WOMEN.

In traveling through continental Europe one sees in the fields certain
coarse and blackened creatures who walk somewhat erect, and in that
respect resemble human beings. If you regard them with attention, they
will stop to offer you some rude but humble mark of respect: if you heed
them not, they will go on, as they have always gone on, with the work
that is before them, and from which they never cease but to sleep or
die. They have hands which are large and horny: they have faces somewhat
like those of men, but coarse, hideous and furrowed with the lines of
exposure. They speak, they have a language, but their words are few and
relate only to the heavy drudgery which is before them. These humble and
debased animals are women.

I remember, while traveling some years ago through the State of
Pennsylvania with Mr. Foster, who was then the Vice-President of the
United States, we saw from the window of the railway-carriage in which
we were sitting a woman barelegged and at work in the fields. She was
digging potatoes on some mountain-patch.

"Thank God," said Mr. Foster, "that I never saw such a sight in my own
country before!"

According to the census of 1870 there were in the United States, out of
a total population of 38,500,000, less than 400,000 females occupied in
the labor of agriculture, either as field-hands or indoor workers. Of
this number, 373,332 were hired laborers, and 22,681 the cultivators of
their own lands. All of the former, and two-thirds of the latter, were
freed-women in the late Slave States, and only 7994 females were
employed in agriculture, either as laborers or proprietors, in or out of
doors, in the Free States.

The States in which these few farm-women of the North were chiefly found
were Wisconsin, which claimed 1387; Pennsylvania, 1279; and Illinois,
1034. In Pennsylvania the farm-women belonged almost exclusively to the
population known as the "Pennsylvania Dutch," descendants of the
Hessians and other Germans who settled in the State at the close of the
Revolutionary War; in Illinois and Wisconsin they were recent immigrants
from Europe, chiefly Germans, and for the most part, it is presumed,
widows, who preferred to till the land left by their husbands rather
than part with it.

With the exception of these trifling numbers, which, including even the
freed-women, amount to but seven per cent. of the whole number of males
employed in agriculture, it may be said, with entire