FIELD LABOUR FOR WOMEN. (To THE EDITOR OF THE "
SPECTATOR:1 .S111,—With your permission I will bring my mite to the discus- sion of the Agricultural Labourers' question, so profitably conducted in your columns. What I have to say possesses this single merit, that, I believe, it is new. Let me begin my story in true storyteller's fashion, at the very beginning, and so arrive by Aim degrees of prolixity at its one only part which is of general interest, its conclusion. More than one of the farmers of this parish have discontinued their attendance at their parish church, end refuse any longer to "sit under" a person holding and ex- pressing opinions so seditious and revolutionary as mine. Not that I have made the agricultural labourers' question, or, in fact, .any political question, the theme of a discourse from the pulpit. But my offence is (for I at once plead guilty) that I have been heard to say to a labourer's wife that I hoped the time might come 'when it should be a very rare thing for such as herself to go out to field-work. Now, my object in writing to you is to ask you, Sir, to allow me to lay before your readers certain very " con- ,crete " reasons I think I have for entertaining and even daring
to utter a sentiment so atrocious. In a labourer's cottage, from which I have but just returned, the only child, an infant of a few weeks old, "lay a-dying." Its mother volunteered (unasked) an explanation of her child's fatal sickliness. It was to the effect that she had continued at field work too long before her confine- ment. And this, she confessed, is the second infant whose brief 1ife has been sacrificed in the self-same way.
Another labourer's wife in this parish has suffered within -eighteen months two miscarriages through the same fatal unwill- ingness to discontinue field work when far advanced in pregnancy.
And yet another labourer's wife has (so far) succeeded in rear- ing a miserably unhealthy child, whose sickliness is to be traced, 1 believe, simply to the same cause. I beg to place the above bald -statement before your readers, and to add to it only this comment, that I think I have a shadow of a shade of an excuse for still venturing to say that I hope the time may come when to see a -labourer's wife engaged in field labour will be a rare phenomenon.
—I am, Sir, &c., VICAR. P.S.—Your readers will see that to the one evil consequence of 'female labour in the fields mentioned above, I might add others, such as neglect of home duties, &c., ad nauseam. I hope, how- ever, soLte abler pen than mine may supply what I have left -unwritten.
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