Trade organizations composed exclusively of women were instituted timidly and tentatively in the large cities.[180] Though protective rather than educational, the instruction given in the few trades unions established by and for women possessed a very broadening character. Able speakers, frequenting the meetings, familiarized the members with the economic theories advanced as to the value of the co-operative principle, the duties owed by the strong to the weak, and the correlation between woman’s best interests and the interests of the State. The experience of the trades unions proved the absurd fallacy of the time-worn objection against women’s guilds, “that it would unsex them,” for the effect of their organizations was to make their members more unselfish and more womanly, more apt to think of the good of all than of a part, and, through the importance of being one of a large body working for some common weal, less inclined to frivolous ends. To wage-working women, one important practical result of labor combinations was the concession made by legislators, through fear of losing the labor vote, to the demand for Bureaus of Labor Statistics, which should show the actual condition of men and women engaged in any and every department of labor. Massachusetts, always first in the field of reform, established such a bureau of labor statistics in 1869. Other States followed slowly in her wake. By 1887 twenty-two States had recognized the importance of having similar bureaus. Among them was “the Department of Labor,” instituted in Washington in 1885, for the purpose of doing collectively for the whole people what the individual States were to accomplish separately. When the Massachusetts Labor Bureau went into operation, its chief, General Henry K. Oliver, a man of liberal views, endeavored to ascertain the conditions under which industrial women worked. The means employed were: I. Personal investigation. II. Distribution of printed forms with blanks for employed and employers to fill. III. Summons to witnesses from the employed and employing classes to testify. IV. Soliciting information through correspondence. Through the recommendation of ladies interested in the question of ascertaining the conditions of working-women, General Oliver associated one of their own sex, Miss Adeline Bryant, with the work of the bureau. In the third year of the bureau’s existence five women were placed on the staff of helpers. The precedent set by Massachusetts of employing women as investigators was followed in turn by the other State bureaus and by the “Department of Labor” at Washington.