The next extended investigation into the occupations and history of wage-earning women was made in 1884, at the instigation of Mr. Carroll D. Wright, who, in 1874, had superseded General Oliver as chief of the Massachusetts Bureau. The research undertaken by Mr. Wright had for its object the ascertainment of the “moral, sanitary, physical, and economical” condition of all wage-earning women in Boston, except those employed in domestic service. This was a larger field than that covered in 1869. Woman’s occupations had multiplied in the earlier year five-fold over what they were in 1840, when, to Harriet Martineau’s surprise, seven vocations, outside of housework, were all into which the women of the United States had entered. In 1884 they were more than ten times seven. Methods of working had also become more difficult to classify. One by one domestic industries were relegated from the home to the factory. And in most of these, what had been done by one person had become differentiated into numerous parts, requiring the co-operation of many workers. Thus, in the occupation of making men’s and women’s clothing, there were classified in 1884 as many as 103 subdivisions. Altogether, in the seventy distinct industries catalogued, there were 354 subdivisions of industries, and each one of these parts employed a different set of workers. It was important that a number of representative women should be interviewed in each of these departments; for, even where each branch formed part of a distinct whole, each worker in those branches had interests at variance with the others. The force of women engaged in the industries of Boston had also seemingly almost doubled in the five years from 1880 to 1885. Exclusive of domestic service, the number of women in all other industries was estimated in the United States census of 1880 at 20,000; in the Massachusetts Census Report for 1885 at 39,647. With this apparent doubling of the population, the amount distributed in wages had not doubled, and so all that had been bad in the conditions of wage-earning women in previous years was heightened because there was nothing to relieve it. On account of all this, the appearance of the report of 1884 was anxiously looked for by large numbers of persons who had become familiar with the line of work of the bureaus. Great, therefore, was the public surprise at finding the whole report so biased in favor of the law-making, shop-keeping, manufacturing class as to prove valueless as an investigation into the condition of women dependent on wages for their living. The statistical information it contained, although arranged in the formidable manner common to the expert statistician, needed no careful scrutiny of its figures to establish the truth of Disraeli’s proposition that “nothing is so unreliable as facts, unless it is figures.”