converted so quickly into
substantial benefits had it not been for our more democratic political
and social forms. A privileged class does not secure itself in the
enjoyment of its advantages merely by legal intrenchments. It depends
quite as much upon disqualifying the "lower classes" from utilizing
their opportunities by a species of social inhibition. The rail-splitter
can be so easily encouraged to believe that rail-splitting is his
vocation. The tragedy in the life of Mr. J.M. Barrie's "Admirable
Crichton" was not due to any legal prohibition of his conversion in
England, as on the tropic island, into a veritable chief, but that on
English soil he did not in his own soul want any such elevation and
distinction. His very loyalty to the forms and fabric of English life
kept him fatuously content with the mean truckling and meaner
domineering of his position of butler. On the other hand, the loyalty of
an American to the American idea would tend to make him aggressive and
self-confident. Our democratic prohibition of any but occasional social
distinctions and our democratic dislike to any suggestion of authentic
social inferiority have contributed as essentially to the fluid and
elastic substance of American life as have its abundant and accessible
economic opportunities.

The increased momentum of American life, both in its particles and its
mass, unquestionably has a considerable moral and social value. It is
the beginning, the only possible beginning, of a better life for the
people as individuals and for society. So long as the great majority of
the poor in any country are inert and are laboring without any hope of
substantial rewards in this world, the whole associated life of that
community rests on an equivocal foundation. Its moral and social order
is tied to an economic system which starves and mutilates the great
majority of the population, and under such conditions its religion
necessarily becomes a spiritual drug, administered for the purpose of
subduing the popular discontent and relieving the popular misery. The
only way the associated life of such a community can be radically
improved is by the leavening of the inert popular mass. Their wants must
be satisfied, and must be sharpened and increased with the habit of
satisfaction. During the past hundred years every European state has
made a great stride in the direction of arousing its poorer citizens to
be more wholesomely active, discontented, and expe