 Influenced by Tocqueville, Mill held that the great trend of his own period was a falling away of aristocratic mores and a growth of  equality.[7]  Mill’s distinctively English take on modern Europe’s “irresistible tendency to equality of conditions” characterised the spread of equality as a manifestation of “the growth of the middle class” (De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [II], XVIII: 150, 196). Although modern Europe had not annihilated the class distinctions of earlier periods, in Mill’s view, such differences were becoming less and less influential on social norms. Wealth, education, status, and therefore power, he held, were amassing with a socially and politically dominant middle class, whose shared commercial traits and interests dictated equality as the emerging rule.