This is a quote from the populist American politician William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat famous at the beginning of the last century.
“There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been tht if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.”
–The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
I am neither Republican nor Democrat, but this quote strikes me as very much a reflection of the ideals of the two American political parties one century later.