_Paper Staining, Colouring and Enamelling._ 1895 Factories 4,254 983 2,916 540 Workshops 102 28 74 16 1896 Factories 4,468 1,065 3,114 577 Workshops 138 70 111 42 1897 Factories 4,795 1,368 3,395 784 Workshops 40 66 33 38 1898-99(a) Factories 4,874 1,320 3,529 746 _Envelope Making._ 1897 Factories 1,203 4,156 8 96 2,865 Workshops 37 292 25 191 1898-99(a) Factories 1,405 4,996 1,030 3,313 (a) Factories only. These figures must not be compared with the census returns as they relate only to those establishments making reports to the Factory Inspectors under the Factory and Workshop Law. CHAPTER III. _WOMEN'S WORK AND ORGANISATION._ [Sidenote: Women as Compositors. Historical.] The subdivision of labour which has broken up the original printing "profession" into a score or so of different trades, each minutely subdivided in turn, has been the chief cause of the employment of women in this industry in modern times, although it appears that nuns were engaged as compositors at the Ripoli Monastery Press in Florence towards the end of the fifteenth century,[5] within half a century of the introduction of printing. Only very exceptional women could obtain a footing in a profession which embraced typefounding, ink-making, press-carpentry, composing, folding, and bookbinding. The United States, where, in so many respects, women have stepped in advance of European conditions, boasts of Jenny Hirsch, who carried on a printer's business in Boston about 1690, and during the next two centuries women printers were common in the thirteen States. It was a woman, Mary Catherine Goddard, who printed the first issue of the "Declaration of Independence." The years of the French Revolution also seem to be marked by the number of women engaged in the printing trade, whether owing to the general emancipating impulses of the time or to the increased demand for compositors, is not quite clear. The amiable and eccentric Thomas Beddoes, moved by the interest he took in social affairs, and inspired by the emancipatory movement of his time, had been struck with the opening which the printing trades seemed to offer to women, and gave his "Alexander's Expedition"[6] to a woman of his village, Madely, to set up. "I know not," he wrote in the Advertisement to the book, "if women be commonly engaged in printing, but their nimble and delicate fingers seem extremely well adapted to the office of compositor, and it will be readily granted that employment for females is amongst the greatest _desiderata_ of society." In England, however, the labour of women