The business man--and that means the worker, the “toiler”--is in control, is there to stay, because the human animal is so constituted that its material affairs--proper food, proper clothing, proper shelter--must always be primal. Not of the _highest_ importance, but of the _first_ importance. And if those material matters are well attended to--as they will be when the worker’s instinct pervades the whole race--the spiritual matters, the growth of body and soul, must inevitably prosper. The worker, the worker’s instinct, provides the right soil for a soul to grow in--a real soil, full of the natural and nourishing substances, not a fanciful, unsubstantial soil of false ideals, fraudulent culture and barren fiddle-faddle of closet theorizings. For proof that the business instinct will provide the right soil we need only point to our own country as it is. In America, the great business nation of the nations, there lives a race of idealists, eighty millions earnest, dominated by the instincts for self-help and helpfulness to others, afire with the passion for improvement, for education, for knowledge of all kinds and from any and all sources. The world has wandered in the swamps of vain and sentimental imaginings long enough. By all means, let us have it established on the firm ground and in the straight, upward roads of science and business. The sun shines upon those roads by day, the moon and the stars light them by night; the flowers bloom beside them--and within reach of the humblest wayfarer. This gospel will not be attractive to _poseurs_ and to the lazy and the incompetent. But it is gospel, the gospel of Democracy, America’s gospel. In the cargo of merchandise, Enlightenment and Democracy always travel as stowaway missionaries; when the cargo is landed, they go ashore and begin to preach. CHAPTER XI DEMOCRACY’S DYNAMO Education is the huge dynamo which supplies power to the American people. Not in history or in legend is there recorded such an outburst of international curiosity as that about the real America, as distinguished from the America created in the minds of Europeans by our multi-millionaires, since it became not merely agricultural but also an industrial world-factor, inevitably dominant in an era whose civilization is the first based upon peace and indissolubly wedded to peaceful arts. Europe has not been satisfied with inspecting what comes to her. Such specimens only whetted her curiosity to an edge as fine as that which cut the home ties of adventurous spirits when Columbus exhibited his Indians and his gold at the court of his patrons. The Europeans, and the Asiatics, too, hastened to dispatch to us all manner of commissioners, semi-official and private, from princes of reigning houses to delegates from labor unions. And each of these spies--of the splendid modern kind--has been charged to seek and find and forthwith bring home an answer to the all-important question: “How _do_ they do it?”