The change in the attitude toward work is coming from both sides of the world. The rich are more and more forced to work. The not-rich are demanding and compelling better opportunities to work. Look at our national life in the broad, and you see all elements concentrating on the democratic platform--Work! Beyond question the “workingman” is discontented. Nor will his discontent decrease. On the contrary, the more he has, the more he’ll want. His appetite will grow with what it feeds on. This Republic was started by just such men, was started for the purpose of creating ever more and more of them. The eagerness for better pay, for better treatment, for better surroundings, whether that eagerness be in the capitalist or in the street-cleaner, is proof that the Republic is still doing business at the old stand in the old way. And the more or less turbulent wrangling over the division of the rewards will never cease. If there were any signs of its ceasing or of its abating, then indeed might we justly despair of Democracy. Content means caste; discontent means Democracy. Work is democratic, not because all kinds of men engage in it and so make it common, but because of its effect on the individual worker. Every impulse toward Democracy is fostered by it, just as every impulse toward caste is encouraged by leniency toward the idea of the value of a leisure class. The sooner ambition is roused in every man, woman and child, the sooner they learn that by work alone can their ambitions be gratified, the sooner will an ideal democratic condition evolve. America is ahead of all the great nations in the race toward this ideal Democracy, because there is the nearest approach in America in every walk of life to a condition in which idlers are few and toilers many. In a previous chapter the efforts of plutocratic philanthropists to relieve a certain part of each community from the “stern and cruel necessity to work” have been noted. But the pauper-making plutocrats and lords and ladies Bountiful are not the only missionaries of idleness and incompetence. Our legislatures, national, state, municipal, are voting large sums of money for free something or other for somebody or other, or for bolstering up some real or reputed neglected or defective class. And leading citizens, themselves toilers at businesses, trade and professions, are, through mistaken sentimentality, urging the legislatures to vote still larger sums for indiscriminate--_necessarily_ indiscriminate--alms.