(b) _Husbandmen_ were possessed of holdings insufficient for the complete maintenance of the family and their income was therefore supplemented by working for wages. (c) _Wage-earners_ had no land, not even a garden, and depended therefore completely on wages for the maintenance of their families. In addition to the above, for whom agriculture was their chief business, the families of the gentry, professional men and tradesmen who lived in the country and smaller towns, generally grew sufficient dairy and garden produce for domestic consumption. The above classification is arbitrary, for no hard-and-fast division existed. Farmers merged imperceptibly into husbandmen, and husbandmen into wage-earners and yet there was a wide gulf separating their positions. As will be shown, it was the women of the first two classes who bore and reared the children who were destined to be the makers of England, while few children of the wage-earning class reached maturity. A. _Farmers._ However important the women who were the mothers of the race may appear to modern eyes, their history was unnoticed by their contemporaries and no analysis was made of their development. The existence of vigorous, able matrons was accepted as a matter of course. They embodied the seventeenth century idea of the “eternal feminine” and no one suspected that they might change with a changing environment. They themselves were too busy, too much absorbed in the lives of others, to keep journals and they were not sufficiently important to have their memoirs written by other people. Perhaps their most authentic portraits may be found in the writings of the Quakers, who were largely drawn from this class of the community. They depict women with an exalted devotion, supporting their families and strengthening their husbands through the storms of persecution and amidst the exacting claims of religion.