Workmen's advocate., 1890-07-05
FEMALE LABOR.

to run Labor Bureau of Statistics in | Rhode island for no State in the Union has so thoroughly fallen under the con trol of a manufacturing plutocracy as did the Lilliputian member of the | original thirteen. And nowhere on this continent has plutocracy shown itself more jealous of it's rights" even to the extent of maintaining a property qualification at the polls within it's small dominion, and thus disfranchizing a comparatively large number of it's wage slaves, regardless of nativity and color. while boasting of having con tributed, by the vote of its representa- tives in our national legislature, to the unconditional enfranchisement of the negroes throughout the Southern States.
 It is, indeed, matter of wonder that Labor Bureau should have been estab- lished in Rhode Island, and this fact may perhaps be set among those which tend to show the irresistible advance of the
 labor question. True, it was not until 1887 Cor eighteen years later than in the neighboring State of Massachusetts,, that the necessary law was enacted; and this, of course, provided for the most niggard- ly appropriation which it was possible to make for the support of the Bureau Again, in 1889, strong attempt to sup press 1t failed only because few politici ans in the General Assembly had more to lose than their plutocratic masters could gain by such step; but good care wa taken to keep the Bureau crippled by the most obvious insufficiency of funds.
 At any rate, from his report for 1889, just received, it seems that the present Labor Commissioner of Rhode Island, Mr. Almon K. Goodwin, has done as well as he could with the contracted power and limited resources at his con- mand. He has been a year only in office, and, if we are we'll informed, had little knowledge of industrial statistics
 when he entered it. He certainly has
 no knowledge whatever, even now, of
 the labor question; for no man who has
 paid any attention to the subject would
 venture, even in fear of the powers that be, upon giving in an official report
 such crude expression as this, for in
 stance, of the most vulgar and best ex
 ploded of economic notions: "Many hore had the idea, and perhaps some dc now that labor and capital are at wal with each other" Nor would any econo mist, even of the most conservative
 type, imagine that the many avenues o1
 endowment in which women are now
 competing with men have been opened
 to them "by their own efforts ant
 energies" Nor would he say, in thu
 same breath, that supply and demand are the great regulators for labor" ant that the only reason why women worl for less pay than men lis because thej
 wM" Fortunately, Mr. Goodwin's sta
 tistics are of more value than his econ omic tenets.
 The subject matter of his report "Working Women"-cannot be sur !, passed in importance by any other tha
 he might have selected, and it is on a upon which so little information ha |, heretofore been sought that too muc
 cannot now be obtained in relation to il o For obvious reasons, stated above, hi o investigation was not exhaustive; no
 even, perhaps, sufficient to convey a idea approximately correct of the COT 2, dition of female. labor in the great il dustries of Rhode lsland-moStly textil ,, fabrics-from which fair idea may | formed of its condition in the simila ,- industries of other States. To this ma