But latterly a host of women have been coming into conspicuous positions because ambition drove them there. They have begun to work for work’s sake. They have seen the fraud in the silly and shallow twaddle about “woman and the home”--as if for centuries the mothers of the men most useful to society had not been for the most part working women who could not, if they would, have pleaded child-bearing and nursery and housework in excuse for doing nothing to add to the family income. The “new woman” is not a slovenly drudge waiting irritably for the advent of a husband that she may become a tenement “sill-warmer” or a palace parasite. She works until she is married; she continues to work after she is married. And there is no shadow of a taint of pecuniary interest in the love and affection she gives. Disregard the negligible few women of the plutocracy and its environs, as we have disregarded the unimportant few men of the same class, and looking at all over eight millions, you find that the American woman, like the American man, is developing in harmony with the ideal of Democracy. Democracy is no discriminator either among persons or between sexes. It respects the mothers of future generations as profoundly as it respects the fathers. And it has the same gifts for all--freedom, intelligence, the joy of work. CHAPTER XVII AS TO SUCCESS It has often been said, and written, that we are about the most unhappy people on the face of the earth, that our unhappiness increases with our Democracy. That our unhappiness is caused by our Democracy. Democracy and discontent, despotism and discontent, constitutional monarchy and content--so runs the argument. If this were true, we as Americans would say, “Happiness bought at the price of self-respect is far too dear. Heaven itself would be too dear at that price. And, however it may be with some Europeans, to an American the admission that he was not the equal of any man would be a degradation like that of the slave.” But it is not true that we are an unhappy people. Not to be sunk in a bucolic stupor like the peasants of Europe does not mean unhappiness. To know when one is uncomfortable, to think how to become less uncomfortable, to be alive, alert, aspiring, to love work as other people love play, to love progress as other people love stagnation--that does not mean unhappiness. There are other standards of happiness than the bucolic or than the self-complacence of the constricted devotees of caste. Indeed, we in America continue to doubt whether those states of mind are truly happy. Content may or may not mean happiness. It may be the calm, numb resignation of despair. It may be the fat, swine-like stupor of an established aristocracy. We have our own ideas of happiness--and it is interesting to note that these restless, forever unsatisfied longings of ours tend to long life.