It is to Massachusetts that we owe the first formal, trustworthy examination into the status of the working-woman, and the remarkable reports of that Bureau of Labor, under the management of Mr. C. D. Wright, have been the model for all later work in the same direction. As the result of a steadily growing interest in the subject, we have now under the same admirable management, the first authoritative statement of conditions as a whole. The fourth annual report of the United States Bureau of Labor, entitled, "Working-women in Large Cities," gives us the result of some three years' diligent work in collecting information as to every phase of the working-woman's life, from the trade itself, with its possibilities and abuses, to the personal characteristics of the woman who had chosen it. It is not only the student of social science who needs to study the volume, but the working-women themselves will find here the answer to many questions, and to some of the charges now and then brought against them as a class. The value of figures like these is seldom at once apparent, since many facts seem isolated and irrelevant. But the fact that they have not been gathered in the interest of a theory but are set down merely as material for deduction, gives them a value, not always attached to figures, and will make them serve as the basis of many a practical reform. It is women earning a living at manual labor who are meant by working-women, and thus all professional and semi-professional occupations, such as teaching, stenography, typewriting, and telegraphy, with the thousands who are employed in them, are excluded from the report. Outside of these occupations, three hundred and forty-three distinct industries have been investigated. Twenty-two cities have given in returns, all representative as to locality, and ending with San Francisco and San Jose for the Pacific slope. Personal interviews were had by the government agents, with 17,427 women, this being, according to the estimate of the report, from six to seven per cent. of the whole number of women engaged in the class of work coming under observation. I am convinced that this estimate of the United States report is very misleading. The 17,427 women being six per cent. of all those engaged in the three hundred and forty-two industries investigated, the total so employed in the twenty-two cities would be 290,450, which on the face of it appears to be absurd. The New York Commissioner of Labor, in the report of his Bureau for 1885, estimates that there were, in 1884, over 200,000 women employed in the various trades in the city of New York alone. Neither of these reports includes women employed in rougher manual labor, such as scrubbing, washing, and domestic service. If the New York Commissioner's estimate for New York City is correct, and I confess it seems to me to be nearly so, and if Mr. Wright's estimate is as much too low in all the