Page:Gilman human-work 1904.pdf/189

IX

THE NATURE OF WORK (I)

Work is the most prominent feature of human life. So large a majority of human beings spend most of their lives at work that the few diseased and defective members of society who do not need scarcely be considered. As usual, the prominence and constant insistence on the facts about work have prevented our thinking much about it, and, when we did think, our mistaken basic concepts made us think wrong. Our general attitude toward work varies somewhat in accordance with race, place, and time, but is traceable, easily enough, to certain general root ideas.

One line of racial feeling on this subject has been most fully and ably treated by Veblen in his "Theory of the Leisure Class." He shows how labour, being first performed by women and then by conquered opponents made slaves, was despised by the early mind, and how, further, the ability not to work, involving power to make others work for you, soon became an ingrained principle of pride; further, how the leisure class, an aborted part of the body politic, has preserved these errors of the early mind and added heavily to them by the increment of tradition and long association. This accounts satisfactorily enough for a large share of the popular feeling about work.