But where the ideal of equality has entered, even slight differences may be resented, and class feeling is most bitter, probably, where this ideal is strong but has no regular and hopeful methods of asserting itself. In that case aspiration turns sour and generates hateful passions. Caste countries are safe from this by lacking the ideal of equality, democracies by partly realizing it. But in Germany, for instance, where there is a fierce democratic propaganda on the one hand, and a stone wall of military and aristocratic institutions on the other, one may feel a class bitterness that we hardly know in America. And in England also, at the present time, when classes are still recognized but very ill-defined, there seems to be much of an uneasy preoccupation about rank, and of the elbowing, snubbing and suspicion that go with it. People appear to be more concerned with trying to get into a set above them, or repressing others who are pushing up from below, than with us. In America social position exists, but, having no such definite symbols as in England, is for the most part too intangible to give rise to snobbery, which is based on titles and other externalities which men may covet or gloat over in a way hardly possible when the line is merely one of opinion, congeniality and character. The feeling between classes will not be very bitter so long as the ideal of service is present in all and mutually recognized. And it is the tendency of the democratic spirit—very imperfectly worked out as yet—to raise this ideal above all others and make it a common standard of conduct. Thus Montesquieu, describing an ideal democracy, says that ambition is limited “to the sole desire, to the sole happiness, of doing greater services to our country than the rest of our fellow citizens. They cannot all render her equal services, but they all ought to serve her with equal alacrity.” He thinks also that the love of frugality, by which he means compunction in material self-indulgence, “limits the desire of having to the study of procuring necessities to our family and superfluities to our country.”[131] If it were indeed so in our own world, there would be no danger of a class conflict.