With all his
willful aggressiveness he was a companionable person who meant much
better towards his fellows than he himself knew.
We need to guard scrupulously against the under-valuation of the advance
which the pioneers made towards a genuine social democracy. The freedom
of intercourse and the consistency of feeling which they succeeded in
attaining is an indispensable characteristic of a democratic society.
The unity of such a state must lie deeper than any bond established by
obedience to a single political authority, or by the acceptance of
common precedents and ideas. It must be based in some measure upon an
instinctive familiarity of association, upon a quick communicability of
sympathy, upon the easy and effortless sense of companionship. Such
familiar intercourse is impossible, not only in a society with
aristocratic institutions, but it can with difficulty be attained in a
society that has once had aristocratic institutions. A century more or
less of political democracy has not introduced it into France, and in
1830 it did not exist along the Atlantic seaboard at all to the same
extent that it did in the newer states of the West.
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