342 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
requirements of your condition." Not a word about exchang- ing one condition for another.
Now my point is that this used to be the rule, and variations from it were the exception. Today the tendency is to make these exceptions relatively more numerous than ever before, or to put it strongly, modern men do not stop with bettering them- selves within their condition, they want to reform their con- dition. They are not content with trying to get better wages. They want to overthrow the wage system. They do not stop with plans to provide for a rainy day. They want to abolish the rainy day. They are not content with conjugal fidelity. They want to reconstruct the family. They are not satisfied with improve- ments in the working of governments. They want to eliminate governments. They look with contempt upon adjustment of relations between social classes. They want to obliterate social classes. The emphasis today is on change of conditions rather than upon adjustment to conditions. Consequently too much of the labor problem is simply the problem of avoiding labor. Instead of feeling a pride and obligation in service, men and women through all the grades are debauched by the vision of escape from service, or what amounts to the same thing, exchange of work for a state that seems to require less work. Not how to do well the work of our present condition, but how to get into a condition which seems to promise release from work, is the question which teases the least respectable, and sometimes the more respectable of those who make the social movement. In the older countries Americans are constantly surprised by evi- dences of pride in being the latest of several generations in the line of fathers and sons who have succeeded to the same lowly occupation, and still find satisfaction in conducting it well. With us the rule is discontent unless the occupation of the children promotes them to conditions supposed to be more dignified than those of their parents.
In the second place the social movement of our time has a new force or volume. It takes more people to make the people than ever before. Every ranch and farm, every fishing hamlet,
