If, unlike the female in those societies in which almost the sole occupation of the male being war and the chase, to the female is left, in addition to the bearing and rearing of the whole people, all agricultural and manufacturing labour, from the cultivation of the fields, and the grinding grain, to the building of houses, and the weaving of garments, and in which even the primitive artistic labour of the society largely devolves on them in the ornamenting of utensils or clothing--if the Boer woman cannot lay claim to the exclusive possession of all these important fields of action, she still retains possession of one full half of the labour of her race. Under no circumstances has she become the drone of her society, or sunk to the condition of being merely a parasitic excrescence on the national life, fed, clothed, and sustained by the labours of others in return for the mere performance of her animal sex function--her very children, when once she has gone through the mechanical labour of bearing them, being reared by others, while she contributes nothing either mentally or physically to the fund of labour which sustains the state--a condition into which large masses of females in the civilizations of the past and present have tended to sink, which is universal among the inhabitants of Eastern harems to-day, which was tending to become universal among the wealthier classes in Europe until forty or fifty years ago a counter movement took its birth. If the Boer woman does not manifest that superiority in intelligence over the male section of her society, which is continually remarked with surprise by those who study the women of many primitive societies (and which is doubtless the result of the more strenuous, complex, and important labours with which they occupy themselves, as compared with the males of their societies), the Boer woman's condition is even more happy yet, being one of intellectual equality with her male companions; a condition which seems to constitute the highest ideal in the human sexual world. Between the Boer woman and her male comrade we never find yawning that mental chasm which in Eastern harems, and frequently in European drawing-rooms, divides the males, highly trained, and in many cases laboriously active, and therefore mentally strong, from their females, so frequently mentally vacuous and feeble, in whom the passive enjoyment of ease has taken the place of all strenuous systematic exertion; and who have become in many cases so enervated, that in passing from their society to that of the males of their own circle we seem to be passing intellectually into contact with another and higher tribe of creature. We believe there is hardly a Boer farm-house in South Africa, where the perturbing influence of the nineteenth-century civilization has not yet crept, where it would be possible to discuss any matters with the male members of the household which its females