This general observation is right in its direction, but not sufficiently accurate to be reliable. Money being a concrete fact, and in its function as representative of all purchasable goods of fascinating importance, we quite naturally attach to it directly the glaring evils we find in its company. We see the misery and sin caused by too little of it and the misery and sin caused by too much of it; we see the various villainies practised to get it, from robbery so small and direct that you catch the thief’s hand in your pocket, to robbery so large and indirect that the thieving hand filches uncaught from a million pockets, via hired railroads, hired legislators, and hired newspapers; we see all this, and attach our condemnation to money itself, or, at farthest, to the love of it. Now, knowing more of the nature of society, we can begin to classify and analyse its difficulties more intelligently and find them somewhat in this order. Let us call poverty in-nutrition—a large part of our social tissues are insufficiently nourished. Let us call wealth over-nutrition, or repletion, or congestion, or fatty degeneration—a small part of our social tissues are gorged and inflamed with too much nourishment. Then let us call our large supply of poor, false, bad things: adulterated articles of food, shoddy clothes, paper shoes,—all the flood of worthless stuff society produces and consumes,—mal-nutrition; the blood is bad and does not nourish. Back of these phenomena we find still more important conditions, having to do not with the nourishment of the body politic, but with its activities. There is wrong action in the social organism; it does not work properly. Hence this local congestion of wealth, this peculiar arrest of distribution which makes both rich and poor dissatisfied in the widest field of life—work. Work is the most conspicuous feature of human life. In the conditions of work, in our ideas and feelings about work, in our habits, methods, and systems of work, lies the subject-matter of this book. It is held that our difficulties are to be found, not in any essential traits of human nature, and not in any essential conditions of human life, but merely in the preservation in our minds of certain ancient and erroneous ideas and feelings which act continually upon the normal processes of social economics, preventing the process and poisoning the product. See, for instance, among our American savages, how the accepted theory, that work is proper only to women, arrests their economic development and their personal progress as well. See, in the Southern States of earlier years, how the popular error, that work was proper only to slaves, arrested development in many lines. It is here asserted that we have still in the popular mind certain traditions—superstitions, falsehoods—about work, and that to them is traceable the economic distresses so conspicuous among us.