Excerpt from Fourteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 1899: Water, Gas, and Electric-Light Plants Under Private and Municipal Ownership As has been intimated, not all of the plan ts in the United States have been covered by the investigation. The Department pursued its usual course in the collection of the data, sending its Special agents to the various plants throughout the country, and securing the data by their personal inspection of the plants and of the details of their business, the various facts being taken directly from the records of the plants so far as such were'in existence. At the beginning of the investiga tion it was realized that it would be impossible to make a canvass of all of the plants in the country with the, limited force at'the disposal of the Department and present the facts while comparatively fresh. It was therefore determined to cover as great a number of the plants as possible within the time which could be devoted to the work. In no cases have. Leased plants or plants established in factories, etc;, for the sole use of the owner, -been included. Quite a large preportion of both the private and municipal plants were canvassed, and it is. Believed that the data presented in the tables are'fairly representative of the varying conditions found throughout the-country. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.