The investigations of the bureau of 1869 covered the thirty-five industries in which the working-women of Massachusetts were then engaged. Published in 1870, the report of the bureau corroborated the accounts given by the press of that year concerning the low wages, long hours of work, and miserable state of living that was the lot of the wage-earning women in the manufacturing towns of Massachusetts. General Oliver himself assisted in the personal investigation carried on in Boston. Accompanied by the Chief of Police, he visited the homes of “poor-paid laborers,”—women and men,—and found that the homes of the laborers are a pretty accurate index of the social, industrial, sanitary, educational, and moral standard of the laborers themselves. The result of his work was a recommendation for further and more thorough research. “Such investigations,” he said, “will reveal a state of things at which the people of Massachusetts will gaze with amazement, disgust, and anger, and demand a bettering of the wrong.” Investigations by blanks and by summons to witnesses was less successful than the personal interview. The mass of the people were ignorant of what the bureau sought to accomplish by their questions; hence not more than twenty per cent. of the employers and thirty-three per cent. of the employed addressed returned replies. A dread on the part of manufacturers and shopkeepers, lest “out of their own mouths they should be condemned,” prevented them from answering, and those under them were restrained to silence through fear of losing employment. In spite of the risk, courageous women replied to the blanks and gave personal testimony sufficient to enable the commission to form a partial estimate of the social and economic conditions of the whole. The statistics presented by the bureau were said to have reached “the very verge of human society.” Said Mrs. Atkinson, speaking of the reports on the working-women, “The stern fact, the thrilling incident, the woeful spectacle, the harrowing sight of squalor and wretchedness are marshaled before our eyes in a great and terrible array.” The subjects investigated were: Housework, Hotel and Saloon work, Home work, Store work. Under the Home work was classified sale work; under Store work, clerks, accountants, saleswomen, and cash girls. All that could be found out concerning women in these employments was printed and presented by General Oliver to the Legislature and to the public, without any of the softening touches common to later reports.