Few of the employes understand or speak any English, and it was therefore not possible to converse with them. LAUNDRIES The 150 workers normally employed in Honolulu’s three steam laundries are exempt from all the minor and some of the major ills which commonly beset this class of wage-earners. The greatest gain is perhaps in the all-year-round opening of doors and windows, entirely obviating the collection of steam, gas fumes and other impurities. Then, too, the fact that two laundries conduct their work entirely on one floor removes the discomfort which ascending steam and heat brings when the wash-room is in a basement or lower floor. The only two-story laundry in the city has its wash-room on the second floor. A test of all the power-driven machinery demonstrates that no more effort than stepping down is required to operate any one of them:—a great and welcome contrast with the exhausting work described in Miss Butler’s “Women and the Trades” as performed by the Pittsburgh operators of laundry machinery. To cite only one instance: (1) _Pages 182-183._ “Cuff, neckband and yoke presses, and the wing point tipper for collars, operate in the same way as the body ironers. The cuff is placed over the saddle-shaped padded head; pressure of a treadle raises the head against a steam chest and the pressure of another treadle causes the head to drop back as the cuff is finished. Only by violent exertion can hot metal and padded head be forced together. By sheer physical effort, therefore, the operator presses each cuff four times, twice on a side, and the whole body of the girl is shaken by the force she is obliged to use. In one laundry the manager said: ‘No American girl can stand this. We have to use Hungarians or other foreigners. It seems to be unhealthful, but I don’t know——’ Yet American girls do stand it. I have seen them ironing at the rate of three cuffs a minute. The motion required for operating the tipper is as violent as that of the old-style cuff press, the pressure of either treadle requiring the utmost physical effort, but in each case where I saw the machine in use the operator was a young girl not over fifteen years of age, and she was white with the strain.”