But we must not here pause for further outlines of a subject which it is the purpose of this and succeeding volumes to explicate in detail. All our succeeding chapters will but make it more clear how marvelous are the elaborations of method and of mechanism through which the world's work of to-day is accomplished. We shall consider first the mechanical principles that underlie work in general, passing on to some of the principal methods of application through which the powers of Nature are made available. We shall then take up in succession the different fields of industry. We shall ask how the work of the agriculturist is done in the modern world; how the multitudinous lines of manufacture are carried out; how transportation is effected; we shall examine the _modus operandi_ of the transmission of ideas; we shall even consider that destructive form of labor which manifests itself in the production of mechanisms of warfare. As we follow out the stories of the all-essential industries we shall be led to realize more fully perhaps than we have done before, the meaning of work in its relations to human development; and in particular the meaning of modern work, as carried out with the aid of modern mechanical contrivances, in its relations to modern civilization. The full force of these relations may best be permitted to unfold itself as the story proceeds. There is, however, one fundamental principle which I would ask the reader to bear constantly in mind, as an aid to the full appreciation of the importance of our subject. It is that in considering the output of the worker we have constantly to do with one form or another of property, and that property is the very foundation-stone of civilization. "It is impossible," says Morgan, in his work on Ancient Society, "to overestimate the influence of property in the civilization of mankind. It was the power that brought the Aryan and Semitic nations out of barbarism into civilization. The growth of the idea of property in the human mind commenced in feebleness and ended in becoming its master passion. Governments and laws are instituted with primary reference to its creation, protection, and enjoyment. It introduced human slavery in its production; and, after the experience of several thousand years, it caused the abolition of slavery upon the discovery that the freeman was a better property-making machine." If, then, we recall that without labor there is no property, we shall be in an attitude of mind to appreciate the importance of our subject; we shall realize, somewhat beyond the bounds of its more tangible and sordid relations, the essential dignity, the fundamental importance--in a word, the true meaning--of Work.