soil, removing tree roots, draining swamps, building houses. If a new continent exactly like North America should suddenly appear, the settlers would take with them portable houses, steam sawmills, ready-made clothing, canned foods, automobiles, and motor boats. They would begin the work of making a new nation not where the Virginians began it, in 1607, but at about 1900. The Americans who have in them the blood of men and women who helped found a nation before life had been made easy have an inheritance that is priceless.

3. Not All the People believe in Hard Work. Not all the millions of people in the United States, however, are hardy and brave and enterprising. In later years many have crossed the Atlantic to make their homes here, knowing that they would find houses already built for them to live in and more comforts than any other nation could offer. In many cases agents from the United States personally conducted immigrants to America -arranging for their passage across the water and securing work for them the moment they landed. In other cases men and women came to join friends or relatives, who met them at the dock and made everything easy for them.

It is not a simple matter, then, to describe the American people of today. Not all of them believe in work, many look on it as a necessary evil, some believe in it for others but not for themselves. The following will give an idea of most of the different work ideals in the United States of today.

4. Some Americans believe in the Right to be Lazy. About forty years ago a Frenchman named Paul Lafargue wrote a book called "The Right to be Lazy." He praised the ancient Greeks for their "contempt of work." He even praised the natives of Africa, who work only enough to obtain food, and pointed scornfully to people of the countries who work long and hard for food and countless other things. Thousands of copies of Lafargue's book have been sold in every part of the world, and many people have let themselves be deceived into believing that what they most desire is a day in which there is as little work as possible.

5. The Men farthest down are the Jobless. The "right to be lazy" means the "right not to work"; but when an American investigator traveled through Europe to study the people of the different nations, he found that the most forlorn human beings everywhere were the jobless men. Early one morning in London his attention was attracted by a "strange, shapeless, and disreputable figure which slunk out of the shadow of a building

The most hopeless persons in all the world are the jobless. They are the unskilled workers and the misfits

and moved slowly and dejectedly down the silent and empty street. . . . He turned neither to the left nor to the right, but moved slowly on, his head bent toward the ground, apparently looking for something he did not hope to find." The life stories of these men differed widely, but the one important fact about them all was that they were jobless, and this had brought them only misery.

One will often see bitter, discontented faces among the workers of a nation, but never the misery that can be found in the faces of the chronic idlers. No one knows just how many of

these misguided people live in America, but there is a small army of them. They ride in empty freight cars, they ask lifts of passing automobiles, they travel on foot leisurely from state to state, begging, thieving at times, committing petty offenses in order to get short jail sentences during the cold winter months. When illness and complete helplessness finally come upon them, they find a lodging in a free hospital or in a "poor farm."

6. Idleness cannot bring Happiness. Not all those who believe in the right to be lazy are "tramps." Many are the sons and daughters of wealthy parents. Enough money has been accumulated in the past by their relatives to make it unnecessary for them to work. There are probably more rich men who work hard than rich men who do not. Yet there are many idle rich. But their riches and the right to be lazy bring them no happiness. During the World War most states passed emergency laws requiring able-bodied men between certain ages to work at some necessary task. Now that war days have gone there are again many people who willingly live on the work of others. They differ from the tramp class simply in this, that they live on the stored-up work of their relatives, for that is what fortunes are, while the tramp must steal or beg the stored-up work of strangers.

7. Some Americans look on Work as a Necessary Evil. Besides idlers and shirkers the United States has many people who do almost as much harm. They are the clock watchers. They are always looking forward to the time when they will have less work and more leisure, and even hope to have a long stretch of years with no work and all leisure. This constant looking ahead spoils the years in which they should be finding their greatest happiness. Leisure is one of the things least understood. It is a time for doing things, not a time for idleness. The only difference between workdays and leisure days is in the kind of things the person does, or the way he does them, or both. What is worth doing with one's leisure is one of the things young people must learn as the days go by. Dr. Samuel John

son, a famous English scholar, once said that the reason why so many men took to drink was that they were not interesting enough to themselves in their leisure to get on without it. Leisure is a source of pleasure and profit only if we know how to interest ourselves anywhere and at any time. Lord Leverhulme, the leading commercial genius of Great Britain, after

forty strenuous years began to look for a place where he could take life a little easier. He bought two islands in the outer Hebrides of Scotland, saying that he had found no more restful place. But he told a friend: "I get no pleasure out of an absolutely idle holiday. I have never spent a holiday doing nothing." It was not strange therefore that almost at once he found himself rebuilding the town hall of one of the towns, rearranging its crooked streets, planning the improvement of the harbor, and financing a great fish business.

8. Some Americans are Idle Part of the Time. Not all idlers are willing loafers. Many of the men with shuffling feet and hopeless faces are a part of the temporarily unemployedan army which, like a great black shadow, spreads over a large part of the world. Even though America is the "home of the job," there are always men and women temporarily out of

work. In New York State every year 170,

000 more men are em

ployed in factories in January than in October, and 140,000 more persons are at work in canning-factories in September than in February. In Kansas 120,ooo more workers are required in the wheat fields at harvest time than at any other part of the year. These are conditions in only two of the states. This means that a little army of workers is

con

These men are not hopeless, but they are out stantly on the move

of work and restless

back and forth as factories open and close

and as the crops ripen and are harvested. The migrant worker usually has little skill to offer the working world. He is a leftover and must take what he can get. Because the shifting from one kind of work to another makes the worker restless, many of these men after a time join the chronic loafing class.

9. Some Americans believe in Slow Work and Poor Work. It does not seem possible that anywhere in the United States there is a person in his right mind who believes in poor work.