tage 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 s