Experiments in social legislation, dealing as they do with the lives and fortunes of human beings, are too costly to be undertaken often, or without a serious forecast of the consequences that possible failure may bring, not only to the individual but to the state; not only to this generation but to the next. "In dealing with the man," the Report of the Unemnployed Fund wisely points out, "the committee is also dealing with posterity." It might therefore be regarded as a part of our social duty to study the working-out of such experiments when they are offered to us, gratuitously as it were, with the costs to be paid by another nation. England has been furnishing one such experiment in its recent attempts to deal with the so-called "unemployed" and attempts to provide for this class are of rather special importance because they so often spell relief that they threaten to cause more evil than they cure. In the past few years, London has brought much money and sympathy, and what is more rare, thought and intelligent effort to bear upon this question, and she has much to teach us that we could not learn from our own extensive experiments of I893-94. For we were facing a sudden and appalling industrial crisis, and adopted makeshift plans in panic-stricken dismay; while in England, settled machinery under the control of the Local Government Board has been set up by act of Parliament, and we have the opportunity of study-

FOR the second time in the history of the federal census the statistics of wages have been made the subject of an exhaustive special report' prepared under the direction of an expert statistician. The publication of this volume marks an important point in the development of wage statistics in the United States, and it seems worth while to consider at some length certain questions regarding it: (i) How does the scope of the inquiry differ from that of previous census investigations into wages? (2) In what respect is the method of presentation and tabulation new, and what are the relative advantages or disadvantages of this method of treatment? (3) What conclusions are reached regarding the trend of wages during the decade? The one other census volume which gives a detailed presentation of wage statistics is the work of Mr. Joseph D. Weeks for the Tenth Census. Many of the data collected are for a period of fifty years, and while the scope is much broader than that of Professor Dewey's report, which presents returns only for i890 and i900, the latter is immeasurably superior in the completeness and accuracy of its statistics;2 and, indeed, it would be saying that there had been small progress in statistical method in the last twenty years if this were not so. Except for this work of Mr. Weeks, all wage statistics in the census up to the present time have been included in the Census of Manufactures, and in general their purpose has been to show the

Edith Abbott and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge. Legislative control of women's work / Sophonisba P. Breckinridge. Statutory regulations of women's employment / Frank P. Mies.