of a failure
in the persistence of their physical soundness. But clever bad men may
break laws that clever good men may make; or good men may be confidingly
inattentive while valuable laws and customs become obsolete. Yet the
fact does stand out that the spirit of the republic does not favor
anything that will dull the physical vigor of the women; and those who
feel this spirit and are representative of its urgency--and they are, we
must believe, the great majority--are the men in most danger of falling
from grace in the manner referred to above. Moreover they are also the
people, voters and what not, who will make an effective bar against the
inroads of a certain disposition on the part of the foreigners who are,
in the main beneficently, coming across the wide seas to find homes in
our farming regions, namely, to place the women of their tribes in rows
along the fields who bend their backs like the picture of "The Gleaners"
by Millet, and to produce such descendants as Markham's "Man with the
Hoe." A sight like this with promise such as this is abhorrent to the
institutions of our country; the men of the republic, not to say the
women, will not tolerate it.

But progress is made little by little. There are cases of arrested
development and examples of retardation. There are places where
backward-drawing influences have kept some groups from making the
advance that other groups have made. If we could penetrate still farther
into the past, we should find more reason for the drawbacks that we run
across here and there in our own time. We have no histories of selected
working days that the great mothers of times past wrote--they certainly
had no time to count up calories and set down scientific records of
their cookery and their collections of simples. There is a Journal
extant which was written by one Abigail Foote in 1779. It goes something
like this:

September 2. I spun.
" 3. I spun.
" 4. I spun.
" 5. I spun.
" 6. I spun.
" 7. I spun.

And so on, excepting, of course, Sundays.

About November the record is stated in this wise:

November 11. I wove.
" 12. I wove.
" 13. I wove.
" 14. I wove.
" 15. I wove.

And so on, again. Certainly monotony could no farther go. If such
workers had not fastened a book to the distaff, insanity would surely
have set in. The weaving never could be quite so monotonous as the
spinning, f