“By reason of its immense population, its numerous and extensive manufactures, its wealth, its poverty, and general cosmopolitan character, New York City presents a field for investigation into the subject of ’Working-Women, their Trades, Wages, Home and Social Conditions,’ unequalled by any other centre of population in America.  It opens up a wider and more diversified field for inquiry, study, and classification of the various industries in which women seek employment, than can be found even in European cities, with but few if any exceptions.  It is for such reasons that the inquiry of the bureau into this special subject has been largely confined to the city named.”

Two hundred and forty-seven trades are given in this report, in which some two hundred thousand women were found to be engaged, this being exclusive of domestic service.  The divisions of the subject were substantially those adopted by the Massachusetts Bureau; but the numbers and complexity of conditions made the inquiry far more difficult.  Its results and their bearings will find place later on.  It is sufficient now to say that the two may be regarded as summarizing all phases of work for women, and as an index to the difficulties at all other points in the country.

The Bureau of Labor for Connecticut sent out its first report in the same year (1885), and included investigations and statistics in the same lines, though, for reasons specified, in much more limited degree.  That for 1886 for the same State took up in detail some points in regard to the work of both women and children, which, for want of both time and space, had been omitted in the first, their returns coinciding in all important particulars with those of the other bureaus.

In 1886 the California Bureau of Labor touched the same points, but only incidentally, in its general analysis of the labor question.  In the following year, however, the report covering the years 1887 and 1888 took up the question under the same aspects as those handled in the special reports on this topic, and gave full treatment of the wages, lives, and general conditions for working-women.  It included, also, the facts, so far as they could be ascertained, of the nature, wages, and conditions of domestic service in California,—­the first attempt at treating this difficult subject with any accuracy.  The apprentice system, and an important chapter on manual training and its bearings make this report one of the most valuable, from the social point of view, that has been given, though where all are invaluable it is hard to characterize one above another.

Mr. Tobin, for California, and Mr. Hutchins, for Iowa, seemed moved at the same time in much the same way,—­the Iowa report for 1887 treating the many questions involved with that largeness which has thus far distinguished work in this direction.  Kansas, in the report for 1888, gave general conditions, women being treated incidentally; and Minnesota, in the report for the years 1887 and 1888, gave a chapter on working-women, wages, etc.