In the satisfied societies of the Old World, the wealthy were comparatively secure in their comforts and poor dared not dream of acquiring them here below, in the fluid mobility of America, citizens were “continually engaged in pursuing or striving to retain [their] precious, incomplete, and fugitive delights.” Men and women in their society of “middling fortunes’ had “enough physical enjoyments to get a taste for them, but not enough to content them.” They could not “win them without effort, or indulge in them without anxiety.” And whereas in the Old World, inequality was the general rule and so attracted little attention, in America, “where everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed.” The “more equal men are,” Tocqueville concluded, “the more insatiable will be their longing for equality.” Striving ever to match their fellow citizens, and enticed always by the imminent possibility of a better life, Americans pursued an elusive equality with the same dogged futility with which they pursued happiness:

"That is a quality which ever retreats before them without getting quite out of sight, and as it retreats it beckons them on to pursue. Every instant they think they will catch it, and each time it slips through their fingers. They see it close enough to know its charms, but they do not get near enough to enjoy it, and they will be dead before they have fully relished its delight."

And that, Tocqueville concluded in a famous line, “is the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance, and of that disgust with life sometimes gripping them in calm and easy circumstance. ~ Page 336