34
SEX IN INDUSTRY.
many laborers and an abundant harvest. Few, however, have entered the corresponding field of inquiry in industry. Strange as it appears, widely and ably conducted as the investigations of various governments have been into the processes and influences bearing unfavorably upon the health of working- people, with frequent special attention to their results upon child-bearing and nursing women, and (in a general way) upon children of tender years, there seems to have been no effort made by authority, until that of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor in 1874, to determine the far more important, the cardinal relation which labor bears to this essential attribute of the forming woman, on which so certainly hinge all other vital results.
It is curious, in this connection, to note in the otherwise admirable report* made last year to the British Local Government Board “ on proposed changes in the hours and ages
* Messrs. Bridges and Holmes.