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270 reports show the results of the inquiries as well as the efforts of the commission to increase the supply of fish in the various parts of the country. It is in the practical line of the work established by government so many years ago when it sought to do all in its power to aid in the development of the natural resources of the country.

This department was established especially for the collection and publication of information bearing upon social science, the duties of the department under the law being to acquire and diffuse among the people of the United States useful information on subjects connected with labor, in the most general and comprehensive sense of that word, and especially upon its relation to capital, the hours of labor, the earnings of laboring men and women, and the means of promoting their material, social, intellectual and moral prosperity. Under this broad authorization the department has made ten annual reports. The first annual report relates to industrial depressions. The statistics published bore upon the various features involved in such depressions, and the report brought out the relations of nations to each other as producers and the various influences bearing upon discontent, and gave a summary of the causes and a classification as to regularity of industrial depressions.

The subject of the second annual report was convict labor as carried on in the penal institutions of the country. It comprehended all the facts ascertainable relating to the employment of convicts in every institution of whatever grade in the United States in which the inmates were in any way employed on any kind of productive labor.

The third annual report deals with strikes and lockouts occurring in the United States during the years 1881 to 1886, inclusive. The report contained a digest of laws relating to strikes and boycotts, so far as they existed at the time, the course of the change of sentiment in judicial decisions on conspiracies, and there was also a brief history of the great strikes of the past.