y of such students of history, and panderers to majorities,
as the leaders of the discontented in England, Germany and in America,
dates back to about the time of the fall of Pericles and the Athenian
republic.

The cry of "discontent" has become a fetich among unthinking
politicians. We are all, thank God, discontented, and a poor lot we
should be if we were not. The workingman's discontent has been
over-emphasized, for the reason that what he demands is material,
ponderable, for sale, easy to see, and not far out of the reach of
one's hand. He wants more rooms, more meat, more tobacco, more beer,
more leisure. I am glad he does want them, and let me say just once,
in answer to my detractors along these lines, that the workingman has
no heartier champion than am I. I applaud his discontent just as I
cherish my own, for "it is precisely this that keeps us all alive!" It
is just because I wish him well that every ounce of my influence and
experience are his, to open his eyes to the demagogues who fatten upon
him, fool him, rope him, throw him and brand him, as they have done in
Germany, as they are attempting to do in England, and as they will
shortly begin to do in America. State socialism means slavery for him,
with an army of officials living on him. He will be given so much
bread, and beer, and meat, and tobacco; so much music, theatre, and
literature; and there will grow up an army whose business it will be
to keep him in order, and to cut him down if he revolts, as was done
by the police in one of the suburbs of Berlin not long ago. The German
workman is already so entangled in the ropes of insurance, so harried
by petty officials, so branded by the police, and he has permitted to
increase such a host of guardians, that revolt or revolution is
practically impossible. Counting the army, navy, and officials, there
are said to be three million officials, great and small in Germany;
and there are fourteen million electors, or, roughly, one policeman to
every five adults. And those three million policemen, armed with
lethal and legal weapons, are inflexibly and unalterably for no
change. Does the workingman ever stop to think that those officials
draw salaries amounting to something like $1,200,000,000 a year, and
is he still fool enough to think that he does not pay those salaries
to these slave-drivers! I have said that the population is well fed,
well clothed, and well looked after. Of course they are. No slave-owner