We have most interesting monographs dealing with separate branches of the small industries of Switzerland, but we have not yet such comprehensive statistical data as those which have been mentioned in the text in speaking of Germany and France. It was only in the year 1901 that the first attempt was made to get the exact numbers of workpeople employed in what the Swiss statisticians describe as Hausindustrie, or “the domestic industries’ extension of the factory industries” (der hausindustrielle Anhang der Fabrikindustrie). Up till then these numbers remained “an absolutely unknown quantity.” For many it was, therefore, a revelation when a first rough estimate, made by the factory inspectors, gave the figure of 52,291 workpeople belonging to this category, as against 243,200 persons employed in all the factories, large and small, of the same branches. A few years later, Schuler, in Zeitung für Schweizerische Statistik, 1904 (reprinted since as a volume), came to the figure of 131,299 persons employed in the domestic industries; and yet this figure, although it is much nearer to reality than the former, is still below the real numbers. Finally, an official census of the industries, made in 1905, gave the figure of 92,162 persons employed in the domestic industries in 70,873 establishments, in the following branches — textiles, watches and jewellery, straw-plaiting, clothing and dress, wood-carving, tobacco. They thus represent more than one-fourth (28.5 per cent.) of the 317,027 operatives employed in Switzerland in these same branches, and 15.7 per cent of all the industrial operatives, who numbered 585,574 in 1905.
Out of the just-mentioned 92,162 workpeople, registered as belonging to the domestic trades, nearly three-quarters (66,061 in 49,168