government, an almost infinite extension has taken place in the fields of
male labour. Where in primitive times woman was often the only builder,
and patterns she daubed on her hut walls or traced on her earthen vessels
the only attempts at domestic art; and where later but an individual here
and there was required to design a king's palace or a god's temple or to
ornament it with statues or paintings, today a mighty army of men, a
million strong, is employed in producing plastic art alone, both high and
low, from the traceries on wall-paper and the illustrations in penny
journals, to the production of the pictures and statues which adorn the
national collections, and a mighty new field of toil has opened before the
anciently hunting and fighting male. Where once one ancient witch-doctress
may have been the only creature in a whole district who studied the nature
of herbs and earths, or a solitary wizard experimenting on poisons was the
only individual in a whole territory interrogating nature; and where later,
a few score of alchemists and astrologers only were engaged in examining
the structure of substances, or the movement of planets, today thousands of
men in every civilised community are labouring to unravel the mysteries of
nature, and the practical chemist, the physician, the anatomist, the
engineer, the astronomer, the mathematician, the electrician, form a mighty
and always increasingly important army of male labourers. Where once an
isolated bard supplied a nation with its literatures, or where later a few
thousand priests and men of letters wrote and transcribed for the few to
read, today literature gives labour to a multitude almost as countless as a
swarm of locusts. From the penny-a-liner to the artist and thinker, the
demand for their labour continually increases. Where one town-crier with
stout legs and lusty lungs was once all-sufficient to spread the town and
country news, a score of men now sit daily pen in hand, preparing the
columns of the morning's paper, and far into the night a hundred
compositors are engaged in a labour which requires a higher culture of
brain and finger than most ancient kings and rulers possessed. Even in the