If this demand be logically expanded, it will take such form as this: Give
us labour! For countless ages, for thousands, millions it may be, we have
laboured. When first man wandered, the naked, newly-erected savage, and
hunted and fought, we wandered with him: each step of his was ours.
Within our bodies we bore the race, on our shoulders we carried it; we
sought the roots and plants for its food; and, when man's barbed arrow or
hook brought the game, our hands dressed it. Side by side, the savage man
and the savage woman, we wandered free together and laboured free together.
And we were contented!

Then a change came.

We ceased from our wanderings, and, camping upon one spot of earth, again
the labours of life were divided between us. While man went forth to hunt,
or to battle with the foe who would have dispossessed us of all, we
laboured on the land. We hoed the earth, we reaped the grain, we shaped
the dwellings, we wove the clothing, we modelled the earthen vessels and
drew the lines upon them, which were humanity's first attempt at domestic
art; we studied the properties and uses of plants, and our old women were
the first physicians of the race, as, often, its first priests and
prophets.

We fed the race at our breast, we bore it on our shoulders; through us it
was shaped, fed, and clothed. Labour more toilsome and unending than that
of man was ours; yet did we never cry out that it was too heavy for us.
While savage man lay in the sunshine on his skins, resting, that he might
be fitted for war or the chase, or while he shaped his weapons of death, he
ate and drank that which our hands had provided for him; and while we knelt
over our grindstone, or hoed in the fields, with one child in our womb,
perhaps, and one on our back, toiling till the young body was old before