not show up, a vocational supervisor keeps track of him by visits to home or office, or by letters, written quarterly. The Job Lady is able to observe by this method, whether or not the work is suitable for the child, or whether it offers him the best available chance; and she is often able to check the habit of "shifting" in its incipient stages. She is continually arbitrating and making adjustments, always ready to listen to childish woes and to allay them when she can.
Not long ago, I went to a conference on Vocational Guidance. There I heard, from the mouths of various men, what hope the work being done by the Bureau held for the future. One showed how it had infused new blood into the veins of an anemic educational system, how it was making the schools a more efficient preparation for life—the life of factory and shop and office—than they ever had been before.
Another man pointed out that the Bureau, through the schools, would strike at one of the deep roots of poverty—incompetency. More people are poor for lack of proper equipment to earn a living and proper direction in choosing a vocation, he said, than for any other one reason.
A third man saw in the Vocational Bureau a means of keeping a control over employing interests. "You treat our children well, and you pay them well," the schools of the future, he declared, would be able to say to the employer, as the Bureau was already saying, "or we won't permit our children to work for you." A fourth had a vision of what the Bureau and the new education it heralded could do toward educating the men and women of the future to a knowledge of their rights as workers.
And then there came a man with a plea. "All of these things," he said, "the Bureau can accomplish—must accomplish. But let us not forget, in our pursuance of great ends, that it is the essential humanness of the Bureau that has made it what it is."
Here was the final, immeasurable measure of its success. It counts, of course, that the Job Lady helps along big causes, drives at the roots of big ills; but, somehow it counts more that an anxious-faced youngster I saw at the Bureau should have brought his woes to her. His employer had given him a problem to solve—and he couldn't do it. He was afraid he'd lose his job. He had never been to the Bureau before, but "a boy you got a job for said you'd help me out," he explained—and he was sent off happy, the problem solved.
It counts too, that Tillie, who had once found work through the Bureau, but was now keeping house for her father, should turn to the Bureau for aid. Her father had been sick and couldn't afford to buy her anything new to wear. "My dress is so clumsy," she wrote, "that the boys laugh at me when I go out in the street." She was confident that the Job Lady would help her—and her confidence was not misplaced. It counts that the Jameses and Henrys and Johns and Marys and Sadies come, brimming over with joy, to tell the Job Lady of a "raise" or of a bit of approbation from an employer. All the funny, grateful, pathetic letters that pour in count unspeakably!
To hundreds of boys and girls and parents the Job Lady has proved a friend. There has been no nonsense about the matter. She has not sentimentalized over her work; she has not made it smack of charity. Indeed, there is no charity about it. The boys and girls and parents who come to the Job Lady are, for the most part, just average boys and girls and parents, as little paupers as millionaires. They are the people who are generally lost sight of in a democracy, where one must usually be well-to-do enough to, buy assistance, or poor enough to accept it as alms, if he is to have any aid at all in solving the problems of life.
It is a great thing for the schools, through the Bureau, to give to these average men and women and children practical aid in adjusting their lives to the conditions under which they live and work, and to do it with a sympathy and an understanding—a humanness that warms the soul.