is the first step toward a general bettering of all trades and their wage; and for fullest details of this, and work in connection with the admirable Bourse du Travail, one of its most important features of working life to-day in Paris, the reader must turn to the reports themselves, beginning with the first one, issued in 1887-88.[37] The same facts may be said to form the story of labor in Belgium, in Switzerland, in Italy, and at all points where women or children are at work, whether in factory or mine or workshop.  For Belgium the situation is summed up in a very important and minute report of the government inquiry commission into the labor of women and children,—­the first made in 1867 and followed by one in 1874, the latest having been made in 1891.[38]

A comprehensive law, promulgated Nov. 2, 1892, and regulating the labor of women and children in factories and mines, was amended in May, 1893, by the addition of very specific regulations as to all employments affecting health and morals.  The Presidential decree consists of two parts,—­the first dealing with the employment of women and children in connection with machinery when in motion, or in which the dangerous parts are not fully protected, in glass-blowing and in carrying weights.  The second part of the decree consists of three tables, of which A enumerates certain industries, chiefly the manufacture of acids, dyes, chemicals, etc., also manures and glass, crystal, and metal polishing, in which female and child labor are prohibited; B those in which children under eighteen must not work, chiefly the manufacture of explosives; and C, a large variety of other industries in which female and child labor is only allowed conditionally.  The great majority of these are industries involving special risk through the disengagement of dust-particles or vapors; while a few are ranked as dangerous, owing to risk of fire and the contraction of special diseases, etc.

Belgium, French in feeling and in methods, has known some of the worst abuses discoverable on continental soil, thousands of women and children in her mines having toiled from twelve to sixteen hours a day, with often no Sunday rest, for a wage at bare subsistence point.  In “Germinal,” Zola, who spent months observing every phase of their life, has given a picture, unsurpassed in any literature, of the misery and degradation of the worker.  An investigation in 1874, and indignation at some of the conditions then discovered, brought about modifications of the law.  That of the general congress of 1891 accomplished much more; but work must still be done before any very marked advance becomes discernible.