There may also be a habit of change that is mere restlessness and has no constructive significance. In the early history of America a conspicuous character on the frontier was the man who had the habit of moving on. He would settle for two or three years in one locality and then, getting restless, sell out and go on to another. So at present, those whom ambition and circumstance, in early manhood, have driven rapidly from one thing to another, often continue into old age the habit so acquired, making their families and friends most uncomfortable. I have noticed that there are over-strenuous people who have come to have an ideal of themselves as making an effort, and are most uneasy when this is not the case. To “being latent feel themselves no less” is quite impossible to them. In our commercial and industrial life the somewhat feverish progress has generated a habit, a whole system of habits, based on the expectation of change. Enterprise and adaptability are cultivated at the expense of whatever conflicts with them; each one, feeling that the procession is moving on and that he must keep up with it, hurries along at the expense, perhaps, of health, culture and sanity. This unrest is due rather to transition than to democracy; the ancient view that the latter is in its nature unstable being, as I have said, quite discredited. Even De Tocqueville, about 1835, saw that the political unrest of America was in minor affairs, and that a democratic polity might conceivably “render society more stationary than it has ever been in our western part of the world.”[142] Tarde has expounded the matter at length and to much the same effect. A policy is stable when it is suited to prevailing conditions; and every year makes it more apparent that for peoples of European stock, at least, a polity essentially democratic is the only one that can permanently meet this test. A social group in which there is a fundamental harmony of forces resulting in effective coöperation may be said, I suppose, to be _solidaire_, to adopt a French word much used in this connection. Thus France with its comparatively homogeneous people has no doubt more solidarity—notwithstanding its dissensions—than Austria; England more than Russia, and Japan more than China. But if one thinks closely about the question he will find it no easy matter to say in just what solidarity consists. Not in mere likeness, certainly, since the difference of individuals and parts is not only consistent with but essential to a harmonious whole—as the harmony of music is produced by differing but correlated sounds. We want what Burke described as “that action and counteraction, which in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.”[143]