Toward the middle of the last century, with our growing wealth and the rise of a leisure class through false education, the Old World ideas found their way across the Atlantic. And in every community there began to be at least a few persons who took on the supercilious and contemptuous attitude toward work. Fortunately for the good sense and happiness of the American people, at about that time modern industrial conditions changed the whole system of getting and keeping prosperous. In the old days, idle and brainless barbarians could hold on to and even add to their possessions--agricultural land. But in the new days of intense energy, of rapidly changing values, of trade, commerce, and competition, of rise in the price of labor and fall in the price of money, property is always growing wings that must be clipped daily and often hourly to keep it from taking flight. It is getting harder and harder to reap where one has not sown, to induce men to work without a proper return, or, after wealth has been acquired, to hold on to it without the use of brains and energy. And so, the old theory is dying out, chiefly for the usual reason for any human advancement--changed conditions compelling men to change their point of view. The reason the rich men’s sons are going to work is that they, or at least their sagacious fathers, know that if they don’t work, the men who do work will get their wealth away from them. And this reason of necessity is going to bring about a revolution where all the shrieking of the reformers, all the logic of the moral philosophers, all the talk about the dignity of labor and “happiness only in hard work” make no headway worth the measuring. Maxims of good sense and good morals can’t be pounded or preached into poor short-sighted, irrational, shadow-chasing humanity. Nature and the laws of environment do not preach. They quietly but relentlessly compel. And sad wrecks they make of the pretensions and pomposities of the conceited human animal. It is in vain that aristocracy-worshiping mothers of America dream of an Old World upper class for their sons and daughters. It is in vain that silly sociologists prattle about the necessity and the advantages of a “leisure class.” Modern environment says “Work; work hard! Be a somebody or I will make you a nobody!” And work we must. And presently we shall hear the last of the notions that idleness or useless employment is “noble” and “dignified” and “aristocratic.” And only in mad-houses will be found men and women who continue in their grown-up periods of life the pastimes of childhood--playing with blocks and soldiers and toy tools. What of the old notions of property rights and distribution of wealth will go by the board and what will remain, no one can foresee. Nor does it in the least matter, since we can be certain that no conditions will arise in which the idler will be more comfortable or the worker less comfortable than in the past or at present.