It was inevitable that before the sons of women such as these, the sons of
the parasitic Roman should be swept from existence, as the offspring of the
caged canary would fall in conflict with the offspring of the free.

Again and again with wearisome reiteration, the same story repeats itself.
Among the Jews in the days of their health and growth, we find their women
bearing the major weight of agricultural and domestic toil, full always of
labour and care--from Rachel, whom Jacob met and loved as she watered her
father's flocks, to Ruth, the ancestress of a line of kings and heroes,
whom her Boas noted labouring in the harvest-fields; from Sarah, kneading
and baking cakes for Abraham's prophetic visitors, to Miriam, prophetess
and singer, and Deborah, who judging Israel from beneath her palm-tree,
"and the land had rest for forty years." Everywhere the ancient Jewish
woman appears, an active sustaining power among her people; and perhaps the
noblest picture of the labouring woman to be found in any literature is
contained in the Jewish writings, indited possibly at the very time when
the labouring woman was for the first time tending among a section of the
Jews to become a thing of the past; when already Solomon, with his seven
hundred parasitic wives and three hundred parasitic concubines, loomed
large on the horizon of the national life, to take the place of flock-
tending Rachel and gleaning Ruth, and to produce amid their palaces of
cedar and gold, among them all, no Joseph or David, but in the way of
descendant only a Rehoboam, under whose hand the kingdom was to totter to
its fall. (The picture of the labouring as opposed to the parasitic ideal
of womanhood appears under the heading, "The words of King Lemuel; the
oracle which his mother taught him." At risk of presenting the reader with
that with which he is already painfully familiar, we here transcribe the
passage; which, allowing for differences in material and intellectual
surroundings, paints also the ideal of the labouring womanhood of the
present and of the future:-