Woman and Labour | Page 8

did not seek new fields of labour, would surely
have answered: "Go away, I have no time to listen to you. Do you not
see that I am spinning here that I too may have a home of my own? I
am weaving the linen garments that shall clothe my household in the
long years to come! I cannot marry till the chest upstairs be full. You
cannot hear it, but as I sit here alone, spinning, far off across the hum of
my spinning-wheel I hear the voices of my little unborn children
calling to me--'O mother, mother, make haste, that we may be!'--and
sometimes, when I seem to be looking out across my wheel into the
sunshine, it is the blaze of my own fireside that I see, and the light
shines on the faces round it; and I spin on the faster and the steadier
when I think of what shall come. Do you ask me why I do not go out
and labour in the fields with the lad whom I have chosen? Is his work,
then, indeed more needed than mine for the raising of that home that
shall be ours? Oh, very hard I will labour, for him and for my children,
in the long years to come. But I cannot stop to talk to you now. Far off,
over the hum of my spinning-wheel, I hear the voices of my children
calling, and I must hurry on. Do you ask me why I do not seek for
labour whose hands are full to bursting? Who will give folk to the
nation if I do not?"
Such would have been our answer in Europe in the ages of the past, if
asked the question why we were contented with our field of labour and
sought no other. Man had his work; we had ours. We knew that we
upbore our world on our shoulders; and that through the labour of our
hands it was sustained and strengthened--and we were contented.

But now, again a change has come.
Something that is entirely new has entered into the field of human
labour, and left nothing as it was.
In man's fields of toil, change has accomplished, and is yet more
quickly accomplishing, itself.
On lands where once fifty men and youths toiled with their cattle, today
one steam-plough, guided by but two pair of hands, passes swiftly; and
an automatic reaper in one day reaps and binds and prepares for the
garner the produce of fields it would have taken a hundred strong male
arms to harvest in the past. The iron tools and weapons, only one of
which it took an ancient father of our race long months of stern exertion
to extract from ore and bring to shape and temper, are now poured forth
by steam-driven machinery as a millpond pours forth its water; and
even in war, the male's ancient and especial field of labour, a complete
reversal of the ancient order has taken place. Time was when the size
and strength of the muscles in a man's legs and arms, and the strength
and size of his body, largely determined his fighting powers, and an
Achilles or a Richard Coeur de Lion, armed only with his spear or
battle-axe, made a host fly before him; today the puniest mannikin
behind a modern Maxim gun may mow down in perfect safety a
phalanx of heroes whose legs and arms and physical powers a Greek
god might have envied, but who, having not the modern machinery of
war, fall powerless. The day of the primary import to humanity of the
strength in man's extensor and flexor muscles, whether in labours of
war or of peace, is gone by for ever; and the day of the all-importance
of the culture and activity of man's brain and nerve has already come.
The brain of one consumptive German chemist, who in his laboratory
compounds a new explosive, has more effect upon the wars of the
modern peoples than ten thousand soldierly legs and arms; and the man
who invents one new labour-saving machine may, through the
cerebration of a few days, have performed the labour it would
otherwise have taken hundreds of thousands of his lusty fellows
decades to accomplish.

Year by year, month by month, and almost hour by hour, this change is
increasingly showing itself in the field of the modern labour; and crude
muscular force, whether in man or beast, sinks continually in its value
in the world of human toil; while intellectual power, virility, and
activity, and that culture which leads to the mastery of the inanimate
forces of nature, to the invention of machinery, and to that delicate
manipulative skill often required in guiding it, becomes ever of greater
and greater importance to the