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 expectant; but our own
country has succeeded in traveling farther in this direction than has
any other, and it may well be proud of its achievement. That the
American political and economic system has accomplished so much on
behalf of the ordinary man does constitute the fairest hope that men
have been justified in entertaining of a better worldly order; and any
higher social achievement, which America may hereafter reach, must
depend upon an improved perpetuation of this process. The mass of
mankind must be aroused to still greater activity by a still more
abundant satisfaction of their needs, and by a consequent increase of
their aggressive discontent.

The most discriminating appreciation, which I have ever read, of the