Economically speaking, the worst of all the evils society perpetrated against the working-women was that of forcing her into long hours of continuous labor; for, whether standing at the looms and in the stores, or sitting at the sewing-machine, specific diseases of the sexual organs were induced, causing marriage to be followed by miscarriage or sickly children. No original statistics were collected by the bureau to show how far the health and morals of women engaged in industries were affected by their employments, and what relation this influence exerted in reference to woman’s position in the State. While this prevented the report from being of full service to the political economist, to the historian its pages were valuable as forming a succession of _genre_ pictures, otherwise unattainable, of the proletarian women, as they lived, labored, and suffered in New York City in 1885. An epidemic of investigation into women’s condition as wage-workers followed the New York report. Five States—Maine, California, Colorado, Iowa, and Minnesota—prepared separate chapters on the subject of the working-women for their Bureaus of Labor Statistics for 1887–1888. In New Jersey, although no original investigation was made by the State, the bureau reprinted in 1887 a large portion of an excellent report on “Woman’s Work and Wages,” gathered by Mrs. Barry in 1886 by order of the Knights of Labor. The latest, and what should have been the best report, was a national research into the social and economic environments of wage-earning women in twenty-two of the largest and most representative cities in the United States. This investigation, conducted under the auspices of the Central Bureau at Washington, comprehended statistics gained through interviewing and questioning personally 17,427 women engaged in industrial pursuits. Undertaken in 1888, this national report was printed in 1889, under the title of “Working-women in Large Cities.” It formed a volume of 631 pages, mostly statistical tables, framed so as to seem to cover the most important points concerning women as industrial workers.