elve, and not less than three hours'
schooling daily is compulsory. Abuses exist at all points, women workers
in mines faring, even with shortened day, in very evil case,--the wage
at or below subsistence point and the general conditions of the most
hopeless order. Constant agitation goes on in the Reichstag, and
organization among the women themselves will in time bring about needed
reforms; but as a whole the German woman is in many points less
considered than the women of any other civilized nation.

Though Italy is pre-eminently an agricultural country, and men, women,
and children are alike employed in agricultural pursuits, there has been
no trustworthy record of numbers engaged. In manufacturing there are
more statistics, but interest in the woman's share in labor is of recent
date. In the silk manufacture, in which Italy ranks second only to
China, and far beyond all other competitors, 81,165 women and 25,373
children were employed in 1877, chiefly in unwinding cocoons, the number
at present having increased nearly ten per cent. In the cotton industry
there were employed, at the time of the same census, 2,696 women and
2,520 children; and a proportionate increase in numbers has taken place.
In the flax and hemp industries nearly seventy thousand workers used
hand-looms at home, the larger proportion of these being women. In the
factories it was found that 2,565 women and 1,227 children were at work
as spinners, and 3,394 women and 1,020 children as weavers. Women are
steadily employed in the manufacture of straw hats and bonnets, in jute
in many forms, in cigar and cigarette making, and in many other
industries, cheap clothing leading. Of the thirty millions and more of
population, not quite half are women; and of these nearly half are
wage-earners, the majority in unrecorded forms of labor,--chiefly
household service or the care of their own homes, with some petty
industry adding its mite to the yearly income. But industrial training
has but begun for Italy. The wage is pitiably low, the conditions of
living hard and full of privation; nor can these facts alter till better
education and organization have been brought about. The latest Italian
census is not yet published; but proofs of tables of the comparative
wage for twenty years in some of the principal industries have been sent
me through the courtesy of Signor Luigi Bodio, the minister of
agriculture, commerce, and general statistics. From these tables it i