rigorous the labour is there? In England, women
are not employed to do the hard work of agriculture.
They may be very badly off, but still they
wear hats to cover their heads, and are not
exposed to wind and rain. Germany, with her
forests and her pastures, with an easy kind of
labour and her national gentleness, does not
crush women as they are crushed in France. It
is there only that the durus arator, the hard
ploughman of the poet, finds his ideal. Why?
Because he is a landed proprietor. A proprietor
of little, a proprietor of a mere nothing, and a
proprietor over head and ears in debt. With
blind and furious hard work, with excessively
bad farming, he struggles to keep the wolf from
the door. His patch of land threatens to slip
through his fingers. Sooner than that, he will
bury himself in it alive, if need be; but he will
first bury his wife there. That's why he gets
married to have a labourer. At the Antilles, you
buy a negro; in France, you marry a wife. You
select one with a small appetite and of slight and
low stature, in the supposition that such a helpmate
will consume less food. [Historical.]

She has a stout heart has this poor French
woman; she does all that is required of her, and
more. She harnesses herself side by side with a
donkey (on light lands) while the man holds the
plough. In everything, the hardest part falls to
her share. He prunes the vines, standing at
ease; she, stooping with her head to the ground,
scratches with the hoe and grubs with the
mattock. He has respites, she has none. He
has his fête-days and his friends. He goes alone
to the public-house. She goes to church for a
moment, and drops asleep there. At night, if he
comes home drunk, she is beaten, and often,
which is worse, when she is about to give birth
to a child. For a twelvemonth, there she is,
dragging about her double sufferance through
heat and cold, frozen by the wind and pelted by
the rain all day long.

The majority die of consumption, especially in
the north. (See the statistics.) No constitution
can stand such a life. A mother is surely
excusable if she wish that her daughter should
suffer less, and if she send her to the factory
(where at least she will have a roof over her head),
or to domestic service in town, where she will
share some of the comforts of city life. The girl
is only too well inclined to the change. Every
woman feels in her heart little cravings after
elegance, smartness, and aristocratical ways. She
is immediately punished for her ambitious
desires. She is deprived of the light of the sun.
The mistress of the house is often very harsh,
especially if the girl be pretty. She is immolated
to spoiled children, to cunning monkeys, to cruel
little cats. Or if not that, she is accused, scolded,
vexed, maltreated. At that point she would
gladly lie down and die. She pines after her
home; but she knows that her father would
never take her back again. She loses her colour,
and wastes away. Her master alone is kind to
her. He would console her, if he dare. At some
accidental occasion he does dare. A grand storm
in the household; the husband, abashed, hangs
his head. She is driven into the streets, without
a morsel of bread, till she finds her way to the
hospital.

The workwomen of France, who are endowed
with such cleverness, taste, and dexterity, are
mostly physically distinguished by natural
elegance and delicacy. In what respect do they
differ from the ladies of the upper classes? In
the foot? No. In the figure? No. The hand
makes the only difference; because the poor
work-girl, obliged to be constantly washing,
passing the winter in a garret with nothing to
warm her but a charcoal pot, has her hands, her
only instrument of labour and livelihood,
painfully swollen and cracked by chilblains. With
this exception, the same woman, if she be only
properly dressed, is Madame la Comtesse as much
as any in the fashionable Faubourg. She has
not the jargon of the world; she is much more
romantic, more vivacious. Only let a gleam of
happiness shine upon her, and she will eclipse
all the rest.

Within the course of the last few years, two
immense events have changed the lot of
European women. Woman has only two grand
trades to follow, spinning and sewing. The others
(embroidery, flower-making, &c.) are hardly
worth reckoning. Woman is a spinster, woman
is a seamstress. That is her work, in all ages;
that is her universal history. Well, such is no
longer the case; a change has lately taken place.
Firstly, flax-spinning by machinery has
suppressed the spinster. It is not her wages only
that she has thereby lost, but a whole world of
habitudes. The peasant woman used to spin as
she attended to her children and her cottage
cookery. She span at winter evening meetings.
She span as she walked, grazing her cow or her
sheep. The seamstress was the workwoman of
towns. She worked at home, either continually,
or alternating her work with domestic duties.
For any important undertaking, this state of
things has ceased to exist. In the first place,
prisons and convents offered a terrible competition
with the isolated workwoman; and now,
the sewing-machine annihilates her. The
increasing employment of these two machines,
the cheapness and perfection of their work,
will force their products into every market, in
spite of every obstacle. There is nothing to
be said against the machines, nothing to be done.
These grand inventions are, in the end, and in
the totality of their effects, a benefit to the
human race. But those effects are cruel during the
moments of transition.

Man is not content with inventing machines
which suppress woman's two grand trades; he
directly usurps secondary industries by which
she used to gain a living, and descends to the
employments of the weaker sex. Can woman,
at will, rise to the trades requiring strength, and
practise those which belong specially to man?
By no means. Nonchalant and leisurely dames,