It ought to have something of importance to do with work, since most people are engaged in some form of work most of their time. And when in an industrial age like the present, the whole life of society revolves about the system of production of wealth, it is impossible to precede with education and ignore the challenge to it of our industrialism. It may not be the task of education to provide a solution of the labor problem. But education certainly fails of its function when men are unable to retain its values while struggling with such problems. People rarely behave like educated human beings when they are confronted by an economic issue. Liberality of outlook, tolerance, temperance of judgment, self-control, ability to see when one is making oneself ridiculous, respect for the truth, are not often found on either side of an industrial conflict. Fantastic notions of the relation of education to work abound because there is much confusion about the meaning and value of work for human personality. Labor is at the same time idealized and despised. Ruskin, Carlyle, and many humanitarians have held labor to be most praiseworthy. Work is a blessing, in it are peace of mind and self-respect. Work is noble, and it ennobles him who does it. A contemporary writer on the subject of education warns us that the hand may not be “dishonored with impunity.” By dishonored he means that hand work may be considered inferior to brain work to the extent that there is great disparity between the rewards. Distinction has been made between work of hand and work of brain. The former is real work. Once in a parade of working men in Pittsburgh, I saw on a banner carried at the head of a column of metal workers, these words in very large capitals, _We Work_. The implication was that some others, slightly to their discredit, did not really work. From the idealization of work to the idealization of the worker is a logical step. The working class, a class which in earlier centuries was looked upon as the despised “proletariat,” attained a new status in nineteenth century thought. Men began to look to labor as the one class capable of righting the age-long wrongs of humanity, and to believe the control of society by organized labor to be the only means to the establishment of peace and justice. Most of the writers who praised labor were themselves members of the so-called leisure class. A few like Tolstoi vainly tried to support themselves by manual toil. Many who wrote convincingly of the blessings of labor did not personally avail themselves of its ennobling advantages. In the earlier humanitarian sentiment of the nobility of labor, the worker was envisaged as a free and independent person in whose wholesome activity there was healthfulness. Good workmanship commanded general respect and revealed the dignity of labor. There were simplicity and grandeur in the primitive act of a man eating his bread in the sweat of his brow. He who lived close to earth gained something