Wherever women are told off to hard open-air labour, we shall find among them a lower class of their own kind—­poorer where all are poor, and straining at their task where all are labouring—­who walk the dust with burdens on their backs.  Loads of field-labour are these, or of the labour in a fishing-port, and large in proportion to their weight; too large to be bound close and carried on the head, too wide to be borne on the shoulder, too unwieldy for the clasp of arms.  Among American Indians, we are told, the women carry the tent so, and the gear of a demenagement, and the warrior himself, upon his goods, not seldom.  In the agriculture of the European Continent the women carry the large loads thus, the refuse is laid upon them, and all that is bound up for burning; they are the gleaners, not of wheat but of tares.  Or they carry fodder for the imprisoned cattle, disappearing as they walk, bowed, quenched, hooded, and hidden with hay.

Women who bear this load do not prosper.  They have a downward look, albeit not as conspirators; and in them the earth carries a burden like their own, or but little more buoyant.  Stones off the face of the stony fields, huge sheaves of stalks and husks after granaries are filled, fuel and forage—­bent from the stature of women, those who bear those bundles go near the earth that gave them, and breathe her dust.

In Austria, where women carry the hod and climb the ladder; in the Rhineland, where a cart goes along the valley roads drawn by a woman harnessed with a cow—­even here I think the hardship hardly so great as where the burden is laid upon the bent back of her whose arms are too small or too weak to grasp it; for after long use in such carrying, the figure is no longer fit for habitual erection.  And the use is established with those women who are so loaded.  It is not that all the labouring women of such a village or such a sea-port are burdened in their turn with the burden of the back; it is rather that a class is formed, a class of the burdened and the bent; and to that class belong all ages; child-bearing women are in that sisterhood.  No stronger women can be seen than the upright women of Boulogne; to whom then, but the bent, are due the many cripples, the many dwarfs, the ill-boned stragglers of that vigorous population, the many children growing awry, the many old people shuffling towards misshapen graves?

There is manifestly another burden, familiar and accustomed to the figure of woman.  This does not bend her back, nor withdraw her eyes from the distance, nor rank her with the haggard waste of fields.  It is borne in front, and she breasts the world with it; shoulder-high, and it is her ballast.  So loaded she stands like the Dresden Raphael, and there is no bearer of sword and buckler more erect.