of the United States,” issued with every decade.  These volumes, accessible to everybody, and arranged with marvelous skill and lucidity, offer to the social observer a complete, accurate, and suggestive survey of every field comprised within the vast domain of the national interests.  An evening’s address would not more than suffice to indicate the scope and appraise the value of this work, which is a mine wherein, the ore ready dressed to his hand, the politico-economic or industrial essayist might work for years without exhausting its riches.

But the United States Census does not treat specifically of wages and subsistence, and it is to the Massachusetts Labor Bureau that we must again turn for such information as we now require.  Dr. Edward Young, indeed, the late chief of the United States Bureau of Statistics, published an elaborate work upon this subject in 1875, but his comparisons as to the relative cost of living in America and Europe, good in themselves, are rendered of little value by the absence of such statistics as would give the true percentage of difference between American and foreign wages.  Several elaborate wages reports were also published between 1879 and 1882, which, while they gave the American side of the question with great fullness, presented foreign wages very incompletely.

Always, however, impressed with the importance of making an accurate comparison between wages and the cost of subsistence on the two sides of the Atlantic, but unable to undertake a very wide inquiry with the funds at its disposal, the Massachusetts Bureau determined, in the fall of 1883, upon reducing to narrower limits than heretofore the field of investigation.  Instead of America and Europe, Massachusetts and Great Britain were selected for comparison, the former as the chief manufacturing State of America, the latter as her leading competitor.

With this view, a number of agents were sent to gather personally, from the pay rolls of American and English manufactories, the rates of wages paid in twenty-four of the leading industries which are common to the two districts respectively.  It was, at first, sought to extend the inquiry to thirty-five different industries, a number which would practically have covered the whole ground, but nine of these were finally abandoned for want of sufficient British information.

It is a perfectly easy thing, as already indicated, to gather wage or other statistics in the counting-houses of Massachusetts manufactories, but quite a different matter when a collection of similar information is attempted in this country, where most proprietors are unwilling, and many altogether refuse, to give any information regarding their industries.

The following table, of which an enlarged facsimile, marked A, appears on the wall, specifies the twenty-four industries from which the returns in question were made, and the number of establishments making such returns in each industry in either country: