The shame feeling, based on woman and slave, grew, rather than relaxed, in the period of serfdom. In fatuous ignorance of the source of their wealth and power, the fighting and governing class despised the hand that fed them, and the ancestral accumulation of this ungrateful idiocy gives us our ingrained contempt for “labour,” “trade,” “the working classes.” The workers themselves, equally ignorant, though more excusably, accepted this feeling as correct, and strove to escape singly from the only honourable position on earth, that of Maker, Doer, Giver, to the supposed dignity of a Social Parasite. “The Theory of the Leisure Class” has been most luminously expounded by Veblen, but there is room for much more study in “the theory of the working class,” the glorious, irresistible, upward pressure of which, by its accumulating superfluity of rich product, has, besides all its good effects, made possible the morbid secretions and deleterious growths of society, the indolent ulcer of idle wealth, the waste of tissue in extreme poverty, the wide range of diseases, disgusting and terrible, with which Society is hampered in its economic processes. This feeling of contempt for work, shame in work, once recognised as one of our evil inheritances from the black past, we should set ourselves to check and dismiss it as rapidly as possible. In the individual by consciously rebutting the old feeling and cultivating its opposite one of honour and pride, and in the race by an instant and thorough change in the education of children, through home, school, and church, book, picture, and story. It is gratifying to note that America is already far ahead of any other nation in its honour of work, and that even the woman-parasite, as well as the leisure-class parasite, is feeling it in this liveliest of societies. Our aversion to work as being an expense of energy is quite right. Human work, as we have seen in the last chapter, should not constitute a draught on individual energy. When it does so there is something wrong. As in our constant analogy, the physical organism, we may be sure that when it is an effort to breathe something is wrong with one’s lungs. Our personal fund of energy is strictly limited, and nature’s processes tend to save it—the law of conservation of energy. Very slowly and gradually has been accumulated in us our private storage battery of nerve force, with its stock of arrested energy and its power to turn it on when necessary to modify action. This supply of energy is limited. This we must not waste; it is the hoarded wealth of all organic time.