In the United States a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit or to public business. He would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living. It is for the purpose of escaping this obligation to work that so many rich Americans come to Europe, where they find some scattered remains of aristocratic society, among whom idleness is still held in honor. Equality of conditions not only ennobles the notion of labor, but raises the notion of labor as a source of profit. In aristocracies it is not exactly labor that is despised, but labor with a view to profit.
Labor is honorable in itself when it is undertaken at the bidding of ambition or virtue.
Yet in aristocratic society it constantly happens that he who works for honor is not insensible to the attractions of profit. In aristocratic countries there are few public officers who do not affect to serve their country without interested motives. Their salary is an incident of which they think but little and of which they always affect not to think at all. In democratic communities these two notions are, on the contrary, always palpably united. As the desire of well-being is universal, as fortunes are slender or fluctuating, as everyone wants either to increase his own resources or to provide fresh ones for his progeny, men clearly see that it is profit that, if not wholly, at least partially leads them to work.