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 Carlyle and Kipling he preached against an idle, pleasure-seeking life as not merely undesirable, but contemptible. He preached the gospel of work for every man that comes into the world, work to the uttermost of his capacity; responsibility for every advantage and every talent; ignominy and derision for the coward and the shirker and the soft-handed over-fastidious person who thinks public life too rough and dirty for his participation. Writing of machine politics in 1886, he said, rather fatalistically: "If steady work and much attention to detail are required, ordinary citizens, to whom participation in politics is merely a disagreeable duty, will always be beaten by the organized army of politicians to whom it is both duty, business, and pleasure, and who are knit together and to outsiders by their social relations." But in 1894 he put the bugle to his lips and summoned the more intelligent class of "ordinary citizens" to arms:

The enormous majority of our educated men have to make their own living. . . . Nevertheless, the man of business and the man of science, the doctor of divinity and the doctor of law, the architect, the engineer and the writer, all alike owe a positive duty to the community, the neglect of which they cannot excuse on any plea of their private affairs. They are bound to follow understandingly the course of public events; they are bound to try to estimate and form judgments upon public men; and they are bound to act intelligently and effectively in support of the principles which they deem