Could the Church of Work-which today has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God-be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: "There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.”.