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.

In those states the people, in a sense, really lived together.