would not have discussed with an equal thoughtfulness, knowledge, and intelligence. Nay it has sometimes even appeared to us that the Boer woman, probably owing to her somewhat more arduous and complex labours with regard to her children, does exhibit, as compared to the male, a slightly greater thoughtfulness, and a larger tendency to inquire into the causes of things and to interest herself in impersonal matters: tendencies which the males of the upper classes in the nineteenth century commonly exhibit to an immensely larger degree than their females. Among the finest specimens of the Boer we have met have certainly been women, devoid of the culture of schools, but keen, resolute, reflective, and determined; showing no trace of that frivolity, love of pleasure, and uncertainty of thought, which so often marks the female of the wealthy classes in our nineteenth-century societies, and renders her so markedly the inferior of the male.[61] [61] It is hardly necessary to state that we are not referring to the labouring classes in modern societies, in which, when the male and female are both exposed to the same conditions of labour, the same intellectual homogeneity is to be observed. The position of these women differs, however, from that of the Boer woman in the less social consideration they enjoy, this depending on causes too complex to be here entered on. No man, we believe, can study the condition of the South African Boer, before he has been acted upon by the nineteenth-century conditions, without being convinced that not only is one full half of the social labour in the hands of the women, but that it is not the least complex or socially honourable; and that she is far more the fellow labourer and comrade of man, than are the mass of women in nineteenth-century societies.