The emergence of the youth salvation campaign at the turn of the century was certainly conditioned by middle-class perceptions of young workers' heightened visibility in Germany's flourishing urban centers and of their ever-greater indispensability as a major component of the Empire's economically vital industrial labor force. Young workers became both symbols and symptoms of the rapid social and economic modernization that Germany was undergoing: the massive migration from rural settlements and small towns to large cities, the shift from employment on farms and in handicraft workshops to wage labor in factories and offices, the transformation of Germany from an agrarian to an industrial state. Thus an analysis of youth as a sector of the population and as part of the work force during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries forms a necessary prerequisite for comprehending the anxieties, aspirations, and demands of the youth savers. In this context, it is also worthwhile to examine the legal provisions applying to youth in the Industrial Code. There are several reasons for doing so. First, since factory and apprenticeship regulations determined matters like the length of the workday and safety precautions, they concretely affected the physical and material well-being of young workers. Recognizing this, youth savers could propose amendments to the laws that would, for example, improve the health of young workers, thus safeguarding their fitness for military service or motherhood, as the case might be. Second, the laws embodied widely shared middle-class assumptions about the degree of autonomy youth should have from their families, the role of adults as moral overseers and preceptors, and the nature and importance of learning to labor.