g-goods factory, $232.24;
millinery, $345.95; paper-box factory, $240.47; plug-tobacco factory,
$235.67; printing-office, $300; skirt factory, $265.40; smoking-tobacco
factory, $238.70.

These, so far as they have been collected and tabulated by the various
labor bureaus, are the returns for the United States as a whole. The
reports for the following years of 1891 and 1892 were expected to be far
more general, but this has not proved to be the case.

AVERAGE WAGE PER STATE.

Maine $5.50
Massachusetts 6.68
Connecticut 6.50
Rhode Island 5.87
New York 5.85
New Jersey 5.00
California 6.00
Colorado 6.00
Kansas 5.17
Wisconsin 5.17
Minnesota 6.00
All cities 5.24

FOOTNOTES:

[23] Third Annual Report of New York Bureau of Labor, p. 162. These are
Mr. Peck's figures; but the United States report gives the average for
skilled labor as $5.85 per week, and adds that the unskilled earns far
less.

[24] Ibid. p. 165.

[25] New York Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Third Annual Report, p. 27.

VII.

GENERAL CONDITIONS FOR ENGLISH WORKERS.

So far as opportunity is concerned, it is the United States only that
offers a practically unlimited field to women workers, to whom some four
hundred trades and occupations are now open. Comparison with other
countries is, however, essential, if we would judge fairly of conditions
as a whole; and thus we turn first to that other English-speaking race,
and the English worker at home. At once we are faced with the
impossibility of gathering much more than surface indications, since in
no other country is there any counterpart to our admirable system of
investigation and tabulation, each year more and more systematic and
thorough. In spite of the fact that factory laws had their birth in
England, and that the whole system of child labor--the early horrors of
which find record in thousands of pages of special reports from
inspectors appointed by government--has been through their means
modified and improved, there are, even now, no sources of information as
to numbers at work or the characteristics of special industries. The
census must be the chief dependence; and here we find the enormous
proportions to which the employment of women has attained.

In 1861 these returns gave for England and Wales 1,024,277 women at
work