Then our fellow-man, having no longer full occupation in his old fields of

labour, began to take his share in ours. He too began to cultivate the
field, to build the house, to grind the corn (or make his male slaves do

it); and the hoe, and the potter's tools, and the thatching-needle, and at
last even the grindstones which we first had picked up and smoothed to

grind the food for our children, began to pass from our hands into his.
The old, sweet life of the open fields was ours no more; we moved within

the gates, where the time passes more slowly and the world is sadder than
in the air outside; but we had our own work still, and were content.

If, indeed, we might no longer grow the food for our people, we were still
its dressers; if we did not always plant and prepare the flax and hemp, we

still wove the garments for our race; if we did no longer raise the house
walls, the tapestries that covered them were the work of our hands; we

brewed the ale, and the simples which were used as medicines we distilled
and prescribed; and, close about our feet, from birth to manhood, grew up

the children whom we had borne; their voices were always in our ears. At
the doors of our houses we sat with our spinning-wheels, and we looked out

across the fields that were once ours to labour in--and were contented.
Lord's wife, peasant's, or burgher's, we all still had our work to do!

A thousand years ago, had one gone to some great dame, questioning her why
she did not go out a-hunting or a-fighting, or enter the great hall to

dispense justice and confer upon the making of laws, she would have
answered: "Am I a fool that you put to me such questions? Have I not a

hundred maidens to keep at work at spinning-wheels and needles? With my
own hands daily do I not dispense bread to over a hundred folk? In the

great hall go and see the tapestries I with my maidens have created by the
labour of years, and which we shall labour over for twenty more, that my

children's children may see recorded the great deeds of their forefathers.
In my store-room are there not salves and simples, that my own hands have

prepared for the healing of my household and the sick in the country round?
Ill would it go indeed, if when the folk came home from war and the chase

of wild beasts, weary or wounded, they found all the womenfolk gone out a-
hunting and a-fighting, and none there to dress their wounds, or prepare

their meat, or guide and rule the household! Better far might my lord and
his followers come and help us with our work, than that we should go to

help them! You are surely bereft of all wit. What becomes of the country
if the women forsake their toil?"

And the burgher's wife, asked why she did not go to labour in her husband's
workshop, or away into the market-place, or go a-trading to foreign

countries, would certainly have answered: "I am too busy to speak with
such as you! The bread is in the oven (already I smell it a-burning), the

winter is coming on, and my children lack good woollen hose and my husband
needs a warm coat. I have six vats of ale all a-brewing, and I have

daughters whom I must teach to spin and sew, and the babies are clinging
round my knees. And you ask me why I do not go abroad to seek for new

labours! Godsooth! Would you have me to leave my household to starve in
summer and die of cold in winter, and my children to go untrained, while I

gad about to seek for other work? A man must have his belly full and his
back covered before all things in life. Who, think you, would spin and

bake and brew, and rear and train my babes, if I went abroad? New labour,
indeed, when the days are not long enough, and I have to toil far into the

night! I have no time to talk with fools! Who will rear and shape the
nation if I do not?"

And the young maiden at the cottage door, beside her wheel, asked why she
was content and 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 primaryimport 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 race. Already today we tremble on the verge of a

discovery, which may come tomorrow or the next day, when, through the
attainment of a simple and cheap method of controlling some widely

diffused, everywhere accessible, natural force (such, for instance, as the
force of the great tidal wave) there will at once and for ever pass away

even that comparatively small value which still, in our present stage of
material civilisation, clings to the expenditure of mere crude, mechanical,

human energy; and the creature, however physically powerful, who can merely
pull, push, and lift, much after the manner of a machine, will have no

further value in the field of human labour.
Therefore, even today, we find that wherever that condition which we call

modern civilisation prevails, and in proportion as it tends to prevail--
wherever steam-power, electricity, or the forces of wind and water, are

compelled by man's intellectual activity to act as the motor-powers in the
accomplishment of human toil, wherever the delicate adaptions of