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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.