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.
If Democracy were dependent upon conscious human effort, we should be moving rapidly and far from the old ideas of independence, of self-reliance, of individuality; we should be hastening toward a re-establishment of the aristocratic ideal of “molly-coddling,” of making the citizen a hot-house plant sheltered under government glass from the rude but invigorating forces of nature—but exposed to withering and denuding paternalism. Everybody who did not do for himself—whether because he would not or because he could not, we should not stop to ask—would be provided with education, ideas, food, clothing, shelter, amusements, baths, in short, everything but self-respect and the power to produce self-respecting progeny. And these things would be provided, not by private philanthropy, not by the rich giving of their surplus, but by taxation.
Taxation simply means taking from one part of the community, chiefly from the poor and those of moderate means, and giving to another part, after an army of officials have had their “rake-off” in salaries and perquisites. Taxation, therefore, means levying upon those who have little to spare; it means crippling those who are trying to fight the hard battle of life.
There is nothing democratic, nothing economically sound, in these alluring schemes for making men sleek and comfortable and wise by public bounty. They result in coddling incompetents, and in breaking down those who are now just able to get along and who need only the push of additional taxation to send them fairly over the precipice from self-reliance to dependence.
A wise man once said: “Most legislation consists of A and B getting together and deciding what C shall do for D.” We mustn’t forget C. He pays the bills. And his name is “the people.”
The work that saves is the work of a man, by himself, for himself, work chosen by him, mastered by him, work by which he is sometimes mastered. He must stand or fall on the results of his efforts. This is no programme for the timid or the halting, but it is the programme for all grades of intelligence and opportunity, each doing for himself just as well as he possibly can, under his circumstances.
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.