establishments) belong to the textile industry, chiefly knitting and the silks; then comes the watch-trade (12,871 persons in 9,186 establishments), straw-plaiting, and dress. However, these figures are still incomplete. Not only several smaller branches of the domestic trades were omitted in the census, but also the children under fourteen years of ago employed in the domestic trades, whose numbers are estimated at 32,300, were not counted. Besides, the census having been made in the summer, during the “strangers’ season,” a considerable number of persons employed in a variety of domestic trades during the winter did not appear in the census.
It must also be noted that the Swiss census includes under the name of Heimarbeit (domestic trades) only those “dependencies of the industrial employers” which do not represent separate factories placed under the employer’s management; so that those workshops and small factories, the produce of which is sold directly to the consumers, as also the small factories directly managed by small employers, are not included in this category. If all that be taken into consideration, we must agree with the conclusion that the “domestic trades have in Switzerland a much greater extension than in any other country of Europe” (save Russia), which we find in an elaborate recent work, published in connection with the 1910 exhibition of Swiss domestic industries, and edited by Herr Jac. Lorenz (Die wirtschaflichen und sozialen Verhältnisse in der Schweizerischen Heimarbeit, Zurich, 1910–1911, p. 27).
A feature of importance which appears from this last work is, that more than one-half of the workers engaged in domestic trades have some other source of income besides these trades. Very many of them carry on agriculture, so that it has been said that in Switzerland “the domestic trades’ question is as much a peasant question as a labour question.”
It would be impossible to sum up in this place the interesting data contained in the first four fascicles published by Herr Lorenz, which deal