Such was the character of native American labor, less than forty years ago, and such, almost, it still remains in those, now few, centers of industry where it has been little diluted with a foreign element. Nowhere is this so conspicuously the case as in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and especially in the western valleys of the former State, where important mill-streams, such as the Housatonic, the Naugatuck, and the Farmington, are lined with mills still largely manned by native Americans. Aside from wages, which will be separately considered, the housing, education, sobriety, and pauperism of any given industrial community form together the best possible test of its social condition. In regard to the housing of labor, there is no more important fact to be discovered than the proportion of an operative population who possess in fee simple the houses in which they dwell. This proportion among the wage-earners of Massachusetts is remarkably high, one working man in every four being the proprietor of the house in which he lives. Of the remaining three-fourths, 45 per cent. rent their houses, and 30 per cent. are boarders. With regard to inhabitancy, the average number of persons living in one house in Massachusetts is rather more than six, while the average number of the Massachusetts family is four and three quarter persons. Hence, lodgers being excepted, almost every operative family in this State lives under its own roof, while one fourth of all such roofs are owned by the heads of families dwelling therein. I leave, for a moment, the agreeable task of describing one of these homes of native American labor, and pass on to the question of education, whose universality among native Americans is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the following facts. Of 1,200 persons born in Massachusetts, whether of native or foreign parents, only one is unable to read or write, while four Germans and Scotch, six English, twenty French Canadians, twenty-eight Irish, and thirty-four Italians, out of every 100 emigrants of these nationalities respectively are illiterate. The total number of public, elementary, and high schools in the United States is 225,800, or about one school for every 200 of the entire population, and one for, say, every fifty of the 10,000,000 pupils who attended school during the census year of 1880. Finally, referring once more to Massachusetts, there are nearly 2,000 free libraries in this single State, or one to every 800 inhabitants, and these, together, own 3,500,000 volumes, and circulate 8,000,000 of volumes annually.