Sorry that I can't figure out how to submit this as a correction of data on this film.
The credit should go not to a "novel" by the great social reformer Jane Addams, but rather to her "treatise," "A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil" (New York: Macmillan, 1912), which gives her findings and reflections on the records of the Juvenile Protection Agency of Chicago and court proceedings . This is the title on the spine of the book shown in the film.
An electronic version in Project Gutenberg is available.
Here is the passage from "A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil" that Weber's film quotes in part at the beginning, and which is then developed in the screenplay:
"Yet factory girls who are subjected to this overstrain and overtime often find their greatest discouragement in the fact that after all their efforts they earn too little to support themselves. One girl said that she had first yielded to temptation when she had become utterly discouraged because she had tried in vain for seven months to save enough money for a pair of shoes. She habitually spent two dollars a week for her room, three dollars for her board, and sixty cents a week for carfare, and she had found the forty cents remaining from her weekly wage of six dollars inadequate to do more than re-sole her old shoes twice. When the shoes became too worn to endure a third soling and she possessed but ninety cents towards a new pair, she gave up her struggle; to use her own contemptuous phrase, she 'sold out for a pair of shoes.'"
