Comparative increase in occupations and in population, 1870 to 1880. Several things are well worthy of note in the foregoing table: First. That in certain states and territories the ratio of increase in population is greater, in some cases much greater, than the ratio of increase in gainful occupations reported. This is due to the fact that these communities are losing something of the frontier character and taking on more of the social and domestic character of older communities. Thus we have Arizona gaining 319 per cent. in population and only 269 per cent. in reported occupations; Idaho, 117 against 43; Kansas, 173 against 160; Montana, 90 against 58; Nebraska, 268 against 248; Nevada, 47 against 20; Washington, 214 against 209; Wyoming, 128 against 34. In a word, these figures indicate the growth of homes with women and children, in the place of the lumbering camp or the ranch, occupied by men only, all of whom were workers. Second. In another group of states and territories, where we must suppose that the same force which has produced the above noted effects is in operation, the rapid incoming of immigrants during the decade, predominately males of adult years, has overpowered this force and caused an increase in the proportion of bread-winners greater than the increase in population. Such are Arkansas, Colorado, Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, and Utah. Third. Throughout the country generally we have an increase of occupations reported greater than the increase of population. In part this is probably due to the closer enumeration conducted under the provisions of the act of March 3, 1879, which, by making the districts smaller, secured in a much higher degree than had previously been attained that house-to-house canvass which is essential to a correct census, especially as regards the details of enumeration. In a still higher degree probably the increase of reported occupations is due to the growth of the factory system, to the minuter organization of industry, and to the resulting differentiation of occupations, allowing women and children to find places where they can be useful and earn a livelihood, both in trade and in manufactures, more readily than was the case ten years ago. We group as follows the states and territories in their inverse rank, according to the proportion of the total population found in gainful occupations: Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Wis- 28 29 Iowa, Minnesota, Texas, Virginia.. Florida, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania.. Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey. Maine, Vermont.. Delaware, Mississippi, New York.. District of Columbia... Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, Oregon, South Caro- 39 40 52 57 Arizona Montana We note here, first, that in the great prosperous grain-raising states there is a tendency to keep down the proportion of bread-winners (see the states having less than 33 per cent.); second, that the tendency in the cotton-raising states is to a higher percentage of bread-winners, women and children going more largely into the fields; third, that the manufacturing states have also a ligh percentage, owing to the employment of these classes in shops and factories; and fourth, that the bread-winners reach their largest proportion in the mining and grazing states and territories, owing both to the character of the industries there pursued and also to the sinall number, relatively, of women and children in those regions. STATISTICS OF OCCUPATIONS IN CITIES. The following table exhibits the total number of occupations reported in each of the principal fifty cities of the United States, and the proportion existing between that number and the total number of inhabitants of both sexes and all ages: It will be observed that the proportion between the number of persons pursuing gainful occupations and the total population enuinerated varies in the several cities in the foregoing list from 33 per cent. as a minimum to 50 per cent. as a maximum, i. e., from one-third to one-half-a much narrower range than we noted in the case of the states. We group the cities below in their rank in the respect indicated: Percentage. Allegheny, Pittsburgh 33 Detroit 34 Albany, Buffalo, Jersey City, Milwaukee, Toledo... 35 Camden, Cleveland, Columbus, Newark, New Orleans, Reading. 36 37 Cambridge, Chicago, New Haven, Rochester 38 Baltimore, Cincinnati, Nashville, Richmond, Syracuse, Washington, 39 The facts which explain these wide variations in the proportions between the number of persons pursuing gainful occupations and the total population of a city are many. The most important may be grouped under three heads: first, the deviations of the respective populations of these cities to the one side or to the other from the type of a normal population, considered as to age and sex; (a) secondly, the character of the prevailing occupations of the several cities, as determining the question whether women and children shall be largely employed or not; thirdly, social causes, affecting the employment of women in avocations of a certain class, or affecting the employment of children under a certain age. The variation of the population of a city either way from the type may affect the proportion of the inhabitants who shall be employed in gainful occupations, either to diminish or to increase it, according to circumstances. Thus, going to a far western city like Kansas City, Minneapolis, or Denver, we shall find the population composed more largely of males than of females, and containing a larger proportion of adults of the working age than is found in a normal population. This is due to the fact that great numbers of the inhabitants of any one of these cities have recently gone thither to seek their fortunes, leaving the women, the children, and the aged behind in the older communities from which they came. Here a high percentage of actual bread-winners is naturally expected. On the other hand, turning to Lowell, Lawrence, and Fall River, where females and children are largely in excess, we find an even higher percentage of bread-winners. This seems like a contradiction. The explanation is found in the factory industries of these cities, which provide employment for enormous numbers of women, who in a western city would be living at home keeping the house, and of children who, under the same conditions, would be attending school or living at home without gainful occupation. The influence of the prevailing industries of a city upon the proportion of bread-winners is too familiar to require to be illustrated. The two great iron-making cities of Allegheny and Pittsburgh keep only a bare third of their population at work, because the labor of women and children would be of little account. Cleveland, another great iron-making city, has but 36 per cent. of its population engaged in gainful occupations; but a great center of the textile industries, like Paterson, Fall River, Lawrence, or Lowell, keeps nearly or quite one-half of its men, women, and children at work. Philadelphia, which is both a great weaving city and a center of heavy manufactures, especially of iron, stands in a mean between the two, having 41 per cent. of its population engaged in gainful occupations. Among the social causes adverted to as affecting the propor a It may be said that this deviation is due to the cause next to be mentioned, viz, the prevailing occupations of the city, and in part this would be true, and in part not. It would be much less true of a city than of a state. Thus, we might suppose the industries of Saint Paul or Minneapolis to remain absolutely the same in character during the next ten years, and yet at the end of that period the proportion of bread-winners would be smaller than now, simply because the city would be ten years older, having, by consequence, a larger proportion of women and children. Again, suppose some factory industry to be introduced into a city which had had none previously, say the manufacture of straw goods or of hosiery; we should doubtless have a speedy effect produced upon the population of the city through the accession of women and children coming to work in the shops, but we should have a much larger effect produced upon the proportion of bread-winners, through the entry into the shops of women and children previously resident. A thousand might come to the shops from outside the city, while three thousand or five might enter the shops from within the city. tion of bread-winners may be mentioned the school system. In some cities the public schools are much more highly organized, more attractive, and are supported by a stronger public sentiment than in others. In the former class of cases we should look to see the influence of the schools acting in diminution of the number of young persons of either sex engaged in gainful occupations. REMARKS UPON THE LIST OF OCCUPATIONS AND UPON THE NUMBERS RETURNED UNDER THE SEVERAL TITLES. THE CLASSIFICATION ADOPTED.-On this point we quote the language of the reports of the census of 1870: The plan pursued in the compilation of these tables has been to refer every specification of occupation to some grand division of industry; and within each of such grand divisions to constitute as many distinct subdivisions as the nature of the material furnished by the enumerators would allow to be formed with a reasonable approach to completeness, subject, however, to certain conditions which will be presented in the further course of these remarks. The Superintendent is familiar with the reasons which have induced many European statisticians to abandon the grouping of occupations according to such assumed grand divisions of industry as agriculture, manufactures, trade, etc., and to resort instead to a system of expressing the employments of the people through a large number of minute and precise specifications, susceptible of being combined and recombined successively, according to different ideas or theories of classification; but he is convinced that the conditions and limitations of industrial statistics, at least within the United States, will not allow of such nicety in the treatment of material, and, moreover, that the highest purposes and the largest uses of such statistics require something closely approaching the plan of treatment adopted in the following tables. It is perhaps not necessary to pursue the subject, but it may be interesting to note two things in this connection. First. That the subdivision of labor and the organization of industry in the United States really correspond rather to the classification of occupations adopted in these tables than to the nicer distinctions of the foreign statisticians. Indeed, instead of throwing away valuable discriminations, the difficulty is so to treat the returns as reasonably to fill the classes here given. Whoever will consider the almost utter want of apprenticeship in this country, the facility with which pursuits are taken up and abandoned, and the variety, and, indeed, seeming incongruity of the numerous industrial offices that are frequently united in one person, will appreciate the force of this argument. For example, the distinctions in the profession of the law, which are known and recognized decisively in England and on the continent, are not maintained in this country except in a few great cities, and there only in exceptional cases. The same person with us is law-scrivener, collector of debts, prosecutor of claims, counselor, attorney, possibly, also, judge. Again, the organization of domestic service in the United States is so crude that no distinction whatever can be successfully maintained. A census of occupations, in which the attempt should be made to reach anything like European completeness in this matter, would result in the return of tens of thousands of "housekeepers" and hundreds of thousands of "cooks" who were simply "maids of all work", being the single servants of the families in which they were employed. Again, the British distinction between the merchant and the shopkeeper is impossible in |