As to numbers employed in trades and industries, it is difficult to secure them with exactness.  The census of 1871 reported three tenths of the population as agricultural, the males employed in agriculture being 2,338,174, and the females 4,426,573.  Household service had 840,000 women on its rolls.  In 1875 the cotton-mills employed in weaving and spinning 95,934 women; the woollen manufacture, nearly 193,000; linen, hemp, and jute, 190,000.  The labor of women and children was hardly recognized, and statistics had to be disentangled as best they might be from general tables of occupations.  Through the persistent efforts of the Centre in the German Reichstag, a gradual betterment of the working-classes has been brought about, and thus indirectly that of women and children,—­the first combined and determined effort being made in 1889, when three bills were brought up for discussion.  The first made the working-day not to exceed eleven hours; the second demanded the suspension of industrial labor on Sunday, save in exceptional cases, when five hours’ labor was to be allowed; the third concerned the labor of women and children, and with some modifications is practically the law to-day.  Night and Sunday labor in mines, smelting-works, rolling-mills, and dockyards is entirely forbidden, nor can married women work more than ten hours a day.  The Federal Council has the right also to forbid the employment of women and children in all factories and establishments where health and morals are exposed to exceptional dangers.

At the period at which the investigations which brought about the agitation of the question were made, the number of child laborers had increased in two years from 155,000 to 192,000, children hardly more than babies being in the factories.  At present the law forbids the employment of any child under twelve, and not less than three hours’ schooling daily is compulsory.  Abuses exist at all points, women workers in mines faring, even with shortened day, in very evil case,—­the wage at or below subsistence point and the general conditions of the most hopeless order.  Constant agitation goes on in the Reichstag, and organization among the women themselves will in time bring about needed reforms; but as a whole the German woman is in many points less considered than the women of any other civilized nation.

Though Italy is pre-eminently an agricultural country, and men, women, and children are alike employed in agricultural pursuits, there has been no trustworthy record of numbers engaged.  In manufacturing there are more statistics, but interest in the woman’s share in labor is of recent date.  In the silk manufacture, in which Italy ranks second only to China, and far beyond all other competitors, 81,165 women and 25,373 children were employed in 1877, chiefly in unwinding cocoons, the number at present having increased nearly ten per cent.  In the cotton industry there were employed, at the time of the same census,