ers have begun to
mitigate, to a certain extent, the embargo which the choice of a
sea-faring life has in times past been understood to place upon
married men. Positions are found for women as stewardesses and in
other capacities, and it is coming to be increasingly recognised that
there is a large amount of women's work to be done on board a ship.

By and by, when it is found that the best and steadiest men can be
secured by making some little concessions to their desire for a
settled life and their objections to the crimp and the "girl at every
port," and all the other squalid accessories so generally attached in
the popular mind to the seaman's career, there will be a serious
effort on the part of owners to remodel the community on board of a
ship on the lines of a village. There will be the "Ship's Shop" and
the "Ship's School," the "Ship's Church" and various other
institutions and societies.

Thus in the twentieth century the sea will no longer be regarded, to
the same extent as in the past, as the refuge for the ne'er-do-well of
the land-living populace; and this, more than perhaps anything else,
will help to render travelling by the great ocean highways safe and
comfortable. It is a common complaint on the part of owners that by
far the larger part of maritime disasters are directly traceable to
misconduct or neglect of duty on the part of masters, officers or
crew; but they have the remedy in their own hands.

CHAPTER VII.

AGRICULTURE.

Muscular power still carries out all the most laborious work of the
farm and of the garden--work which, of course, consists, in the main,
of turning the land over and breaking up the sods. In the operations
of ploughing, harrowing, rolling, and so forth, the agency almost
exclusively employed is the muscular power of the horse guided by
man-power; with the accompaniment of a very large and exhausting
expenditure of muscular effort on the part of the farmer or farm
labourer. On the fruit and vegetable garden the great preponderance of
the power usefully exercised must, under existing conditions, come
direct from the muscles of men. Spade and plough represent the badges
of the rural workers' servitude, and to rescue the country residents
from this old-world bondage must be one of the chief objects to which
invention will in the near future apply itself.

The miner has to a very large extent escaped from the