he results of this highly
specialized work. More complete organization necessarily accompanied
specialization. The expert became a part of a great industrial machine.
His individuality tended to disappear in his work. His interests became
those of a group. Imperative economic necessities began to classify the
individuals composing American society in the same way, if not to the
same extent, that they had been classified in Europe.

This was a result which had never entered into the calculations of the
pioneer Democrat. He had disliked specialization, because, as he
thought, it narrowed and impoverished the individual; and he distrusted
permanent and official forms of organization, because, as he thought,
they hampered the individual. His whole political, social, and economic
outlook embodied a society of energetic, optimistic, and prosperous
democrats, united by much the same interests, occupations, and point of
view. Each of these democrats was to be essentially an all-round man.
His conception of all-round manhood was somewhat limited; but it meant
at least a person who was expansive in feeling, who was enough of a
business man successfully to pursue his own interests, and enough of a
politician to prevent any infringement or perversion of his rights. He
never doubted that the desired combination of business man, politician,
and good fellow constituted an excellent ideal of democratic
individuality, that it was sufficiently realized in the average Western
American of the Jacksonian epoch, that it would continue to be the type
of admirable manhood, and that the good democrats embodying this type
would continue to merit and to obtain substantial and approximately
equal pecuniary rewards. Moreover, for a long time the vision remained
sufficiently true. The typical American democrat described by De
Tocqueville corresponded very well with the vision of the pioneer; and
he did not disappear during the succeeding generation. For many years
millions of Americans of much the same pattern were rewarded for their
democratic virtue in an approximately similar manner. Of course some
people were poor, and some people were rich; but there was no class of
the very rich, and the poverty of the poor was generally their own
fault. Opportunity knocked at the door of every man, and the poor man of
to-day was the prosperous householder of to-morrow. For a long time
American social and economic conditions were not merely fluid, but
consiste