Boy Life and Labour 193 



wanders from one employer to another during 

 the following three years of his life, learning 

 little, if anything, likely to advance his future 

 career. His earnings are insufficient to enable 

 him to feed or clothe himself properly, conse- 

 quently many a lad drifts into the ranks of the 

 unemployable class. 1 That this is not an over- 

 drawn picture of the career of many town-bred 

 lads is proved by the result of Mr. Arnold Free- 

 man's history of seventy- one typical examples 

 of boy-workers between their fourteenth and 

 nineteenth years of age. He seems to have had 

 no great difficulty in obtaining sufficient details 

 concerning the career of these lads at school, 

 and of their parentage and home conditions to 

 enable him to form a fairly accurate opinion as 

 to their hereditary qualities. Mr. Freeman be- 

 lieves that the life-history of these seventy-one 

 individuals is representative of well above a 

 half of the juvenile population of the City of 

 Birmingham after they had passed through a 

 ten years' course of instruction in elementary 

 State-supported schools. But he rightly lays 

 stress on the fact that throughout their school- 



1 The Nineteenth Century and After, 1912, p. 962. 



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