At present we have for the common lot of humanity that painful exhibition known as “the round man in the square hole.” Of all human troubles, none is so universal as this—a man’s work does not fit him. His income is insufficient, his output is insufficient, and he does not healthfully enjoy the process of living. A general condition of misadaptation, with necessary results of mal-nutrition and mal-production,—that is the prominent and visible symptom of our deep-lying psychological errors. Consider the life of a typical average man. He is misborn, misfed, mistaught, mis-clothed, misgoverned, to a varying degree. Instead of having a clear view of the social life and his place in it, he has a false and distorted view of his personal life, and only sees the social action as it infringes on him. He is surrounded from infancy with poor workmanship, the grudging product of those unhappy, misplaced men in square holes. The education which should be his introduction to the great and beautiful facts and laws of life, is too often a “bread-winning” process, practised by celibate women, as being more respectable than other work, and introducing him merely to a mass of unrelated facts and old ideas. The higher the field of social service, the less does “whip-dodging” or “bread-winning” help, and none is higher than teaching. Thus mishandled, the boy grows up without the aid of that subtle discernment and delicately applied special training which would have brought out his best faculties. He is a blurred, indeterminate, self-contradicting group of faculties, he has no unerring organic preference to lead him to his work. He is the nearest approach we can make to that “all-round man” we hear so much of; but the intricate duties of social service do not furnish us with one-sized cylindrical holes for our machine-made pegs. Into some hole he must go, we will not feed him else; so in he pops, and “settles down for life.” That is our common phrase for a permanent establishment in the active service of Society, otherwise known as “self-support,” “earning one’s living,” “maintaining a family.” Our average man is not expected to love his work, to enjoy it, to grow continually through it. He does all this sometimes, but too rarely. Our methods of education have been specially esteemed, not because they taught the child to like what he did, but taught him to do what he did not like. We take it for granted that he will not like his life work, and so seek to fit him for continued application to distasteful service.