radical metamorphosis in agricultural conditions than all this implies could not well be conceived. And when we recall once more that the agricultural conditions that obtained at the beginning of the nineteenth century were closely similar to those that obtained in each successive age for a hundred preceding centuries, we shall gain a vivid idea of the revolutionizing effects of new methods of work in the most important of industries. It is little wonder that in this short time the world has not solved to the satisfaction of the economists all the new problems thus so suddenly developed.

Turn now to the manufacturing world. In the days of our great-grandparents almost every household was a miniature factory where cotton and wool were spun and the products were woven into cloth. It was not till toward the close of the eighteenth century—just at the time when Watt was perfecting the steam engine—that Arkwright developed the spinning-frame, and his successors elaborated the machinery that made possible the manufacture of cloth in wholesale quantities; and the nineteenth century was well under way before the household production of cloth had been entirely supplanted by factory production. It is nothing less than pitiful to contemplate in imagination our great-great-grandmothers—and all their forebears of the long centuries—drudging away day after day, year in and year out, at the ceaseless task of spinning and weaving—only to produce, as the output of a lifetime of labor, a quantity of cloth equivalent perhaps to what our perfected machine, driven by steam, and manipulated by a factory girl, produces each working hour of every day. Similarly, carpets and quilts were of home manufacture; so were coats and dresses; and shoes were at most the product of the local shoemaker around the corner.

In the kitchen, food was cooked over the coals of a great fireplace or in the brick oven connected with that fireplace. Meat was supplied from a neighboring farm; eggs were the product of the housewife's own poultry yard; the son or daughter of the farmer milked the cow and drove her to and from the pasture; the milk was "set" in pans in the cellar—on a swinging shelf, preferably, to make it inaccessible to the rats; and twice a week the cream was made into butter in a primitive churn, the dasher of which was operated by the vigorous arm of the housewife herself, or by the unwilling arms of some one of her numerous progeny.

To give variety to the dietary, fruits grown in the local garden or orchard were preserved, each in its season, by the industrious housewife, and stored away in the capacious cellar; where also might be found the supply of home-grown potatoes, turnips, carrots, parsnips, and cabbages to provide for the needs of the winter. Fuel to supply the household needs, both for cooking and heating, was cut in the neighboring woodland, and carefully corded in the door-yard, where it provided most uncongenial employment for the youth of the family after school hours and of a Saturday afternoon.

The ashes produced when this wood was burned in the various fireplaces, were not wasted, but were carefully deposited in barrels, from which in due course lye was extracted by the simple process of pouring water over the contents of the barrel. Meantime scraps of fat from the table were collected throughout the winter and preserved with equal care; and in due course on some leisure day in the springtime—heaven knows how a leisure day was ever found in such a scheme of domestic economy!—the lye drawn from the ash-barrels and the scraps of fat were put into a gigantic kettle, underneath which a fire was kindled; with the result that ultimately a supply of soft soap was provided the housewife, with which her entire establishment, progeny included, could be kept in a state of relative cleanness.

The reader of these pages has but to cast his eye about him in the household in which he lives, and contrast the conditions just depicted with those of his every-day life, to realize what change has come over the aspects of household economy in the course of a short century. Nor need he be told in each of the various departments of which the activities are here outlined, that the changes which he observes have been due to the application of machinery in all the essential lines of work in question. We need not pause to detail the multitudinous devices for the economy of household labor which owe their origin to the same agency. There still remains, to be sure, enough of drudgery in the task of the housewife; yet her most strenuous day seems a mere playtime in comparison with the average day of her maternal forebear of three or four generations ago.

But we must not here pause for further outlines of a subject which it is the purpose of this and succeeding volumes to explicate in detail. All our succeeding chapters will but make it more clear how marvelous are the elaborations of method and of mechanism through which the world's work of to-day is accomplished. We shall consider first the mechanical principles that underlie work in general, passing on to some of the principal methods of application through which the powers of Nature are made available. We shall then take up in succession the different fields of industry. We shall ask how the work of the agriculturist is done in the modern world; how the multitudinous lines of manufacture are carried out; how transportation is effected; we shall examine the modus operandi of the transmission of ideas; we shall even consider that destructive form of labor which manifests itself in the production of mechanisms of warfare. As we follow out the stories of the all-essential industries we shall be led to realize more fully perhaps than we have done before, the meaning of work in its relations to human development; and in particular the meaning of modern work, as carried out with the aid of modern mechanical contrivances, in its relations to modern civilization.

The full force of these relations may best be permitted to unfold itself as the story proceeds. There is, however, one fundamental principle which I would ask the reader to bear constantly in mind, as an aid to the full appreciation of the importance of our subject. It is that in considering the output of the worker we have constantly to do with one form or another of property, and that property is the very foundation-stone of civilization. "It is impossible," says Morgan, in his work on Ancient Society, "to overestimate the influence of property in the civilization of mankind. It was the power that brought the Aryan and Semitic nations out of barbarism into civilization. The growth of the idea of property in the human mind commenced in feebleness and ended in becoming its master passion. Governments and laws are instituted with primary reference to its creation, protection, and enjoyment. It introduced human slavery in its production; and, after the experience of several thousand years, it caused the abolition of slavery upon the discovery that the freeman was a better property-making machine." If, then, we recall that without labor there is no property, we shall be in an attitude of mind to appreciate the importance of our subject; we shall realize, somewhat beyond the bounds of its more tangible and sordid relations, the essential dignity, the fundamental importance—in a word, the true meaning—of Work.

Undoubtedly there is a modern tendency to accept this view of the dignity of physical labor. At any rate, we differ from the savage in thinking it more fitting that man should toil than that his wife should labor to support him—though it cannot be denied that even now the number of physical toilers among women greatly exceeds the number of such toilers among men. But in whatever measure we admit