correctness, that
in the United States woman has been raised above the necessity of
field-labor.

This is so far from being the case in Europe that in some countries all
the women, except the few belonging to the aristocratic and bourgeois
classes, are employed in the fields. One-third of the entire rural
laboring population of Prussia and one-half of that of Russia are
females. The following figures are from official sources:

COUNTRY. Total population. Total occupied
in agriculture.
United States, 1870 38,558,371 5,922,471
Prussia, 1867 19,607,710 3,286,954
Europ. Russia, exclud.
Baltic Provs., 1863 59,097,859 26,362,435

Of whom Percentage of female
Males. Females. to male agriculturists.
5,525,503 396,968 7
2,232,741 1,054,213 47

13,444,842 12,917,593 98

To every 100 men employed in field-work, there are in Russia 98 women,
in Prussia 47, and in the United States but 7; and of the latter, nearly
all are freed-women of the African race. I have heard men sneer at this
statement, which I regard as matter for boasting--men who regretted it
was true: "You Americans make too much of your women. You educate them
above their rank in life, dress them like dolls and keep them for show.
They are idle, and become enfeebled and vicious, and their progeny, if
indeed they have any, partake of the same characteristics."

It is not alone foreigners who hold this language. There is among our
own countrymen a growing class of admirers of what they are pleased to
term the robust female, and "robust" with this class means hard-worked.

We have already seen the debased condition to which field-work,
apparently, has reduced the peasant-women of continental Europe: we have
seen that they resemble animals as much as they do women, so heavy and
unremitting is the toil with which they are burdened.

"This only makes them hardy," cries the advocate of the robust school,
who believes that hard work is good for everybody, even for women, yet
carefully avoids it himself--avoids even hard thinking, which might
teach him better doctrine. "It is thus that women become the mothers of
a race of heroes."

Heroes! Moon-calves, rather; but we shall see.

Mr. Harris-Gastud in his late report to the British Foreign Office on
Prussia, after mention