De Tocqueville found that in the United States there was no proletariat. “That numerous and turbulent multitude does not exist, who regarding the law as their natural enemy look upon it with fear and distrust. It is impossible, on the contrary, not to perceive that all classes ... are attached to it by a kind of parental affection.”[53] And, notwithstanding a deep and well-grounded “social unrest,” this remains essentially true at the present day, and should be true of all real democracy. Where the state is directly and obviously founded upon the thought of the people it is impossible to get up much fundamental antagonism to it; the energies of discontent are absorbed by moderate agitation. The extension of reach and choice favors, in the long run, not only political but every kind of opportunity and freedom. It opens to the individual a more vital, self-determined and energetic part in all phases of the whole. At the same time, the limits of human faculty make it impossible that any one of us should actually occupy all the field of thought thus open to him. Although stimulated to greater activity than before, one must constantly select and renounce; and most of his life will still be on the plane of custom and mechanism. He is freer chiefly in that he can survey the larger whole and choose in what relations he will express himself. Indeed, an ever-present danger of the new order is that one will not select and renounce enough, that he will swallow more than he can properly digest, and fail of the benefits of a thorough subconscious assimilation. The more one studies current life, the more he is inclined to look upon superficiality as its least tractable defect. The new conditions demand also a thorough, yet diversified and adaptable, system of training for the individual who is to share in this freer and more exigent society. While democracy as a spirit is spontaneous, only the fullest development of personal faculty can make this spirit effectual on a great scale. Our confidence in our instincts need not be shaken, but our application of them must be enlarged and enlightened. We must be taught to do some one thing well, and yet never allowed to lose our sense of the relation of that one thing to the general endeavor.