the Mohave desert he sees abject beings loafing about the railway station to beg from the curious passengers; further east he sees self-respecting red people offering for sale pottery or blankets—their own handiwork; later he notes members of another tribe working on railroad construction by the side of white laborers; as he approaches the settled region he observes yet others who have homes and farms and engage in civilized industry, and his thought runs along the ascending scale of being until he contemplates the highest energy of the most cultured and forceful minds of our best civilization. He instinctively decides that the desirable life is on the upper scale of intelligence, feeling, and action.
Happiness through work is the creed of the dawning century. The romance of chivalry gives place to the poetry of steam; democracy is teaching wealth and position the dignity of labor; evolution and psychology show action to be the consummate flower of thought and feeling; recent literature illustrates the gospel of effort; and religion reaffirms the doctrine that faith without works is dead.
Herbert Spencer's philosophy defines life to be "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." This adjustment implies self-activity. If man has been evolved through a long period of change, he is a survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence. His ancestral history is one of exertion, his powers have been developed by use, he maintains himself by striving, his normal state is in the field of labor, and logically it is there his welfare and happiness are found.
Max Nordau wrote a book on "Degeneration." It contains much interesting matter, many wholesome
