Work--not as a means to leisure, but as in itself the aim and end. No thought of “retiring.” No thought of social distractions that breed only boredom, or of useless activities that dissipate manhood and womanhood. The main thought--work. Work is _the_ ideal of the Republic. The central point in the Old World theory which our plutocracy would make our theory of life is that a man or woman ought to aspire not to be a worker, but a person of leisure, to become not a doer of useful things, but a doer of useless things. The central point of the democratic theory of life is just the reverse. It is the worker exalted, and his work also. Europe clings to precedent; America insists upon judgment. Europe tends to act as “father and grandfather did”; America has acted and should tend to act as the new situation, ever changing, may require at any given moment. Europe, bound by precedents, by false ideals, by traditions of class distinctions and the nobility of idleness, simply cannot compete with us. For the cause of Democracy, for the uplifting of the common man, for the increase in the application of human energy to human needs, America’s competition with Europe is more helpful than centuries of theorizing and preaching and political maneuvering. The Great Republic is presenting to Europe the stern alternative: Democracy or Decay. CHAPTER XV OUR ALLIES FROM ABROAD The European “hordes” continue to pour in upon us, and the agitation over, and against, the “foreign devil” increases. We shall soon be “welcoming to our shores” upwards of a million strangers a year, all of them with no “capital”--except their muscles and the potentialities of their minds and hearts. If Washington and Jefferson could have looked forward to this time, they would have lifted jubilant prayers of thankfulness that their hopes that this land would become “the refuge of the poor and oppressed of all nations” were being superbly realized. But many of our statesmen view the tidal-wave incursions with anything but joy; and their woful cries find echo everywhere among those who do not take the trouble to put facts into proper perspective. Russian and Finn, Polack, Hun and Lithuanian, Sicilian and Greek and Syrian and Bohemian, on they come, streaming from the noisome steerages of great ocean liners, pouring through the gates of the immigration offices. They are obviously poor, obviously the descendants of generations of toilers. And with them are their wives and their children. Myriads of anxious, troubled faces, in which hope and fear alternately triumph in the struggle for expression. Indeed, a disquieting spectacle to those who cannot or will not look beneath surfaces at universal human nature with its powerful instincts for and resolves toward progress. But let us watch this incoming flood with American eyes. Let us see what the facts plead--the facts, as distinguished from prejudices. What is our so-called foreign-population problem?