Meanwhile, let us regard for a moment the sufferings of the peasant mothers. Their confinement frequently takes place in a hut devoted to the purposes of a steam-bath, or, in summer, in a barn, stable or outhouse. Many a poor woman is obliged to bear her great trial unattended--perhaps even without those appliances the absence of which will compel her, even against her better nature, to follow the instinct of brutes. In three days, at the utmost, she leaves the scene of her unspeakable agony and resumes her household duties, even her hard field-work. Cases occur in which the mother of only one day is forced by the hardship of circumstances to take to the field. Of course, these women, so cruelly enslaved, are to the last degree ignorant. What time, even if opportunity offered, have they for schooling, or even discourse? None whatever. They are but little superior in intellect to animals. Naturally, this ignorance begets superstition, and from this source arise new perils for their miserable offspring. On the third day after birth it is considered necessary to baptize the child by complete immersion in water, from which it is held by the Russian Church to be a sin to remove the chill. A large proportion of the deaths of infants in the colder months of the year are attributed by native writers to this cause. Mothers who have been able to suckle their own children generally wean them at the expiration of twelve months, and popular custom, which takes rank as a superstition, has appointed two days in the year for that purpose--one in July, the other in January. Both of these periods are unfavorable to the child: in July the cattle are mostly afflicted with disorders, and their milk is hurtful; in January they give but little milk. Various devices, more or less prejudicial to health, are resorted to by the mother to effect a purpose to which the grossest ignorance and superstition alone impel her. One of the mildest of these is separation from her child for a week or longer: frequently she returns to find it a corpse. And now let us see what sort of men are born of these overworked women. According to the statistical tables of Brun and Zernof, the number of persons of both sexes alive between the ages of fifteen and sixty was in Russia only 265 in 1000; in the United States in 1870 the number was 558. In Great Britain there are 548 adults to every 1000 population, and in Belgium 518; so that Russia, which, from the subjection of the weaker sex and their exposure to hardship, should, according to some persons, produce the greatest number of heroes, in fact produces but half as many adults, heroes or otherwise, as the other countries named, where women do but little field-labor.