PREFACE

TO THE TENTH EDITION.

However great and sudden the events that have just unfolded before our eyes, the author of this book has the right to say that he was not surprised by them. This book was written fifteen years ago, driven from start to finish by a single idea: that Democracy was coming to the world — soon, unstoppably, everywhere. Go back and reread it: on every page you will find a solemn warning reminding us that society is changing its forms, humanity its condition, and that new destinies are drawing near.

At the very beginning, these words were written:

The gradual development of equality is a providential fact. It has all the hallmarks of one: it is universal, it is lasting, it escapes human power more with every passing day; every event and every person has served its advance. Would it be wise to believe that a social movement coming from so far back could be halted by a single generation? Does anyone really think that after destroying feudalism and defeating kings, Democracy will retreat before the bourgeoisie and the rich? Will it stop now, when it has grown so strong and its adversaries so weak?

The man who wrote these lines — in the presence of a monarchy that had been strengthened rather than shaken by the July Revolution — lines that events have since proved prophetic, can today call the public's attention back to his work without fear.

He should also be allowed to add that the current circumstances give his book a timely relevance and a practical usefulness it did not have when it first appeared.

The monarchy existed then. Today it is destroyed. American institutions, which were merely a curiosity for monarchical France, should now be a subject of serious study for republican France. It is not force alone that establishes a new government; it is good laws. After the fighter comes the lawmaker. One destroys; the other builds. To each their task. The question, it is true, is no longer whether France will have a monarchy or a republic; but we still need to learn whether we will have a turbulent republic or a peaceful one, an orderly republic or a chaotic one, a peaceable republic or a warlike one, a liberal republic or an oppressive one, a republic that threatens the sacred rights of property and family or one that recognizes and upholds them. A terrible problem — and its solution matters not just to France, but to the entire civilized world. If we save ourselves, we save at the same time the nations around us. If we destroy ourselves, we drag them all down with us. Depending on whether we achieve democratic liberty or democratic tyranny, the fate of the world will be different, and one can truly say that it is in our hands today whether the republic ends up established everywhere — or abolished everywhere.

Now, this problem that we have only just posed, America solved more than sixty years ago. For sixty years, the principle of popular sovereignty — which we enthroned among ourselves only yesterday — has reigned there unchallenged. It is put into practice in the most direct, the most unlimited, the most absolute way. For sixty years, the people who made it the common source of all their laws have grown continuously in population, in territory, in wealth; and mark this well — during that entire period, they have been not only the most prosperous but the most stable of all the peoples on earth. While every nation in Europe was ravaged by war or torn apart by civil strife, the American people alone in the civilized world remained at peace. Nearly all of Europe was convulsed by revolutions; America did not even have riots. The republic there was not a force for disruption but a guardian of every right; individual property had more protections than in any country in the world; anarchy was as unknown there as despotism.

Where else could we find greater hopes and greater lessons? Let us turn our eyes toward America — not to slavishly copy the institutions it has created for itself, but to better understand the ones that suit us; less to borrow examples than to draw lessons, to take its principles rather than the details of its laws. The laws of the French Republic can and should, in many cases, differ from those governing the United States, but the principles on which the American constitutions rest — those principles of order, of balanced powers, of true liberty, of sincere and deep respect for the law — are indispensable to all republics. They must be common to all, and one can say in advance that wherever they are absent, the Republic will soon cease to exist.

INTRODUCTION

Of all the new things that caught my attention during my time in the United States, nothing struck me more powerfully than the equality of social conditions. I had no trouble seeing the enormous influence this single fact exerts on the whole direction of society: it gives public opinion a certain cast, a certain shape to the laws, new principles to those who govern, and distinctive habits to those who are governed.

Soon I recognized that this same fact extends its influence far beyond political customs and laws, and that it holds no less sway over civil society than over government: it creates opinions, gives rise to feelings, inspires practices, and reshapes everything it does not directly produce.

And so, the more I studied American society, the more clearly I saw in the equality of social conditions the fundamental fact from which every other fact seemed to flow, and I kept finding it before me like a central point where all my observations converged.

Then I turned my thoughts back to our own hemisphere, and it seemed to me that I could make out something analogous to the spectacle the New World had shown me. I saw the equality of conditions which, though it had not yet reached the extreme limits it has in the United States, was drawing closer to them every day; and this same democracy, which reigned over American societies, seemed to me to be advancing rapidly toward power in Europe.

From that moment, I conceived the idea of the book you are about to read.

A great democratic revolution is taking place among us; everyone sees it, but not everyone judges it the same way. Some regard it as something new and, taking it for an accident, still hope to stop it; while others judge it irresistible, because it seems to them the most continuous, the most ancient, and the most enduring fact in all of history.

Let me go back for a moment to what France was seven hundred years ago: I find it divided among a small number of families who own the land and rule its inhabitants; the right to command passes from generation to generation along with inheritances; men have only one means of acting upon one another -- force; and one can discover only a single source of power -- the ownership of land.

But then the political power of the clergy begins to establish itself and soon to expand. The clergy opens its ranks to everyone, to the poor and the rich, to the commoner and the lord; equality begins to penetrate through the Church into the heart of government, and the man who would have wasted away as a serf in eternal bondage takes his place as a priest among the nobles, and often sits above kings.

As society becomes more civilized and more stable over time, the different relations between people grow more complex and more numerous. The need for civil laws makes itself keenly felt. Then come the lawyers: they emerge from the obscure halls of the courts and the dusty back rooms of the clerks' offices, and they go to sit in the prince's court, alongside feudal barons clad in ermine and iron.

Kings bankrupted themselves on grand ventures; nobles exhausted themselves in private wars; commoners grew rich through trade. The influence of money begins to make itself felt in the affairs of state. Commerce is a new channel opening to power, and the financiers become a political force that is despised and courted at the same time.

Little by little, knowledge spreads; a taste for literature and the arts reawakens; the mind becomes an element of success; learning is a tool of governance, intelligence a social force; men of letters arrive at the levers of power.

As new paths to power are discovered, the value of birth declines. In the eleventh century, nobility was beyond price; by the thirteenth century, it could be bought; the first ennoblement took place in 1270, and equality was finally introduced into government by the aristocracy itself.

During the seven hundred years that have just elapsed, it has sometimes happened that, to fight royal authority or to seize power from their rivals, the nobles gave political power to the people.

Even more often, kings brought the lower classes into government in order to humble the aristocracy.

In France, the kings proved to be the most active and the most persistent of levelers. When they were ambitious and strong, they worked to raise the people to the level of the nobles; and when they were timid and weak, they allowed the people to rise above themselves. Some helped democracy through their talents, others through their vices. Louis XI and Louis XIV took care to level everything beneath the throne, and Louis XV finally descended into the dust himself, along with his entire court.

As soon as citizens began to own land on terms other than feudal tenure, and as movable wealth, once recognized, could in its turn create influence and confer power, every discovery in the arts, every improvement introduced into commerce and industry, created a new element of equality among men. From that moment on, every new technique discovered, every new need that arises, every new desire seeking satisfaction, is a step toward universal leveling. The taste for luxury, the love of war, the reign of fashion, the most superficial passions of the human heart as well as the deepest -- all seem to work together to impoverish the rich and enrich the poor.

From the time that intellectual work became a source of strength and wealth, every advance in knowledge, every new discovery, every fresh idea had to be seen as a seed of power placed within the people's reach. Poetry, eloquence, memory, the graces of the mind, the fires of the imagination, the depth of thought -- all these gifts that heaven distributes at random benefited democracy, and even when they belonged to its adversaries, they still served its cause by throwing into relief the natural greatness of man; democracy's conquests therefore spread with those of civilization and learning, and literature became an arsenal open to all, where the weak and the poor came every day to find weapons.

If you leaf through the pages of our history, you will find hardly a single major event in the past seven hundred years that has not worked in favor of equality.

The Crusades and the wars with the English decimated the nobles and divided their lands; the institution of the townships introduced democratic liberty into the heart of feudal monarchy; the invention of firearms equalized commoner and noble on the battlefield; the printing press offered equal resources to their minds; the postal service brought knowledge to the threshold of the poor man's cottage as surely as to the gates of palaces; Protestantism declared that all men are equally capable of finding the path to heaven. The discovery of America opened a thousand new roads to fortune and handed the obscure adventurer wealth and power alike.

If, starting from the eleventh century, you examine what has been happening in France at fifty-year intervals, you will invariably notice that a double revolution has taken place in the state of society. The noble will have fallen on the social scale, the commoner will have risen; one descends, the other climbs. Every half-century brings them closer together, and soon they will meet.

And this is not peculiar to France alone. Wherever we look, we see the same revolution continuing throughout the entire Christian world.

Everywhere, the various events in the lives of nations have turned to democracy's advantage; all men have aided it by their efforts: those who intended to contribute to its success and those who had no thought of serving it; those who fought for it, and even those who declared themselves its enemies -- all have been driven pell-mell down the same road, and all have worked together, some against their will, others without knowing it, blind instruments in the hands of God.

The gradual development of equality of conditions is therefore a providential fact, and it has the chief characteristics of one: it is universal, it is enduring, it escapes human power at every turn; all events, like all men, serve its development.

Would it be wise to believe that a social movement coming from so far back could be suspended by the efforts of a single generation? Does anyone think that after destroying feudalism and vanquishing kings, democracy will retreat before the bourgeoisie and the rich? Will it stop now that it has become so strong and its adversaries so weak?

Where, then, are we headed? No one can say, for we already lack any basis for comparison: social conditions are more equal among Christians today than they have ever been in any time or any country in the world; and so the very magnitude of what has already been accomplished prevents us from foreseeing what may yet be done.

This entire book has been written under the influence of a kind of religious terror produced in the author's soul by the sight of this irresistible revolution that has been advancing for so many centuries through every obstacle, and that we can still see today marching forward amid the ruins it has made.

It is not necessary for God to speak Himself for us to discover sure signs of His will; it is enough to examine the habitual course of nature and the steady tendency of events. I know, without the Creator raising His voice, that the stars follow through space the curves His finger has traced.

If long observation and sincere reflection were to lead the people of our time to recognize that the gradual and progressive development of equality is at once the past and the future of their history, that single discovery alone would give this development the sacred character of the will of the sovereign master. To try to stop democracy would then seem like fighting against God Himself, and nations would have no choice but to accommodate themselves to the social condition that Providence has imposed upon them.

The Christian peoples of the world seem to me to present a frightening spectacle today: the movement carrying them forward is already strong enough that it cannot be stopped, and yet not rapid enough to make us despair of directing it. Their fate is in their own hands -- but soon it will slip from their grasp.

To educate democracy; to revive, if possible, its beliefs; to purify its customs and values; to regulate its movements; to gradually replace its inexperience with practical knowledge, its blind instincts with awareness of its true interests; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and the people involved -- this is the first duty imposed in our time on those who lead society.

A new political science is needed for a world that is entirely new.

But this is something we hardly think about. Placed in the middle of a rushing river, we stubbornly fix our eyes on a few pieces of debris still visible on the shore, while the current carries us backward toward the abyss.

There is no country in Europe where the great social revolution I have just described has made more rapid progress than in our own; but here it has always advanced at random.

Never have the leaders of the state thought to prepare anything in advance for it; it has happened despite them or without their knowledge. The most powerful, the most intelligent, and the most moral classes of the nation made no effort to take hold of it in order to guide it. Democracy has therefore been abandoned to its savage instincts; it has grown up like those children deprived of parental care who raise themselves in the streets of our cities and who know nothing of society but its vices and its miseries. People still seemed unaware of its existence when it suddenly seized power. Then everyone submitted with servility to its slightest whims; it was worshipped as the image of strength. But when it was later weakened by its own excesses, the lawmakers conceived the reckless plan of destroying it instead of trying to educate and correct it; and rather than teaching it to govern, they thought only of driving it from government.

The result has been that the democratic revolution took place in the material fabric of society without the corresponding change in laws, ideas, habits, and customs that would have been necessary to make that revolution useful. And so we have democracy minus everything that might temper its vices and bring out its natural advantages; and seeing already the harms it brings, we remain ignorant of the benefits it could bestow.

When royal power, supported by the aristocracy, peacefully governed the peoples of Europe, society, for all its miseries, enjoyed several kinds of happiness that are difficult to conceive or appreciate today.

The power of a few subjects raised insurmountable barriers against the tyranny of the prince; and kings, feeling themselves clothed in the eyes of the crowd with an almost divine character, drew from the very respect they inspired the resolve not to abuse their power.

Placed at an immense distance from the people, the nobles nonetheless took in the fate of the people that kind of benevolent and tranquil interest that a shepherd gives to his flock; and, without seeing the poor as their equals, they watched over their destiny as over a trust placed by Providence in their hands.

Having never conceived the idea of any social condition other than his own, unable to imagine that he could ever become equal to his masters, the common man accepted their kindnesses without questioning their rights. He loved them when they were merciful and just, and submitted without difficulty or degradation to their harshness, as to unavoidable afflictions sent by the hand of God. Custom and values had, moreover, set limits to tyranny and established a kind of law even in the midst of force.

Since the noble had no thought that anyone would try to strip him of privileges he believed legitimate, and since the serf regarded his inferiority as an effect of the immutable order of nature, one can see how a kind of mutual goodwill could establish itself between these two classes so differently favored by fate. There was inequality in society then, and misery -- but souls were not degraded.

It is not the exercise of power or the habit of obedience that corrupts men; it is the exercise of a power they consider illegitimate, and obedience to an authority they regard as usurped and oppressive.

On one side stood wealth, strength, and leisure, and with them the pursuit of luxury, the refinements of taste, the pleasures of the mind, the cultivation of the arts; on the other side, labor, coarseness, and ignorance.

But within that ignorant and coarse multitude, one found powerful passions, generous sentiments, deep beliefs, and fierce virtues.

The body of society, organized in this way, could have stability, power, and above all, glory.

But then the ranks begin to blur; the barriers raised between men are lowered; estates are divided, power is shared, knowledge spreads, minds are equalized; the social order becomes democratic, and the rule of democracy is at last peacefully established in institutions and in customs.

I can then envision a society where all citizens, regarding the law as their own creation, would love it and submit to it willingly; where the authority of government, respected as necessary and not as divine, would inspire not passionate devotion to the head of state but a reasoned and calm attachment. Everyone having rights, and being assured of keeping those rights, a sturdy trust would establish itself among all classes, and a kind of mutual respect, as far removed from pride as from servility.

Educated in its true interests, the people would understand that to enjoy the benefits of society, one must submit to its obligations. The free association of citizens could then replace the individual power of nobles, and the state would be protected from both tyranny and lawlessness.

I understand that in a democratic state constituted in this way, society would not be static; but the movements of the social body could be orderly and progressive. If one found less brilliance there than in an aristocracy, one would also find less misery; pleasures would be less extreme and well-being more widespread; the sciences less grand and ignorance more rare; feelings less intense and habits gentler; there would be more vices and fewer crimes.

In the absence of enthusiasm and the ardor of faith, education and experience would sometimes win great sacrifices from the citizens; each individual, being equally weak, would feel an equal need for his fellow men; and knowing that he can obtain their support only on the condition that he lends them his own, he would easily discover that for him, personal interest merges with the general interest.

The nation as a whole would be less brilliant, less glorious, perhaps less powerful; but the majority of citizens would enjoy a more prosperous lot, and the people would be peaceful -- not because they have given up hope of something better, but because they know how to be content.

If not everything were good and useful in such a state of affairs, society would at least have claimed everything useful and good that it can offer; and men, in forever abandoning the social advantages that aristocracy can provide, would have taken from democracy all the benefits it has to give.

But we, in casting off the social order of our forebears, in tossing their institutions, their ideas, and their customs pell-mell behind us -- what have we taken in their place?

The prestige of royal power has vanished without being replaced by the majesty of the laws; today, the people despise authority, but they fear it, and fear wrings from them more than respect and love ever used to give.

I can see that we have destroyed the individual powers that were able to fight tyranny on their own; but I see the government inheriting alone all the prerogatives torn from families, from corporations, from individuals: the sometimes oppressive but often preserving strength of a small number of citizens has thus given way to the weakness of all.

The division of fortunes has narrowed the gap between poor and rich; but in drawing closer, they seem to have found new reasons to hate each other, and casting glances full of terror and envy at one another, they push each other away from power. For both, the idea of rights does not exist, and force appears to each as the sole justification for the present and the only guarantee of the future.

The poor man has kept most of his forefathers' prejudices without their beliefs; their ignorance without their virtues. He has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule for his actions without understanding the science of it, and his selfishness is as devoid of enlightenment as his devotion once was.

Society is calm, not because it is conscious of its strength and well-being, but on the contrary because it believes itself weak and infirm; it fears that any effort might kill it. Everyone feels the affliction, but no one has the courage or the energy to seek something better. People have desires, regrets, sorrows, and joys that produce nothing visible or lasting, like the passions of old men that lead only to impotence.

And so we have abandoned what the old order could offer that was good, without acquiring what the present order might provide that is useful; we have destroyed an aristocratic society, and, pausing complacently amid the ruins of the old edifice, we seem to want to settle there forever.

What is happening in the intellectual world is no less deplorable.

Hindered in its progress or abandoned without support to its disordered passions, democracy in France has overturned everything in its path, shaking what it did not destroy. It has never been seen taking gradual hold of society in order to establish its rule peacefully; it has never stopped advancing amid the chaos and turmoil of combat. Driven by the heat of the struggle, pushed beyond the natural limits of his own views by the opinions and excesses of his adversaries, each man loses sight of the very object of his pursuits and uses language that corresponds poorly to his true feelings and his secret instincts.

Hence the strange confusion we are forced to witness.

I search my memory in vain -- I can find nothing more worthy of grief and pity than what is happening before our eyes. It seems as though in our time the natural bond linking opinions to tastes, and actions to beliefs, has been broken; the sympathy that has always been observed between men's feelings and their ideas appears destroyed, and one would think that all the laws of moral harmony have been abolished.

You still find among us zealous Christians whose religious souls feed on the truths of the afterlife; these will surely rally to the cause of human liberty, the source of all moral greatness. Christianity, which has made all men equal before God, will not object to seeing all citizens equal before the law. But by a strange confluence of events, religion finds itself momentarily entangled with the powers that democracy is overthrowing, and it often happens that religion rejects the equality it loves and curses liberty as an enemy -- when, by taking liberty by the hand, it could sanctify its efforts.

Alongside these religious men, I see others whose eyes are turned toward the earth rather than toward heaven; partisans of liberty not only because they see in it the source of the noblest virtues, but above all because they consider it the wellspring of the greatest goods -- they sincerely desire to secure its reign and let people taste its blessings. I understand that these men will hasten to call religion to their aid, for they must know that one cannot establish the reign of liberty without that of customs and values, nor found customs and values without beliefs; but they have spotted religion in the ranks of their adversaries, and that is enough for them: some attack it, and the others dare not defend it.

Past centuries have seen base and venal souls champion slavery, while independent spirits and generous hearts fought without hope to save human liberty. But in our time one often encounters men who are naturally noble and proud, whose opinions directly contradict their tastes, and who praise the servility and baseness they themselves have never known. Others, by contrast, speak of liberty as if they could feel what is sacred and great about it, and loudly claim rights on behalf of humanity that they themselves have always trampled.

I see virtuous and peaceful men whose pure morals, quiet habits, prosperity, and education naturally place them at the head of the communities around them. Full of sincere love for their country, they are ready to make great sacrifices for it; yet civilization often finds adversaries in them. They confuse its abuses with its blessings, and in their minds the idea of evil is inseparably linked to the idea of the new.

Nearby, I see others who, in the name of progress, strive to reduce man to matter, seeking utility without justice, knowledge without faith, and prosperity without virtue: these have proclaimed themselves the champions of modern civilization, and they insolently place themselves at its head, usurping a position that has been abandoned to them and from which their own unworthiness should exclude them.

Where, then, do we stand?

The religious fight liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; noble and generous spirits praise slavery, and base and servile souls champion independence; honest and enlightened citizens oppose all progress, while men without patriotism or morals set themselves up as apostles of civilization and enlightenment!

Have all centuries, then, resembled ours? Has man always had before his eyes, as he does today, a world where nothing holds together, where virtue is without genius and genius without honor; where the love of order is confused with a taste for tyrants, and the sacred worship of liberty with contempt for the law; where conscience casts only a doubtful light upon human actions; where nothing any longer seems forbidden, or permitted, or honest, or shameful, or true, or false?

Am I to believe that the Creator made man only to let him struggle endlessly amid the intellectual miseries that surround us? I cannot think so. God is preparing for the societies of Europe a future more settled and more calm; I do not know His designs, but I will not stop believing in them simply because I cannot fathom them, and I would rather doubt my own understanding than His justice.

There is a country in the world where the great social revolution I am describing seems to have nearly reached its natural limits; it was accomplished there in a simple and easy manner -- or rather, one can say that this country is experiencing the results of the democratic revolution taking place among us, without having had the revolution itself.

The emigrants who came to settle in America at the beginning of the seventeenth century somehow separated the principle of democracy from all the forces it was struggling against within the old societies of Europe, and transplanted it alone to the shores of the New World. There it was able to grow in freedom, and, advancing alongside customs and values, to develop peacefully into law.

It seems to me beyond doubt that sooner or later we will arrive, like the Americans, at a nearly complete equality of conditions. I do not conclude from this that we are destined one day to necessarily draw from such a social condition the same political consequences the Americans have drawn from it. I am very far from believing that they have found the only form of government that democracy can take; but it is enough that in both countries the generative cause of laws and customs is the same for us to have an immense interest in knowing what it has produced in each.

So it is not merely to satisfy a curiosity -- legitimate though it may be -- that I examined America; I wanted to find lessons there from which we might profit. Anyone who thinks I intended to write a tribute would be greatly mistaken; whoever reads this book will be quite convinced that such was not my aim. Nor was my purpose to advocate any particular form of government in general, for I am among those who believe there is almost never absolute merit in laws. I have not even claimed to judge whether the social revolution, whose progress seems to me irresistible, has been advantageous or harmful to humanity; I have accepted this revolution as an accomplished fact, or one on the verge of accomplishing itself, and among the peoples who have undergone it, I sought the one where it has reached the most complete and most peaceful development, so as to discern its natural consequences clearly and to identify, if possible, the means of making it beneficial to mankind. I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there an image of democracy itself -- its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, its passions. I wanted to understand it, if only so I might know at least what we should hope or fear from it.

In the first part of this work, I have therefore tried to show the direction that democracy, left to its own inclinations in America and nearly free to follow its instincts, naturally gives to the laws, the course it impresses upon the government, and in general the power it obtains over public affairs. I wanted to learn what benefits and what harms it produces. I investigated what precautions the Americans have used to guide it, and what others they have neglected, and I undertook to identify the causes that enable it to govern society.

My aim was to depict in a second part the influence that equality of conditions and democratic government exert in America on civil society, on habits, ideas, and customs and values; but I am beginning to feel less enthusiasm for the completion of this plan. Before I can finish the task I set for myself, my work will have become almost unnecessary. Another writer is soon to show readers the principal features of the American character, and, casting a light veil over the seriousness of his portraits, lend to truth a charm I could never have given it.

When I published the first edition of this work, my traveling companion in America, Gustave de Beaumont, was still working on his book titled Marie, or Slavery in the United States, which has since appeared. Beaumont's primary purpose was to highlight and make known the situation of Black people within Anglo-American society. His work will cast a vivid and fresh light on the question of slavery -- a vital question for the United States. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that Beaumont's book, after deeply engaging those who seek emotions and vivid scenes, must achieve an even more solid and lasting success among readers who, above all, desire truthful observations and profound truths.

I do not know whether I have succeeded in making known what I saw in America, but I am certain that I sincerely desired to do so, and that I never knowingly yielded to the temptation of fitting facts to ideas instead of submitting ideas to facts.

When a point could be established with the help of written documents, I took care to consult original texts and the most authoritative and respected works.

The legislative and administrative documents were provided to me with a generosity whose memory will always inspire my gratitude. Among the American officials who aided my research in this way, I must cite above all Edward Livingston, then Secretary of State (now minister plenipotentiary in Paris). During my time in Congress, Livingston was kind enough to have most of the documents I possess regarding the federal government delivered to me. Livingston is one of those rare men whom you love when you read their writings, whom you admire and honor even before knowing them, and to whom you are happy to owe a debt of gratitude.

I have indicated my sources in notes, and anyone may verify them. When the matter involved opinions, political practices, or observations of customs and values, I sought to consult the most knowledgeable people. If something was important or uncertain, I did not content myself with a single witness but relied only on the weight of multiple testimonies.

Here the reader must necessarily take me at my word. I could often have cited, in support of what I say, names that are known to the reader, or at least worthy of being known; but I have refrained from doing so. A foreigner often learns important truths by the fireside of his host -- truths the host might perhaps hide even from a friend. People unburden themselves with him of a silence they are otherwise obliged to keep; they do not fear his indiscretion, because he is only passing through. Each of these confidences was recorded by me the moment it was received, but they will never leave my portfolio; I would rather harm the success of my account than add my name to the list of those travelers who repay the generous hospitality they have received with troubles and embarrassments.

I know that, despite my efforts, nothing will be easier than to criticize this book, if anyone ever thinks to criticize it.

Those who care to look closely will find, I believe, throughout the entire work a single guiding idea that links all its parts together. But the range of subjects I have had to treat is very wide, and anyone who sets out to oppose an isolated fact against the body of facts I cite, or a detached idea against the body of ideas, will succeed without difficulty. I would therefore ask the reader to do me the favor of reading in the same spirit that guided my work, and to judge the book by the general impression it leaves, just as I myself was guided not by any single reason, but by the weight of all the reasons together.

Nor should it be forgotten that an author who wishes to make himself understood is obliged to push each of his ideas to all their theoretical consequences, and often to the very limits of the false and the impracticable; for while it is sometimes necessary to depart from the rules of logic in action, one cannot do so in speech, and a man finds it almost as difficult to be inconsistent in his words as he ordinarily finds it to be consistent in his deeds.

I will end by pointing out myself what many readers will consider the chief defect of this work. This book does not follow precisely in anyone's footsteps; in writing it, I did not intend to serve or to fight any party. I set out to see not differently from the parties, but further than they do; and while they concern themselves with tomorrow, I wanted to think about the future.

CHAPTER I.

THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NORTH AMERICA.

North America divided into two vast regions, one sloping toward the pole, the other toward the equator. -- The Mississippi Valley. -- Traces of the earth's geological upheavals found there. -- The Atlantic coast, where the English colonies were founded. -- The different appearance of South America and North America at the time of their discovery. -- The forests of North America. -- Prairies. -- Wandering indigenous tribes. Their appearance, their customs and values, their languages. -- Traces of an unknown people.

The physical geography of North America has certain broad features that are easy to spot at a glance.

A kind of methodical order has governed the division of its lands and waters, its mountains and valleys. A simple and majestic arrangement reveals itself even amid the confusion of details and the extreme variety of the landscape.

Two vast regions divide it roughly in half.

See the map at the end of the volume.

One region is bounded to the north by the Arctic pole, and to the east and west by the two great oceans. It then narrows toward the south, forming a triangle whose irregular sides meet somewhere below the Great Lakes of Canada.

The second region begins where the first one ends, and stretches across the rest of the continent.

One tilts slightly toward the pole; the other toward the equator.

The lands within the first region slope northward so gently that you could almost call them a plateau. In the interior of this immense flatland, there are no high mountains and no deep valleys.

Water winds through it almost at random. Rivers intermingle, join together, separate, come together again, lose themselves in a thousand marshes, wander at every turn through a watery labyrinth of their own creation, and finally reach the polar seas only after countless detours. The Great Lakes that mark the boundary of this first region are not hemmed in, like most lakes in the Old World, by hills or rocks; their shores are flat, rising only a few feet above the water's surface. Each one is like a vast bowl filled to the brim; the slightest shift in the earth's structure would send their waters spilling either toward the pole or toward the tropical sea.

The second region is more rugged and better suited to become a permanent home for human beings. Two long mountain ranges run its full length: one, the Alleghenies, follows the edge of the Atlantic coast; the other runs parallel to the Pacific.

The space between these two mountain chains covers 228,843 square leagues.

1,341,649 miles. See Darby's View of the United States, p. 499. I have converted these miles into leagues of 2,000 toises.

Its area is therefore roughly six times larger than France.

France has 35,181 square leagues.

This vast territory, however, forms only a single valley, which descends from the rounded summits of the Alleghenies and rises again, unobstructed, all the way to the peaks of the Rocky Mountains.

At the bottom of this valley flows an immense river. All the waters that come down from the mountains seem to rush toward it from every direction.

The French once named it the River Saint Louis, in memory of their distant homeland; and the Indians, in their grand language, called it the Father of Waters -- the Mississippi.

The Mississippi rises at the boundary between the two great regions I described above, near the top of the plateau that separates them.

Close by, another river

The Red River.

is born, flowing toward the polar seas. The Mississippi itself seems uncertain at first about which path to take: several times it doubles back on itself, and only after slowing its course through lakes and marshes does it finally commit, tracing its route slowly southward.

Sometimes calm at the bottom of its clay bed carved by nature, sometimes swollen by storms, the Mississippi waters more than a thousand leagues along its course.

2,500 miles, 1,032 leagues. See Description of the United States, by Warden, vol. 1, p. 166.

Six hundred leagues above its mouth, the river already has an average depth of fifteen feet, and vessels of 300 tons can navigate it for a stretch of nearly two hundred leagues.

1,364 miles, 563 leagues. See ibid., vol. 1, p. 169.

Fifty-seven major navigable rivers feed into it. Among the Mississippi's tributaries, one has a course of 1,300 leagues

The Missouri. See ibid., vol. 1, p. 132 (1,278 leagues).

, another of 900

The Arkansas. See ibid., vol. 1, p. 188 (877 leagues).

, one of 600

The Red River. See ibid., vol. 1, p. 190 (598 leagues).

, one of 500

The Ohio. See ibid., vol. 1, p. 192 (490 leagues).

, four of 200

The Illinois, the Saint Pierre, the Saint Francis, the Moingona. In the measurements above, I have taken as my standard the statute mile and the post league of 2,000 toises.

-- to say nothing of a countless multitude of smaller streams that rush in from every direction to lose themselves in its waters.

The valley watered by the Mississippi seems to have been created for the river alone; it distributes its blessings and its destruction at will, and is like a god presiding over it. Near the river, nature displays an inexhaustible fertility; as you move away from its banks, the plant life fades, the soil grows thin, everything languishes and dies. Nowhere have the great convulsions of the earth left more visible traces than in the Mississippi Valley. The entire appearance of the land bears witness to the work of water. Its barrenness as well as its abundance are both water's doing. The waves of the primeval ocean accumulated enormous layers of topsoil in the bottom of the valley, and had time to level them smooth. On the right bank of the river, you find immense plains, flat as a field over which a farmer has rolled his press. But as you approach the mountains, the terrain becomes increasingly uneven and barren; the ground is pierced, so to speak, in a thousand places, and primitive rock outcrops appear here and there, like the bones of a skeleton after time has consumed the muscle and flesh around them. Granitic sand, irregularly shaped stones cover the surface of the earth; a few plants push their shoots through these obstacles with great difficulty; it looks like a fertile field strewn with the rubble of some vast building. Analyzing these stones and this sand, it is easy to spot a perfect resemblance between their composition and that of the arid, broken peaks of the Rocky Mountains. After dumping earth into the bottom of the valley, the waters must have eventually carried some of the rock itself with them; they tumbled it down the nearest slopes, and after grinding the stones against one another, scattered the debris at the base of the mountains from whose summits they had been torn.

All things considered, the Mississippi Valley is the most magnificent home that God ever prepared for human habitation -- and yet it can still be called nothing more than a vast wilderness.

On the eastern slope of the Alleghenies, between the base of those mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, stretches a long strip of rock and sand that the sea seems to have left behind as it receded. This territory averages only 48 leagues in width

100 miles.

but stretches 390 leagues in length

About 900 miles.

. The soil in this part of the American continent barely lends itself to cultivation. The vegetation is sparse and uniform.

It was on this inhospitable coast that human effort first concentrated itself. On this narrow strip of arid land, the English colonies were born and grew -- the colonies that would one day become the United States of America. This is still where the center of power lies today, while behind it, almost in secret, the real building blocks of the great nation to which the continent's future doubtless belongs are quietly assembling.

When Europeans first reached the shores of the West Indies, and later the coasts of South America, they thought they had been transported into the legendary lands celebrated by poets. The sea sparkled with tropical fire; the extraordinary clarity of its waters revealed, for the first time, the depths of the abyss to the navigator's eye.

The waters of the Caribbean Sea are so transparent, says Malte-Brun (vol. 3, p. 726), that you can see coral and fish at sixty fathoms' depth. The ship seems to float in midair; a kind of vertigo seizes the traveler whose eye plunges through the crystalline water into underwater gardens where golden shells and fish gleam among the tufts of seaweed and groves of marine plants.

Here and there, little perfumed islands appeared, floating like baskets of flowers on the calm surface of the ocean. Everything in these enchanted places seemed designed for human needs or calculated for human pleasure. Most trees were loaded with nourishing fruit, and even the least useful ones charmed the eye with the brilliance and variety of their colors. In a forest of fragrant lemon trees, wild fig trees, round-leafed myrtle, acacia, and oleander, all intertwined with flowering vines, a multitude of birds unknown to Europe flashed their wings of purple and azure, blending their voices into the harmonies of a nature bursting with movement and life.

Death was hidden beneath this brilliant cloak; but no one noticed it then, and besides, there was in the climate a certain enervating quality that bound people to the present and made them indifferent to the future.

North America presented a different face: everything about it was grave, serious, solemn. You might have said it had been created to become the domain of the intellect, as the other had been the home of the senses.

A turbulent, foggy ocean surrounded its shores; granite cliffs and sandy beaches served as its border; the forests covering its banks displayed dark, melancholy foliage; little grew there but pine, larch, evergreen oak, wild olive, and laurel.

Once you pushed through this first barrier, you entered the shade of the great central forest; there you found mingled together the grandest trees growing on both hemispheres. Sycamore, catalpa, sugar maple, and Virginia poplar interlaced their branches with those of oak, beech, and linden.

As in forests under human control, death struck here without pause -- but no one bothered to clear away the debris it left behind. And so the dead trees piled up on top of one another; time could not reduce them to dust fast enough to make room for new growth. But even amid the wreckage, the work of reproduction went on ceaselessly. Climbing plants and grasses of every kind pushed through the obstacles; they crept along fallen trees, worked their way into the decay, lifted and cracked the withered bark that still covered them, and cleared a path for their young shoots. In this way, death came almost to assist life. The two stood face to face, seeming to have deliberately mingled and merged their work.

These forests held a deep darkness; a thousand streams, their courses still undirected by human hands, kept up an eternal dampness. You could barely make out a few flowers, a few wild fruits, a few birds.

The crash of a tree felled by age, the cataract of a river, the bellowing of buffalo, and the whistling of the wind -- these alone broke the silence of nature.

East of the great river, the forests gradually disappeared; in their place stretched boundless prairies. Had nature, in her infinite variety, withheld the seed of trees from these fertile plains? Or had the forest that once covered them been destroyed long ago by human hands? Neither tradition nor scientific research has been able to answer this question.

These immense wildernesses were not, however, entirely devoid of human presence; for centuries, scattered tribes had wandered beneath the forest canopy or across the pastures of the prairie. From the mouth of the Saint Lawrence to the Mississippi delta, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, these native people shared points of resemblance that testified to a common origin. But in other respects, they differed from all known races

Some resemblances have since been found between the physical build, languages, and habits of the Indians of North America and those of the Tungus, Manchus, Mongols, Tatars, and other nomadic tribes of Asia. These latter peoples occupied a position near the Bering Strait, which suggests that in some ancient period they may have crossed over to populate the empty continent of America. But science has not yet managed to settle this question. See on this topic Malte-Brun, vol. 5; the works of Humboldt; Fischer, Conjectures on the Origin of the Americans; Adair, History of the American Indians.

: they were neither white like Europeans, nor yellow like most Asians, nor Black like Africans; their skin was reddish, their hair long and glossy, their lips thin, and their cheekbones very prominent. The languages spoken by the native tribes of America differed from one another in vocabulary, but all obeyed the same grammatical rules. These rules departed in several respects from any that had previously seemed to govern the formation of language among humans.

The language of the Americans seemed to be the product of entirely new combinations; it revealed, on the part of its creators, an intellectual effort of which today's Indians appear hardly capable.

The social conditions of these peoples also differed in several ways from what was found in the Old World: they seemed to have multiplied freely in the heart of their wilderness, without contact with races more civilized than their own. Among them, then, you did not find those muddled, incoherent notions of good and evil, that deep corruption that usually accompanies ignorance and rudeness of customs and values in civilized nations that have fallen back into barbarism. The Indian owed nothing to anyone but himself; his virtues, his vices, his prejudices were all his own work; he had grown up in the savage independence of his nature.

The coarseness of common people in civilized countries comes not merely from their being ignorant and poor, but from the fact that, being so, they find themselves in daily contact with people who are educated and rich.

The sight of their own misfortune and weakness, contrasting every day with the happiness and power of some of their fellow citizens, excites in their hearts both anger and fear at the same time. The feeling of their inferiority and dependence irritates and humiliates them. This inner state of mind shows up in their customs and values and in their language; they become at once insolent and servile.

The truth of this is easily confirmed by observation. Common people are coarser in aristocratic countries than anywhere else -- in wealthy cities more than in the countryside.

In places where men of great power and wealth are found, the weak and the poor feel crushed by their own lowliness; seeing no way to regain equality, they despair of themselves entirely and let themselves fall below the level of human dignity.

This harmful effect of contrasting conditions does not exist in the life of the wilderness: the Indians are all equally ignorant and poor, and they are all equally free.

When Europeans arrived, the natives of North America still did not know the value of wealth and were indifferent to the comforts that civilized man acquires through it. Yet there was nothing coarse about them; on the contrary, a habitual reserve and a kind of aristocratic courtesy characterized their behavior.

Gentle and hospitable in peacetime, merciless in war beyond even the known limits of human ferocity, the Indian would starve himself to feed a stranger who knocked at his cabin door in the evening, and would tear the quivering limbs from his prisoner with his own hands. The most famous republics of antiquity never witnessed firmer courage, prouder souls, or a more unyielding love of independence than what lay hidden in the wild forests of the New World.

As President Jefferson tells us (Notes on Virginia, p. 148), among the Iroquois, when attacked by superior forces, old men scorned to flee or to survive the destruction of their country, and braved death like the ancient Romans during the Gauls' sack of Rome. Further on (p. 150): "There is no example," he says, "of an Indian who fell into the hands of his enemies and begged for his life. On the contrary, the prisoner actively seeks death at the hands of his captors, by insulting and provoking them in every way."

The Europeans made little impression when they landed on the shores of North America; their presence aroused neither envy nor fear. What hold could they have over such people? The Indian knew how to live without needs, to suffer without complaint, and to die singing.

See History of Louisiana, by Lepage-Dupratz; Charlevoix, History of New France; Letters of Rev. Hecwelder, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 1; Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, pp. 135-190. What Jefferson says carries particular weight, given the personal distinction of the writer, his unique position, and the empirical, precise age in which he wrote.

Like all other members of the great human family, these native peoples believed in the existence of a better world and worshipped, under different names, the God who created the universe. Their ideas about the great intellectual truths were generally simple and philosophical.

However primitive the people whose character I am sketching here may appear, there can be no doubt that another people -- more civilized, more advanced in every respect -- preceded them in the same regions.

An obscure but widespread tradition among most Indian tribes along the Atlantic tells us that the original home of these same peoples was once west of the Mississippi. Along the banks of the Ohio and throughout the central valley, man-made mounds are still being found to this day. When you dig to the center of these monuments, you almost always find, it is said, human bones, strange instruments, weapons, and tools of every kind made from metal, or recalling customs unknown to present-day peoples.

Today's Indians can provide no information about this unknown people. Those who were alive three hundred years ago, at the time of America's discovery, said nothing from which even a hypothesis could be drawn. Oral traditions -- those perishable, ever-renewing monuments of the primitive world -- offer no light at all. Yet thousands of our fellow human beings once lived there; of that there can be no doubt. When did they come? What was their origin, their fate, their history? When and how did they perish? No one can say.

A strange thing: there are peoples who have vanished so completely from the earth that even the memory of their name has been erased; their languages are lost, their glory has faded like a sound without an echo. But I do not know of a single one that failed to leave at least a tomb to mark its passage. And so, of all the works of man, the most enduring is still the one that best records his nothingness and his misery!

Although the vast land I have just described was inhabited by numerous indigenous tribes, it is fair to say that at the time of its discovery it was still no more than a wilderness. The Indians occupied it, but they did not possess it. It is through agriculture that man makes the land his own, and the first inhabitants of North America lived by hunting. Their unyielding prejudices, their untamable passions, their vices, and perhaps even more their savage virtues, delivered them to an inevitable destruction. The ruin of these peoples began the day Europeans landed on their shores; it has continued ever since; it is being completed in our own time. Providence, in placing them amid the riches of the New World, seems to have given them only a brief right of use; they were there, in a sense, only as a placeholder. These shores, so well suited to commerce and industry; these deep rivers; this inexhaustible Mississippi Valley; this entire continent -- they appeared then as the still-empty cradle of a great nation.

It was here that civilized men would try to build society on new foundations, and that -- applying for the first time theories until then unknown or thought to be impractical -- they would offer the world a spectacle for which the history of the past had not prepared it.

CHAPTER II.

ON THE STARTING POINT, AND ITS IMPORTANCE FOR THE FUTURE OF THE ANGLO-AMERICANS.

Why it is useful to know the starting point of a people in order to understand their social conditions and their laws. -- America is the only country where the starting point of a great people can be clearly observed. -- What all the men who came to settle English America had in common. -- How they differed. -- A remark applicable to all Europeans who came to establish themselves on the shores of the New World. -- The colonization of Virginia. -- The colonization of New England. -- The distinctive character of the first settlers of New England. -- Their arrival. -- Their first laws. -- The social contract. -- A penal code borrowed from the laws of Moses. -- Religious fervor. -- The republican spirit. -- The intimate union of the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.

A man is born; his early years pass quietly amid the pleasures and labors of childhood. He grows up; manhood begins; the doors of the world finally open to receive him; he comes into contact with his fellow human beings. People study him then for the first time, and they think they can see forming in him the seeds of the virtues and vices of his mature years.

This, if I am not mistaken, is a great error.

Go further back; examine the child even in his mother's arms; watch the outside world reflect itself for the first time on the still-dark mirror of his mind; observe the first examples that catch his eye; listen to the first words that awaken the dormant powers of thought within him; be present, finally, at the first struggles he must face -- and only then will you understand where the prejudices, habits, and passions that will dominate his life come from. The man, so to speak, is entirely formed in the swaddling clothes of his cradle.

Something similar happens with nations. Peoples always bear the marks of their origins. The circumstances that attended their birth and helped shape their development influence everything that follows.

If we could go back to the very elements of societies and examine the earliest records of their history, I have no doubt we would discover the original cause of the prejudices, the habits, the dominant passions -- of everything, in short, that makes up what we call national character. We would find the explanation for customs that today seem to contradict the prevailing values; for laws that appear to oppose accepted principles; for incoherent opinions scattered through society like fragments of broken chains still hanging from the vault of an old building, no longer holding anything up. This is how the destiny of certain peoples might be explained -- peoples whom an unknown force seems to propel toward a goal they themselves do not see. But until now, the evidence for such a study has been lacking; the spirit of analysis came to nations only as they aged, and by the time they thought to look back at their cradle, time had already wrapped it in fog, while ignorance and pride had surrounded it with myths, behind which the truth lay hidden.

America is the only country where it has been possible to witness the natural, undisturbed development of a society, and where the influence of the starting point on the future of the state could be clearly traced.

When the European peoples arrived on the shores of the New World, the features of their national character were already well established; each one had a distinct identity. And since they had already reached that level of civilization where people begin to study themselves, they transmitted to us a faithful picture of their opinions, their customs and values, and their laws. The men of the fifteenth century are almost as well known to us as those of our own. America thus reveals in broad daylight what the ignorance or barbarism of earlier ages has hidden from our view.

Close enough to the founding of the American societies to know their origins in detail, far enough removed to judge what those seeds have produced, the people of our time seem destined to see further into human events than their predecessors. Providence has placed within our reach a torch that our fathers lacked, and has allowed us to discern, in the destiny of nations, first causes that the darkness of the past had concealed from them.

When, after carefully studying the history of America, you examine its political and social conditions with care, you become deeply convinced of this truth: that there is not a single opinion, not a single habit, not a single law -- I could almost say not a single event -- that the starting point does not easily explain. Those who read this book will therefore find in this chapter the seed of everything that follows and the key to nearly the entire work.

The emigrants who came, at various periods, to occupy the territory now covered by the American Union differed from one another in many respects; their aims were not the same, and they governed themselves according to different principles.

Yet these men had common traits, and they all found themselves in a similar situation.

The bond of language is perhaps the strongest and most enduring tie that can unite human beings. All the emigrants spoke the same language; they were all children of the same people. Born in a country that had been roiled for centuries by partisan struggle, where factions had been forced, one after another, to place themselves under the protection of the law, their political education had been forged in that hard school, and one could see among them a wider knowledge of rights and truer principles of liberty than among most of the peoples of Europe. At the time of the first migrations, township government -- that fertile seed of free institutions -- had already taken deep root in English habits, and with it, the principle of popular sovereignty had found its way into the heart of the Tudor monarchy itself.

This was the era of the religious conflicts that shook the Christian world. England had thrown itself with a kind of fury into this new arena. The character of the people, which had always been serious and thoughtful, had become austere and argumentative. Education had expanded greatly through these intellectual battles; the mind had received a deeper cultivation. While people were busy debating religion, their customs and values had become purer. All these general traits of the nation were more or less visible in the character of those of its children who had crossed the ocean to seek a new future.

One observation, moreover -- to which we will have occasion to return later -- applies not only to the English but also to the French, the Spanish, and all the Europeans who successively came to settle on the shores of the New World. All the new European colonies contained, if not the full development, at least the seed of a complete democracy. Two causes led to this result: in general, you could say that when they left the mother country, the emigrants had no sense of superiority over one another. It is not the happy and the powerful who go into exile, and poverty and misfortune are the best guarantees of equality known to man. It did happen, on several occasions, that great lords crossed to America following political or religious quarrels. Laws were made to establish a hierarchy of ranks, but it quickly became clear that American soil absolutely rejected a territorial aristocracy. To clear this stubborn land, nothing less than the constant, self-interested effort of the landowner himself was needed. Once the ground was prepared, its yield was not large enough to enrich both a master and a tenant. The land therefore naturally broke itself up into small holdings cultivated by the owner alone. Now, it is to the land that aristocracy attaches itself; it is on the soil that it rests and relies. What establishes it is not privilege alone; what constitutes it is not birth; it is landed property passed down through inheritance. A nation may have enormous fortunes and dire poverty; but if those fortunes are not tied to the land, you will see rich people and poor people in it, but strictly speaking, there is no aristocracy.

All the English colonies therefore shared, at the time of their birth, a strong family resemblance. All of them, from the very beginning, seemed destined to develop liberty -- not the aristocratic liberty of the mother country, but a bourgeois, democratic liberty, of which the history of the world had not yet offered a complete example.

Within this general coloring, however, there were very strong differences that need to be brought out.

Two main branches can be distinguished in the great Anglo-American family; they have grown, up to now, without fully merging -- one in the South, the other in the North.

Virginia received the first English colony. The settlers arrived in 1607. Europe at that time was still remarkably fixated on the idea that gold and silver mines were the source of a nation's wealth: a disastrous idea that impoverished the European nations that embraced it and destroyed more lives in America than war and all bad laws combined. So it was gold seekers who were sent to Virginia

The charter granted by the English crown in 1609 included, among other clauses, a provision that the colonists would pay the crown one-fifth of the yield from gold and silver mines. See Life of Washington, by Marshall, vol. 1, pp. 18-66.

-- men without resources or discipline, whose restless, turbulent spirit troubled the colony's infancy

A large portion of the new colonists, says Stith (History of Virginia), were dissolute young men of good family whose parents had shipped them off to escape some disgraceful fate; former servants, fraudulent bankrupts, libertines, and others of that kind, more apt to plunder and destroy than to build the settlement. Seditious leaders easily led this crowd into every sort of extravagance and excess. See also the following works on the history of Virginia: History of Virginia from the first Settlements in the year 1624, by Smith; History of Virginia, by William Stith; History of Virginia from the earliest period, by Beverly, translated into French in 1807.

and made its progress uncertain. Then came the tradesmen and farmers -- a more moral, more tranquil sort, but one that hardly rose above the level of the English lower classes.

It was only later that a number of wealthy English landowners came to settle in the colony.

No noble idea, no plan beyond the material, guided the founding of these new settlements. The colony had barely been established before slavery was introduced

Slavery was introduced around the year 1620 by a Dutch vessel that landed twenty enslaved Africans on the banks of the James River. See Chalmer.

-- and that was the defining fact that would exert an immense influence on the character, the laws, and the entire future of the South.

Slavery, as we shall explain later, degrades labor; it introduces idleness into society, and with idleness come ignorance and pride, poverty and luxury. It saps the powers of the mind and puts human initiative to sleep. The influence of slavery, combined with the English character, explains the customs and values and social conditions of the South.

Against this same English background, entirely opposite colors appeared in the North. Here, I hope the reader will allow me a few details.

It was in the English colonies of the North, better known as the New England states

The New England states are those situated east of the Hudson; there are now six of them: (1) Connecticut; (2) Rhode Island; (3) Massachusetts; (4) Vermont; (5) New Hampshire; (6) Maine.

, that the two or three key ideas which today form the foundation of American social theory first came together.

The principles of New England first spread to the neighboring states; then gradually reached the most distant ones; and in the end -- if I may put it this way -- they penetrated the entire federation. They now extend their influence beyond its borders, across the whole American world. New England's civilization has been like a fire lit on the heights: after warming everything around it, it still tinges the farthest edges of the horizon with its glow.

The founding of New England was something new; everything about it was singular and original.

Nearly all colonies have had, as their first inhabitants, uneducated, resourceless people driven out of their homeland by poverty and bad conduct -- or greedy speculators and industrial entrepreneurs. There are colonies that cannot even claim such an origin: Santo Domingo was founded by pirates, and in our own day, the courts of England take it upon themselves to populate Australia.

The emigrants who came to settle on the shores of New England all belonged to the comfortable classes of the mother country. Their gathering on American soil presented, from the very beginning, the remarkable spectacle of a society containing neither lords nor common people, and in effect neither rich nor poor. In proportion, there was a greater concentration of education and knowledge spread among these people than in any European nation of our own day. Every single one of them, perhaps without exception, had received an advanced education, and several had made a name for themselves in Europe for their talent and learning. The other colonies had been founded by adventurers without families; the New England emigrants brought with them admirable elements of order and morality; they went to the wilderness accompanied by their wives and children. But what set them apart above all else was the very purpose of their venture. It was not necessity that forced them to leave their country; they were giving up a comfortable social position and a secure livelihood. Nor did they cross to the New World to improve their situation or increase their wealth; they tore themselves from the comforts of home to obey a purely intellectual need. In exposing themselves to the inevitable hardships of exile, they wanted to make an idea triumph.

The emigrants -- or, as they so aptly called themselves, the pilgrims -- belonged to that sect in England whose austere principles had earned it the name Puritan. Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine; it also overlapped at several points with the most radical democratic and republican theories. This is what had earned it its most dangerous enemies. Persecuted by the government of the mother country, offended in the rigor of their principles by the daily workings of the society in which they lived, the Puritans sought a land so wild and so forsaken by the world that they might still be allowed to live in their own way and pray to God in freedom.

A few quotations will reveal the spirit of these devout adventurers better than anything we could add ourselves.

Nathaniel Morton, the historian of New England's early years, opens his account like this

New-England's Memorial, p. 14; Boston, 1826. See also Hutchinson's History, vol. 2, p. 440.

: "I have always believed," he says, "that it was a sacred duty for us, whose fathers received such numerous and memorable tokens of God's goodness in the founding of this colony, to preserve the memory of it in writing. What we have seen and what our fathers have told us, we must make known to our children, so that future generations may learn to praise the Lord; so that the line of Abraham his servant and the sons of Jacob his chosen may always keep the memory of God's miraculous works (Ps. 105:5-6). They must know how the Lord brought his vine into the wilderness; how he planted it and drove out the heathen; how he prepared a place for it, sank its roots deep, and let it spread and cover the land (Ps. 80:15, 13); and not only that, but also how he guided his people to his holy tabernacle, and established them on the mountain of his inheritance (Exod. 15:13). These things must be known, so that God may receive the honor due to him, and that some rays of his glory may fall upon the venerable names of the saints who served as his instruments."

You cannot read this opening without being struck, in spite of yourself, by a feeling of religious solemnity; you seem to breathe the air of antiquity and a kind of biblical fragrance.

The conviction that drives the writer elevates his language. In your eyes, as in his, this is no longer a small band of adventurers seeking their fortune across the sea; it is the seed of a great people that God is planting with his own hands on a predestined land.

The author continues and describes the departure of the first emigrants like this

New-England's Memorial, p. 22.

:

"And so," he says, "they left that city (Delft-Haven) which had been a resting place for them; yet they were calm, for they knew they were pilgrims and strangers here on earth. They did not cling to earthly things but lifted their eyes toward heaven, their dear homeland, where God had prepared his holy city for them. They finally arrived at the port where the ship awaited them. A great number of friends who could not go with them had at least wanted to follow them that far. The night passed without sleep; it was spent in outpourings of friendship, in devout conversation, in expressions full of genuine Christian tenderness. The next day they went aboard; their friends insisted on accompanying them onto the ship. It was then that deep sighs were heard, that tears were seen streaming from every eye, that long embraces and ardent prayers moved even the strangers among them. The signal for departure being given, they fell to their knees, and their pastor, raising tear-filled eyes to heaven, commended them to the Lord's mercy. They finally took leave of one another, speaking farewells that for many of them would be the last."

The emigrants numbered about a hundred and fifty, men, women, and children. Their goal was to found a colony on the banks of the Hudson; but after drifting for a long time across the ocean, they were finally forced to land on the barren coast of New England, at the place where the town of Plymouth stands today. The rock where the pilgrims stepped ashore is still pointed out.

This rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen fragments of it carefully preserved in several cities of the Union. Does this not clearly show that the power and greatness of man resides entirely in his soul? Here is a stone that the feet of a few wretched people touched for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it attracts the gaze of a great people; its fragments are revered and its dust shared far and wide. What has become of the thresholds of so many palaces? Who cares about them?

"But before going further," says the historian I have already cited, "let us consider for a moment the present condition of this poor people, and admire the goodness of God who saved them."

New-England's Memorial, p. 33.

"They had now crossed the vast ocean; they had arrived at the goal of their journey; but they saw no friends to welcome them, no shelter to take them in. It was the middle of winter, and those who know our climate know how harsh the winters are and what furious storms batter our coasts in that season. In such weather, it is hard to travel through familiar places, let alone settle on unknown shores. Around them stretched only a hideous, desolate wilderness, full of wild animals and wild men whose numbers and savagery they could not guess. The earth was frozen; the ground was covered with forests and thickets. The whole scene had a barbarous look. Behind them, they could see only the immense ocean separating them from the civilized world. To find any peace or hope, they could look only upward."

Do not think that the Puritans' piety was merely theoretical, or that it held itself aloof from worldly affairs. Puritanism, as I said above, was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine. No sooner had they set foot on that inhospitable shore -- the one Nathaniel Morton just described -- than the emigrants' first order of business was to organize themselves as a society. They immediately drew up a document that read

The emigrants who founded the state of Rhode Island in 1638, those who settled in New Haven in 1637, the first inhabitants of Connecticut in 1639, and the founders of Providence in 1640 all similarly began by drafting a social contract submitted for the approval of all interested parties. Pitkin's History, pp. 42 and 47.

:

"We, whose names follow, who, for the glory of God, the advancement of the Christian faith, and the honor of our country, have undertaken to establish the first colony on these distant shores, do hereby covenant and agree, by mutual and solemn consent, and before God, to form ourselves into a body politic for the purpose of governing ourselves and working toward the accomplishment of our aims; and by virtue of this contract, we agree to enact laws, acts, and ordinances, and to establish, as the need arises, magistrates to whom we promise submission and obedience."

This was in 1620. From that point on, emigration never stopped. The religious and political passions that tore the British Empire apart throughout the reign of Charles I drove new swarms of dissenters to the coasts of America every year. In England, the center of Puritanism continued to be found in the middle classes; it was from the middle classes that most of the emigrants came. The population of New England grew rapidly, and while the hierarchy of ranks was still classifying people despotically in the mother country, the colony increasingly presented the novel spectacle of a society that was uniform in all its parts. Democracy -- a democracy that antiquity had never dared even to dream of -- emerged fully grown and fully armed from the heart of the old feudal society.

Happy to send away the seeds of trouble and the ingredients of new revolutions, the English government watched this mass emigration without concern. It even encouraged it with all its power, and seemed to give barely a thought to the fate of those who came to American soil seeking refuge from the harshness of its laws. It was as if the government regarded New England as a region given over to the dreams of the imagination, to be abandoned to the free experiments of idealists.

The English colonies -- and this was one of the main causes of their prosperity -- always enjoyed more internal freedom and more political independence than the colonies of other peoples; but nowhere was this principle of liberty more fully applied than in the New England states.

It was generally accepted at the time that the lands of the New World belonged to whichever European nation had first discovered them.

By this principle, nearly the entire coastline of North America had become an English possession by the end of the sixteenth century. The methods the British government used to populate these new domains varied. In some cases, the king placed a portion of the New World under a governor of his choosing, charged with administering the land in his name and under his direct orders

This was the case with the state of New York.

; this was the colonial system adopted throughout the rest of Europe. At other times, the king granted the ownership of certain tracts to an individual or a company.

Maryland, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey were in this category. See Pitkin's History, vol. 1, pp. 11-31.

All civil and political powers were then concentrated in the hands of one or several individuals who, under the oversight and control of the crown, sold the land and governed the inhabitants. A third system, finally, consisted of giving a certain number of emigrants the right to form themselves into a political society under the sponsorship of the mother country, and to govern themselves in everything that did not contradict her laws.

This mode of colonization, so favorable to liberty, was put into practice only in New England.

See the work entitled: Historical collection of state papers and other authentic documents intended as materials for an history of the United States of America, by Ebenezer Hazard, printed at Philadelphia, 1792 -- a very large number of valuable documents, both in content and authenticity, relating to the earliest period of the colonies, including the various charters granted to them by the English crown, as well as the first acts of their governments. See also the analysis of all these charters by Justice Story in the introduction to his Commentary on the Constitution of the United States. It is clear from all these documents that the principles of representative government and the outward forms of political liberty were introduced into nearly all the colonies almost from birth. These principles were more fully developed in the North than in the South, but they existed everywhere.

As early as 1628

See Pitkin's History, p. 35, vol. 1. See The History of the Colony of Massachusetts, by Hutchinson, vol. 1, p. 9.

, a charter of this kind was granted by Charles I to emigrants who came to found the colony of Massachusetts.

But as a general rule, the charters for the New England colonies were not issued until long after their existence had become an established fact. Plymouth, Providence, New Haven, the state of Connecticut, and Rhode Island

See ibid., pp. 42-47.

were all founded without the help, and in a sense without the knowledge, of the mother country. The new settlers, without denying the authority of the metropolis, did not go to her for the source of their powers; they constituted themselves, and it was only thirty or forty years later, under Charles II, that a royal charter came along to legalize their existence.

As a result, it is often difficult, when going through the earliest historical and legislative records of New England, to spot any connection between the emigrants and the country of their ancestors. At every turn, you see them exercising sovereignty: they appoint their own magistrates, make peace and war, establish regulations of public order, and give themselves laws as if they answered to God alone.

The inhabitants of Massachusetts, in establishing criminal and civil laws, procedures, and courts of justice, had departed from the practices followed in England: as late as 1650, the king's name still did not appear at the head of judicial writs. See Hutchinson, vol. 1, p. 452.

Nothing is more remarkable, and at the same time more instructive, than the legislation of this period; it is here, above all, that you find the answer to the great social riddle that the United States presents to the world today.

Among these early documents, we will single out in particular, as one of the most revealing, the code of laws that the small state of Connecticut gave itself in 1650.

Code of 1650, p. 28 (Hartford, 1830).

The legislators of Connecticut

See also Hutchinson's History, vol. 1, pp. 435-456, for an analysis of the penal code adopted in 1648 by the colony of Massachusetts; this code is drafted on principles similar to Connecticut's.

turned first to the penal laws; and in composing them, they had the strange idea of drawing on the sacred texts:

"Whoever worships any god other than the Lord," they begin, "shall be put to death."

There follow ten or twelve provisions of a similar nature, borrowed word for word from Deuteronomy, Exodus, and Leviticus.

Blasphemy, witchcraft, adultery

Adultery was likewise punishable by death under Massachusetts law, and Hutchinson (vol. 1, p. 441) says several people did in fact suffer death for this crime. He cites a curious anecdote from the year 1663. A married woman had been involved with a young man; she became a widow and married him. Several years passed. When the public finally came to suspect the intimacy that had once existed between the spouses, they were criminally prosecuted, thrown in prison, and very nearly condemned to death.

, and rape were punished by death; a son's offense against his parents was subject to the same penalty. The legislation of a rough, half-civilized people was thus transplanted into the heart of a society whose spirit was enlightened and whose customs and values were gentle. And so it was that the death penalty was never more lavishly written into the law, nor less often applied to actual offenders.

The lawmakers, in this body of criminal law, were above all preoccupied with maintaining moral order and good customs and values in society. They thereby constantly intruded into the domain of conscience, and there was scarcely a sin they did not manage to subject to the magistrate's censure. The reader will have noticed how severely these laws punished adultery and rape. Simple relations between unmarried people were harshly suppressed as well. The judge was given the power to impose on the guilty one of three penalties: a fine, a whipping, or marriage

Code of 1650, p. 48. It appears that judges sometimes imposed these penalties in combination, as we see in a ruling from 1643 (p. 114, New-Haven Antiquities), which states that Margaret Bedford, convicted of reprehensible acts, shall suffer the penalty of the whip and shall be ordered to marry Nicholas Jemmings, her accomplice.

; and if the old court records of New Haven are to be believed, prosecutions of this kind were not rare; you find, on the date of May 1, 1660, a judgment imposing a fine and a reprimand on a young woman accused of uttering some indiscreet words and allowing herself to be kissed.

New-Haven Antiquities, p. 104. See also Hutchinson's History, vol. 1, p. 435, for several judgments as extraordinary as this one.

The code of 1650 is packed with preventive measures. Laziness and drunkenness are severely punished.

Ibid., 1650, pp. 50, 57.

Innkeepers may not serve more than a set amount of wine to each customer; fines or the whip punish even simple lying when it can cause harm.

Ibid., p. 64.

Elsewhere, the lawmaker -- completely forgetting the great principles of religious freedom he himself had demanded in Europe -- forces people, under threat of fines, to attend religious services

Ibid.

, and goes so far as to impose severe penalties

This was not unique to Connecticut. See, among others, the law of September 13, 1644, in Massachusetts, condemning Anabaptists to banishment. Historical Collection of State Papers, vol. 1, p. 538. See also the law of October 14, 1656, against the Quakers: "Whereas," the law says, "there has lately arisen a cursed sect of heretics called Quakers..." Then follow provisions imposing very heavy fines on ship captains who bring Quakers into the country. Quakers who manage to get in will be whipped and locked up in prison to work. Those who defend their opinions will first be fined, then imprisoned, and expelled from the province. Same collection, vol. 1, p. 630.

-- and often death -- on Christians who wish to worship God in any way other than his own.

Under the penal law of Massachusetts, a Catholic priest who set foot in the colony after having been expelled was punishable by death.

Sometimes, finally, the regulatory zeal that possesses him leads the lawmaker to concern himself with matters quite beneath his dignity. And so you find, in this same code, a law prohibiting the use of tobacco.

Code of 1650, p. 96.

We should not lose sight of the fact, however, that these bizarre or tyrannical laws were not imposed by force; they were passed by the free consent of all the interested parties themselves, and that the customs and values of the people were even more austere and more Puritan than the laws. In Boston in 1649, a formal association was organized whose purpose was to prevent the worldly luxury of long hair.

New-England's Memorial, p. 316.

Such excesses are no doubt a disgrace to the human spirit; they testify to the weakness of our nature, which, unable to grasp the true and the just firmly, is most often reduced to choosing between two extremes.

Alongside this criminal legislation, so deeply marked by the narrow sectarian spirit and all the religious passions that persecution had inflamed and that still smoldered in people's souls, there stands -- linked and almost chained to it -- a body of political law that, drafted two hundred years ago, still seems to be far ahead of the spirit of liberty in our own age.

The general principles on which modern constitutions rest -- principles that most seventeenth-century Europeans barely understood and that were still only imperfectly triumphant in Great Britain itself -- were all recognized and established in the laws of New England: the people's involvement in public affairs, the free vote on taxes, the accountability of government officials, individual liberty, and trial by jury -- all were established there as a matter of fact, without debate.

These foundational principles were given an application and a development that no European nation had yet dared to attempt.

In Connecticut, the electorate was composed, from the very beginning, of the entire body of citizens -- and this is easy to understand.

Constitution of 1638, p. 17.

Among this newborn people, there reigned an almost perfect equality of wealth and an even greater equality of education and knowledge.

As early as 1645, the general assembly of Rhode Island unanimously declared that the government of the state consisted of a democracy, and that power rested with the body of free men, who alone had the right to make laws and oversee their enforcement. Code of 1650, p. 70.

In Connecticut at this time, all executive officials were elected, up to and including the governor of the state.

Pitkin's History, p. 47.

Citizens over the age of sixteen were required to bear arms; they formed a national militia that chose its own officers and stood ready at all times to march in defense of the country.

Constitution of 1638, p. 12.

It is in the laws of Connecticut, as in all those of New England, that you can see the birth and growth of the township independence that still forms the very principle and lifeblood of American liberty today.

In most European nations, political life began in the upper reaches of society and was communicated gradually, and always incompletely, to the various parts of the social body.

In America, by contrast, you could say that the township was organized before the county, the county before the state, the state before the Union.

In New England, by 1650, the township was fully and definitively established. Around the township's own identity clustered a tight web of interests, passions, duties, and rights. Within the township, there thrived a real, active political life, thoroughly democratic and republican. The colonies still recognized the authority of the mother country; monarchy was the law of the state -- but the republic was already alive and well in the township.

The township appointed its own magistrates of every kind; it taxed itself; it assessed and collected its own taxes.

Code of 1650, p. 80.

In the New England township, the principle of representation was not accepted. It was in the public square, in the general assembly of all citizens, that matters touching the common interest were decided -- just as in Athens.

When you study the laws that were enacted during this first age of the American republics, you are struck by the intelligence of the lawmakers and the advanced nature of their theories.

Clearly, they held a higher and more complete idea of the duties society owes its members than European lawmakers of the time, and they imposed obligations on society that it was still avoiding elsewhere. In the New England states, from the very beginning, the welfare of the poor was guaranteed

Ibid., p. 78.

; strict measures were taken for the upkeep of the roads, with officials appointed to oversee them

Code of 1650, p. 49.

; townships kept public records in which the results of general deliberations, deaths, marriages, and births of citizens were entered

See Hutchinson's History, vol. 1, p. 455.

; clerks were assigned to maintain these records

Code of 1650, p. 86.

; officers were charged with administering unclaimed estates, others with surveying property boundaries; several had as their main function the maintenance of public order within the township.

Ibid., p. 40.

The law went into a thousand different details to anticipate and meet a host of social needs that, even in our own day, are only vaguely felt in France. But it is in the provisions regarding public education that the distinctive character of American civilization reveals itself most fully from the very beginning.

"Whereas," says the law, "Satan, the enemy of the human race, finds his most powerful weapons in the ignorance of men, and whereas it is essential that the knowledge brought by our fathers not be buried in their graves; whereas the education of children is one of the highest interests of the state, with the Lord's assistance..."

Ibid., p. 90.

There follow provisions creating schools in every township and requiring the inhabitants, on pain of heavy fines, to tax themselves to support them. Higher schools are established in the same way in the most populous districts. Municipal officials must ensure that parents send their children to school; they have the power to impose fines on those who refuse; and if resistance continues, society steps in to replace the family, takes charge of the child, and strips the parents of the rights that nature had given them but that they had so badly misused.

Code of 1650, p. 83.

The reader will doubtless have noticed the preamble to these ordinances: in America, it is religion that leads to knowledge; it is the observance of divine law that leads man to liberty.

When, after casting a quick glance at American society in 1650, you look at the state of Europe -- and particularly the continent -- around the same time, you are filled with deep astonishment. On the European continent, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, absolute monarchy was everywhere triumphing over the ruins of the oligarchic and feudal liberty of the Middle Ages. In the heart of this brilliant, literary Europe, never had the idea of rights been more completely disregarded; never had peoples lived less of a political life; never had the principles of true liberty been further from people's minds. And it was at that very moment that these same principles -- unknown to the nations of Europe or scorned by them -- were being proclaimed in the wildernesses of the New World and becoming the future creed of a great people. The boldest theories of the human mind were being put into practice in this society so humble in appearance, a society no statesman would have deigned to notice. Left to the originality of its own nature, human imagination there improvised a body of law without precedent. In the heart of this obscure democracy -- which had not yet produced generals, philosophers, or great writers -- a man could stand up before a free people and deliver, to the applause of all, this beautiful definition of liberty:

"Let us not be mistaken about what we mean by our independence. There is a kind of corrupt liberty whose use is common to animals and to man alike, which consists in doing whatever you please. This liberty is the enemy of all authority; it chafes impatiently at every rule; with it, we become less than ourselves; it is the enemy of truth and of peace, and God has seen fit to rise against it! But there is a civil and moral liberty that finds its strength in union, and that it is the very mission of authority to protect: the liberty to do without fear everything that is just and good. This holy liberty we must defend through every danger, and if need be, risk our lives for it."

Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, vol. 2, p. 13. This speech was given by Winthrop; he had been accused of committing arbitrary acts as a magistrate. After delivering the speech from which I have just quoted a passage, he was acquitted with applause, and from then on he was always re-elected governor of the state. See Marshall, vol. 1, p. 166.

I have already said enough to reveal the true character of Anglo-American civilization. It is the product -- and this starting point must always be kept in mind -- of two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere have often been at war with each other, but that in America people managed to merge into one another and combine wonderfully well. I mean the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.

The founders of New England were at once passionate sectarians and exalted innovators. Held in the tightest bonds of certain religious beliefs, they were free of all political prejudice.

From this came two different but not opposing tendencies, whose traces can be found everywhere, in the customs and values as in the laws.

Men sacrifice their friends, their family, and their homeland for a religious conviction; you might think they would be entirely absorbed in the pursuit of this intellectual good they have come to buy at so high a price. Yet you see them seeking with almost equal fervor both material wealth and moral satisfaction -- heaven in the next world, and prosperity and liberty in this one.

In their hands, political principles, laws, and human institutions seem like malleable things that can be shaped and combined at will.

Before them fall the barriers that had imprisoned the society in which they were born; the old ideas that had guided the world for centuries vanish; an almost boundless career, a field without horizon, opens up. The human mind rushes into it, exploring it in every direction. But when it reaches the limits of the political world, it stops of its own accord; trembling, it sets aside its most formidable powers; it renounces doubt; it gives up the need to innovate; it refrains even from lifting the veil of the sanctuary; it bows with respect before truths it accepts without questioning.

Thus, in the moral world, everything is ordered, structured, foreseen, decided in advance. In the political world, everything is turbulent, contested, uncertain. In the one, passive obedience -- though freely given; in the other, independence, contempt for experience, and jealousy of all authority.

Far from undermining each other, these two tendencies -- so apparently opposed -- move in harmony, and seem to lend each other mutual support.

Religion sees in civil liberty a noble exercise of human faculties; in the political world, a field that the Creator has opened to the efforts of the intellect. Free and powerful in its own sphere, content with the place reserved for it, religion knows that its dominion is all the more firmly established because it reigns by its own strength alone, and commands hearts without any outside support.

Liberty sees in religion the companion of its struggles and its triumphs; the cradle of its infancy; the divine source of its rights. It regards religion as the safeguard of customs and values; customs and values as the guarantee of the laws, and the pledge of its own survival.

REASONS FOR SOME PECULIARITIES IN THE LAWS AND CUSTOMS OF THE ANGLO-AMERICANS.

Some remnants of aristocratic institutions within the most complete democracy. -- Why? -- We must carefully distinguish what is Puritan in origin from what is English in origin.

The reader should not draw overly broad or absolute conclusions from what I have just said. The social conditions, religion, and customs and values of the first emigrants undoubtedly exerted an immense influence on the destiny of their new homeland. But it was not in their power to found a society whose starting point lay solely in themselves; no one can entirely break free from the past. It happened -- sometimes deliberately, sometimes without their knowing it -- that they mixed into the ideas and practices that were their own other practices and other ideas that they had absorbed from their education or from the national traditions of their country.

When you want to know and judge the Anglo-Americans of today, you must therefore carefully distinguish what is Puritan in origin from what is English in origin.

In the United States, you often encounter laws or customs that clash with everything around them. These laws seem to have been drafted in a spirit opposite to the dominant spirit of American legislation; these customs and values seem to contradict the overall social conditions. If the English colonies had been founded in an age of darkness, or if their origins were already lost in the mist of time, the problem would be unsolvable.

I will cite a single example to make my point clear.

American civil and criminal law knows only two instruments of enforcement: imprisonment or bail. The first step in any legal proceeding is to obtain bail from the defendant, or, if he refuses, to have him locked up; only then is the validity of the claim or the seriousness of the charges debated.

It is obvious that such a system works against the poor and favors the rich.

A poor man cannot always find someone to post bail, even in a civil case, and if he is forced to wait for justice in jail, his enforced idleness soon reduces him to destitution.

A rich man, by contrast, always manages to avoid imprisonment in civil matters; and more than that, if he has committed an offense, he easily escapes the punishment that awaits him: after posting bail, he disappears. So you could say that for him, all the penalties the law imposes amount to nothing more than fines.

There are, to be sure, crimes for which bail is not accepted, but they are very few in number.

What could be more aristocratic than a system like that?

In America, however, it is the poor who make the law, and they usually reserve the greatest advantages of society for themselves.

The explanation for this phenomenon must be sought in England: the laws I am talking about are English.

See Blackstone and Delolme, Book 1, Chapter X.

The Americans never changed them, even though they are at odds with the rest of their legislation and with the whole body of their ideas.

The thing a people is least likely to change, after its customs, is its civil legislation. Civil laws are familiar only to lawyers -- that is, to the very people who have a direct interest in keeping them as they are, good or bad, for the simple reason that they know them. The general public barely knows these laws; it sees them in action only in particular cases, grasps their overall tendency only with difficulty, and submits to them without thinking about it.

I have cited one example; I could have pointed out many others.

The picture that American society presents is, if I may put it this way, covered with a democratic coat of paint, beneath which you can see, from time to time, the old colors of aristocracy showing through.

CHAPTER III.

SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF THE ANGLO-AMERICANS.

Social conditions are usually the product of a fact, sometimes of laws, and most often of both combined. But once social conditions exist, they can be considered the primary cause of most of the laws, customs, and ideas that govern a nation's conduct. What they do not produce, they modify.

To understand a people's laws and customs, then, you must begin by studying their social conditions.

THE DEFINING FEATURE OF ANGLO-AMERICAN SOCIAL CONDITIONS IS THAT THEY ARE ESSENTIALLY DEMOCRATIC.

The first settlers of New England. -- Equal among themselves. -- Aristocratic laws introduced in the South. -- The era of the Revolution. -- Changes in inheritance law. -- Effects of those changes. -- Equality pushed to its furthest limits in the new Western states. -- Equality of intellect.

You could make many important observations about the social conditions of Anglo-Americans, but one stands above all the rest.

The social conditions of Americans are eminently democratic. They have had this character ever since the colonies were born, and they have it even more today.

I said in the previous chapter that a great equality prevailed among the settlers who came to establish themselves on the shores of New England. The very germ of aristocracy was never planted in that part of the Union. The only influence anyone could establish there was intellectual. The people grew accustomed to revering certain names as emblems of knowledge and virtue. The voice of a few citizens held a power over them that might justifiably have been called aristocratic -- if it could have been passed down invariably from father to son.

This was how things stood east of the Hudson. To the southwest of that river, and all the way down to Florida, the situation was quite different.

In most of the states southwest of the Hudson, great English landowners had come to settle. Aristocratic principles, along with English inheritance laws, had been imported with them. I have already explained the reasons that prevented a powerful aristocracy from ever taking root in America. Those reasons, while present southwest of the Hudson, had less force there than east of it. In the South, a single man could, with the help of slaves, cultivate a vast stretch of land. You could therefore find wealthy landowners in that part of the continent. But their influence was not precisely aristocratic in the European sense, since they had no legal privileges and since slave labor gave them no tenants and therefore no patronage. Still, the great landowners south of the Hudson formed an upper class with its own ideas and tastes, one that generally concentrated political activity within its own ranks. It was a kind of aristocracy that was not very different from the mass of the people, easily embracing their passions and interests, exciting neither love nor hatred -- in short, weak and not very vigorous. It was this class that took the lead in the insurrection in the South: the American Revolution owes its greatest men to them.

At that time, all of society was shaken. The people, in whose name the war had been fought -- the people, now become a power -- conceived the desire to act for themselves. Democratic instincts awakened. In breaking the yoke of the mother country, Americans developed a taste for every kind of independence: individual influence gradually ceased to be felt; customs and laws alike began marching in step toward the same goal.

But it was the inheritance laws that drove equality to take its final step.

I am astonished that political writers, ancient and modern alike, have not attributed a greater influence to inheritance laws in the course of human affairs.

By inheritance laws, I mean all laws whose principal aim is to regulate the disposition of property after the owner's death. The law of entail falls into this category. It too has the effect, it is true, of preventing the owner from disposing of his property before death; but it imposes the obligation to preserve it only in order to pass it intact to the heir. The principal aim of the law of entail is therefore to regulate the disposition of property after the owner's death. The rest is simply the means it employs.

These laws belong, it is true, to the civil order. But they should be placed at the head of all political institutions, because they have an incredible influence on the social conditions of peoples -- and political laws are merely the expression of social conditions. Moreover, they have a sure and uniform way of operating on society: they seize hold of generations, so to speak, before they are born. Through them, a human being is armed with an almost divine power over the future of his fellow men. The legislator regulates inheritance once and then rests for centuries: the motion once given to his work, he can withdraw his hand; the machine runs on its own power and directs itself, as if of its own will, toward a goal marked out in advance. Designed in a certain way, it gathers, concentrates, and clusters property around a single head -- and soon after, political power as well. It makes aristocracy spring, so to speak, from the very soil. Driven by different principles and launched in another direction, its action is swifter still: it divides, it distributes, it scatters wealth and power. Sometimes the speed of its progress is alarming; despairing of stopping its momentum, people try at least to place obstacles in its path; they want to counterbalance its action with opposing efforts. Useless! It crushes or shatters everything in its way, rising and falling ceaselessly upon the ground until nothing remains to the eye but a shifting, impalpable dust -- upon which democracy sits down.

When inheritance law permits -- and all the more when it requires -- the equal division of a father's property among all his children, its effects are of two kinds, which must be carefully distinguished even though they tend toward the same end.

By virtue of the inheritance law, the death of each property owner brings about a revolution in property. Not only do goods change hands, but they change, so to speak, in nature: they are endlessly broken up into smaller portions.

This is the direct and, you might say, the material effect of the law. In countries where legislation establishes equal partition, property -- and particularly landed fortunes -- must have a permanent tendency to shrink. The effects of this legislation would only be felt in the long run, however, if the law were left to its own forces. After all, as long as a family has no more than two children (and the average family in a country as populated as France is said to have only three), those children, splitting the fortune of their father and mother, will be no poorer than either parent was individually.

But the law of equal partition does not exert its influence only on the fate of property; it acts on the very soul of property owners and enlists their passions in its cause. It is these indirect effects that rapidly destroy great fortunes and especially great estates.

Among peoples where inheritance law is based on the right of primogeniture, landed estates pass most often from generation to generation without being divided. The result is that family spirit becomes, in a sense, materialized in the land. The family represents the land; the land represents the family. It perpetuates the family's name, its origins, its glory, its power, its virtues. It is an imperishable witness to the past and a precious guarantee of the future.

When inheritance law establishes equal division, it destroys the intimate bond that existed between family spirit and the preservation of land. The land ceases to represent the family, because it inevitably will be divided after one or two generations -- it must constantly shrink and eventually disappear entirely. The sons of a great landowner, if they are few in number or if fortune favors them, may well hope to be no less wealthy than their father, but not to possess the same property as he did. Their wealth will necessarily be composed of different elements than his.

Now, the moment you strip landowners of a great interest rooted in sentiment, in memory, in pride, in ambition -- the interest in preserving the land -- you can be sure that sooner or later they will sell it. They have a strong financial interest in selling, since capital in movable form produces more income than other kinds, and lends itself far more easily to satisfying the passions of the moment.

Once great landed estates are divided, they never come back together again. The small landowner draws more income from his field, proportionally speaking, than the large landowner from his.

I do not mean that the small landowner cultivates better, but that he cultivates with more passion and care, making up through labor what he lacks in skill.

He therefore sells it at a much higher price. So the same economic logic that led the rich man to sell a vast estate will prevent him, all the more, from buying small ones to reassemble large holdings.

What we call family spirit is often founded on an illusion of individual selfishness. People seek to perpetuate and in a sense immortalize themselves in their descendants. Where family spirit ends, individual selfishness returns to the reality of its inclinations. As the family no longer presents itself to the mind as anything but a vague, uncertain, indeterminate thing, each person concentrates on the comfort of the present. You think about providing for the next generation, and nothing beyond that.

So people do not seek to perpetuate their family, or at least they seek to perpetuate it by means other than landed property.

Thus, not only does inheritance law make it difficult for families to keep the same estates intact, but it strips them of the desire to try, and in a sense enlists them in cooperating with it toward their own ruin.

The law of equal partition works in two ways: by acting on things, it acts on people; by acting on people, it reaches things.

In both ways it manages to strike deeply at landed property and to make both families and fortunes disappear with speed.

Because land is the most solid form of property, you do find from time to time rich men willing to make great sacrifices to acquire it, gladly losing a considerable portion of their income to secure the rest. But these are exceptions. The love of real estate is habitually found only among the poor. The small landowner, having less education, less imagination, and fewer passions than the large one, is generally preoccupied only with the desire to enlarge his domain -- and it often happens that inheritance, marriage, or the chances of commerce gradually provide him the means to do so. Alongside the tendency that leads men to divide the land, there exists another that leads them to accumulate it. This tendency is strong enough to prevent property from being infinitely subdivided, but not strong enough to create great landed fortunes, let alone to maintain them in the same families.

It is certainly not for us, Frenchmen of the nineteenth century, daily witnesses to the political and social changes that inheritance law produces, to doubt its power. Every day we see it pass and re-pass ceaselessly across our land, toppling the walls of our houses and tearing down the fences of our fields. But if the inheritance law has already accomplished much among us, much still remains for it to do. Our memories, our opinions, and our habits still raise powerful obstacles against it.

In the United States, its work of destruction is nearly complete. That is where you can study its principal results.

The English law on the transmission of property was abolished in nearly every state at the time of the Revolution.

The law of entail was modified so as to impede the free circulation of goods only in a barely perceptible way.

The first generation passed; the land began to be divided. The movement became faster and faster as time went on. Today, barely sixty years later, the face of society is already unrecognizable. The families of the great landowners have nearly all been swallowed up into the common mass. In the state of New York, where they were once very numerous, barely two remain afloat above the abyss ready to consume them. The sons of those wealthy citizens are now merchants, lawyers, doctors. Most have sunk into the deepest obscurity. The last trace of hereditary ranks and distinctions has been destroyed: inheritance law has leveled everything in its path.

This is not to say that in the United States, as elsewhere, there are no rich people. I know of no country, in fact, where the love of money occupies a larger place in the human heart, or where people profess a deeper contempt for the theory of the permanent equality of property. But wealth circulates there with incredible speed, and experience teaches that it is rare to see two generations enjoy its favors.

This picture, however vivid you imagine it, still gives only an incomplete idea of what is happening in the new states of the West and Southwest.

At the end of the last century, bold adventurers began pushing into the valleys of the Mississippi. It was like a new discovery of America. Soon the main body of emigration moved there; previously unknown societies suddenly sprang from the wilderness. States whose very names had not existed a few years before took their place within the American Union. It is in the West that you can observe democracy pushed to its furthest limit. In those states, improvised by fortune as it were, the inhabitants arrived on the land they occupy only yesterday. They barely know one another, and no one knows the history of his nearest neighbor. In this part of the American continent, the population escapes not only the influence of great names and great wealth, but also that natural aristocracy that flows from education and virtue. No one there wields the respectable power that people grant to the memory of a life spent doing good before their eyes. The new Western states already have inhabitants; they do not yet have a society.

But it is not only fortunes that are equal in America; equality extends, to a certain degree, to intellects themselves.

I do not think there is a country in the world where, in proportion to its population, there are so few ignorant people and so few scholars as in America.

Primary education is within everyone's reach; higher education is within almost no one's.

This is easy to understand and is, so to speak, the necessary result of what I have described above.

Almost all Americans are comfortable; they can therefore easily acquire the basic elements of human knowledge.

In America, there are few rich people; almost all Americans therefore need to practice a profession. And every profession requires an apprenticeship. Americans can thus devote only the first years of life to the general cultivation of the mind. At fifteen, they enter a career; so their education most often ends at the point where ours begins. If it continues beyond that, it is directed only toward a specialized and lucrative subject: you study a science the way you learn a trade, grasping only those applications whose present usefulness is recognized.

In America, most of the rich started out poor; almost all of those now at leisure were busy people in their youth. The result is that when you might have the taste for study, you do not have the time to pursue it; and when you have acquired the time, you no longer have the taste.

There exists, therefore, no class in America in which a taste for intellectual pleasures is passed down along with inherited ease and leisure, and which holds the works of the mind in honor.

So the will to pursue these works is lacking just as much as the ability.

A certain middling level has been established in America with respect to human knowledge. All minds have moved closer to it -- some by rising, others by descending.

You therefore find an immense multitude of individuals who have roughly the same number of ideas about religion, history, science, political economy, legislation, and government.

Intellectual inequality comes directly from God, and there is nothing humans can do to prevent it from always reasserting itself.

But it follows from what I have just said that intellects, while remaining unequal as the Creator intended, find at their disposal equal means.

And so, in America today, the aristocratic element -- always weak since its birth -- is if not destroyed, at least so weakened that it is difficult to assign it any influence at all in the course of affairs.

Time, events, and laws have, on the contrary, made the democratic element not just predominant but virtually the only one. No influence of family or corporate body is visible; often you cannot even detect any individual influence of any lasting kind.

America therefore presents, in its social conditions, the strangest phenomenon. People there appear more equal in fortune and in intellect -- or in other words, more equally strong -- than in any country in the world, and than they have been in any century that history records.

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF THE ANGLO-AMERICANS.

The political consequences of such a social order are easy to deduce.

It is impossible to imagine that equality will not eventually penetrate the political world as it has everything else. You cannot conceive of people being eternally unequal on one point while equal on all others; they will therefore arrive, in time, at being equal in everything.

Now, I know of only two ways to make equality reign in the political world: you must give rights to every citizen, or give them to no one.

For peoples who have reached the same social conditions as the Anglo-Americans, it is therefore very difficult to find any middle ground between the sovereignty of all and the absolute power of one.

We must not hide from ourselves the fact that the social conditions I have just described lend themselves almost equally well to either of these two outcomes.

There is indeed a virile and legitimate passion for equality that drives people to want to be strong and respected. This passion tends to raise the small to the level of the great. But there also exists in the human heart a depraved taste for equality that leads the weak to want to drag the strong down to their level, and that reduces people to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom. It is not that peoples whose social conditions are democratic naturally despise liberty; they have, on the contrary, an instinctive taste for it. But liberty is not the principal and constant object of their desire; what they love with an undying love is equality. They lunge toward liberty by rapid impulse and sudden effort, and if they miss their mark, they resign themselves. But nothing can satisfy them without equality, and they would sooner consent to perish than to lose it.

On the other hand, when citizens are all roughly equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power. None of them being strong enough to fight alone with any advantage, only the combination of everyone's strength can guarantee liberty. And such a combination does not always come about.

Peoples can therefore draw two great political consequences from the same social conditions: these consequences differ enormously from one another, but they both spring from the same fact.

Subjected before anyone else to this fearsome alternative I have just described, the Anglo-Americans were fortunate enough to escape absolute power. Their circumstances, their origins, their education, and above all their customs and values allowed them to found and maintain the sovereignty of the people.

CHAPTER IV.

ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY IN AMERICA.

It dominates all of American society. -- How Americans applied this principle even before their Revolution. -- The development the Revolution gave it. -- The gradual and irresistible lowering of property qualifications.

When you want to discuss the political laws of the United States, you must always begin with the principle of popular sovereignty.

The principle of popular sovereignty, which is always more or less present at the foundation of nearly all human institutions, usually remains buried there. People obey it without recognizing it, and if it sometimes happens to be brought out into the open for a moment, they rush to plunge it back into the darkness of the sanctuary.

"The national will" is one of those phrases that schemers of every era and despots of every age have abused most freely. Some have seen it expressed in the bought votes of a few agents of power; others in the ballots of a self-interested or frightened minority. There are even those who have discovered it, fully formed, in the silence of peoples -- who have concluded that from the fact of obedience springs the right to command.

In America, the principle of popular sovereignty is neither hidden nor barren as it is in certain nations. It is recognized in customs, proclaimed in laws; it spreads freely and reaches its ultimate consequences without obstacles.

If there is one country in the world where you can hope to appreciate the principle of popular sovereignty at its true value, to study it as it is applied to the affairs of society, and to judge its advantages and its dangers, that country is surely America.

I said earlier that, from the very beginning, the principle of popular sovereignty had been the generative principle of most of the English colonies in America.

It was far, however, from dominating the government of society then as it does today.

Two obstacles -- one external, one internal -- slowed its encroaching advance.

It could not emerge openly into law, since the colonies were still forced to obey the mother country. It was therefore reduced to hiding in the provincial assemblies and especially in the township. There it spread in secret.

American society at that time was not yet prepared to adopt the principle in all its consequences. Education in New England and wealth south of the Hudson exerted, as I showed in the preceding chapter, a kind of aristocratic influence that tended to concentrate the exercise of social powers in a few hands. It was still far from the case that all public officials were elected and all citizens were voters. The right to vote was everywhere confined within certain limits and made dependent on a property qualification. This qualification was very low in the North, more substantial in the South.

The American Revolution broke out. The principle of popular sovereignty emerged from the township and seized hold of the government. Every class threw itself into its cause; people fought and triumphed in its name. It became the law of laws.

An almost equally rapid change took place within society itself. The inheritance laws finished breaking down local influences.

By the time this effect of the laws and of the Revolution became visible to all, victory had already irrevocably declared in favor of democracy. Power was, in fact, in its hands. It was no longer even permissible to fight against it. The upper classes therefore submitted without murmur and without struggle to what was now an inevitable fate. What happens to all falling powers happened to them: individual selfishness took hold of their members. Since they could no longer wrest power from the hands of the people, and since they did not hate the multitude enough to take pleasure in defying it, they thought only of winning its goodwill at any price. The most democratic laws were therefore enacted in rivalry by the very men whose interests they most offended. In this way, the upper classes did not provoke popular passions against themselves -- but they hastened the triumph of the new order with their own hands. And so, remarkably, the democratic surge was most irresistible precisely in the states where the aristocracy had the deepest roots.

The state of Maryland, which had been founded by great lords, was the first to proclaim universal suffrage and to introduce the most democratic forms into the whole of its government.

Amendments made to the constitution of Maryland in 1801 and 1809.

Once a people begins to tamper with the property qualification for voting, you can predict that sooner or later they will abolish it entirely. This is one of the most invariable rules governing societies. With each step back in the boundary of voting rights, the need to push it back further is felt -- because after each new concession, the forces of democracy grow and its demands increase with its new power. The ambition of those left below the threshold is inflamed in proportion to the number of those above it. The exception finally becomes the rule; concessions follow one another without pause, and there is no stopping until universal suffrage has been reached.

Today, the principle of popular sovereignty in the United States has taken on every practical development that the imagination can conceive. It has freed itself from all the fictions with which people have been careful to surround it elsewhere. You can see it clothe itself successively in every form that circumstances require. Sometimes the people as a body make the laws, as in Athens; sometimes deputies created by universal suffrage represent them and act in their name under their nearly direct supervision.

There are countries where a power that is, so to speak, external to the social body acts upon it and forces it to march in a certain direction.

There are others where power is divided, being at once within society and outside of it. Nothing like this exists in the United States. Society there acts by itself and upon itself. Power exists only within it; you can barely even find anyone who dares to conceive, much less express, the idea of seeking it elsewhere. The people participate in the making of laws through their choice of legislators, and in the application of laws through their election of the agents of executive power. You could say that the people govern themselves, so small and restricted is the part left to the administration, and so closely does the administration feel its popular origin and obey the power from which it springs. The people reign over the American political world as God reigns over the universe. They are the cause and the end of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed back into them.

CHAPTER V.

THE NEED TO STUDY WHAT HAPPENS IN THE INDIVIDUAL STATES BEFORE DISCUSSING THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNION.

In the following chapter, I intend to examine the form of government in America that is founded on the principle of popular sovereignty -- its means of action, its difficulties, its advantages, and its dangers.

A first difficulty presents itself: the United States has a complex constitution. You can observe two distinct societies engaged within it and, if I may put it this way, nested one inside the other. You see two governments, completely separate and nearly independent: one, ordinary and unlimited in scope, that addresses the daily needs of society; the other, exceptional and circumscribed, that applies only to certain general interests. In a word, these are twenty-four small sovereign nations whose totality makes up the great body of the Union.

To examine the Union before studying the state is to set out on a road strewn with obstacles. The form of the federal government in the United States appeared last; it was merely a modification of the republic, a summary of political principles that were already spread throughout all of society and that subsisted independently of it. The federal government, moreover, as I have just said, is only an exception; the state government is the general rule. A writer who tried to present the whole picture before showing the details would inevitably fall into either obscurity or repetition.

The great political principles that today govern American society were born and developed within the state; of this there can be no doubt. It is therefore the state that must be understood in order to have the key to everything else.

The states that today make up the American Union all present, in the outward appearance of their institutions, the same spectacle. Political and administrative life is concentrated in three centers of action, which might be compared to the various nerve centers that move the human body.

At the first level you find the township, above it the county, and finally the state.

THE TOWNSHIP SYSTEM IN AMERICA.

Why the author begins his examination of political institutions with the township. -- The township is found among all peoples. -- The difficulty of establishing and preserving township liberty. -- Its importance. -- Why the author chose the township organization of New England as his principal subject.

It is not by accident that I begin with the township.

The township is the only form of association so deeply rooted in nature that wherever people gather together, a township forms of its own accord.

Township society therefore exists among all peoples, whatever their customs and laws may be. It is human beings who make kingdoms and create republics; the township seems to come straight from the hand of God. But if the township has existed as long as there have been people, township liberty is a rare and fragile thing. A people can always establish great political assemblies, because there are usually enough individuals in its midst whose education can, to a certain extent, substitute for experience in public affairs. The township is composed of cruder elements that often resist the legislator's efforts. Far from diminishing as nations become more enlightened, the difficulty of founding township independence actually increases with their education. A highly civilized society can barely tolerate the experiments of township liberty; it revolts at the sight of its many missteps and despairs of success before the experiment has reached its final result.

Of all liberties, that of the township, which is so hard to establish, is also the most exposed to the encroachments of power. Left to themselves, township institutions can hardly fight against an enterprising and strong government; to defend themselves successfully, they must have reached their full development and become woven into the nation's ideas and habits. So as long as township liberty has not entered into a people's customs and values, it is easy to destroy -- and it cannot enter into customs and values until it has long existed in the laws.

Township liberty therefore escapes, so to speak, the efforts of humankind. It is rarely created; it is born, in a sense, of its own accord. It develops almost in secret, within a half-barbarous society. It is the sustained action of laws and customs, favorable circumstances, and above all time that manage to consolidate it. Of all the nations on the continent of Europe, you can say that not a single one truly knows it.

Yet it is in the township that the strength of free peoples resides. Township institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to knowledge: they put it within the people's reach; they teach them to enjoy its peaceful exercise and accustom them to making use of it. Without township institutions, a nation can give itself a free government, but it does not have the spirit of liberty. Passing passions, momentary interests, the chance of circumstances may give it the outward forms of independence; but despotism, driven back into the interior of the social body, sooner or later reappears on the surface.

To help the reader clearly understand the general principles on which the political organization of the township and the county in the United States rests, I thought it useful to take one state in particular as a model, to examine in detail what happens there, and then to cast a quick glance at the rest of the country.

I chose one of the New England states.

The township and the county are not organized in the same way in every part of the Union. It is easy to see, however, that throughout the Union roughly the same principles have presided over the formation of both.

Now, it seemed to me that these principles had received their fullest development in New England and reached consequences more far-reaching than anywhere else. They stand out more clearly there, so to speak, and thus offer themselves more readily to the observation of a foreigner.

The township institutions of New England form a complete and regular whole. They are old; they are strong through law and stronger still through custom and habit. They exert a prodigious influence on all of society.

On all these counts, they deserve our attention.

BOUNDARIES OF THE TOWNSHIP.

The New England township (township) occupies a middle ground between the French canton and the French commune. It generally has two to three thousand inhabitants.

The number of townships in the state of Massachusetts was 305 in 1830; the number of inhabitants was 610,014 -- which gives an average of roughly 2,000 inhabitants per township.

It is therefore not so large that all its inhabitants cannot share roughly the same interests, and yet it is populated enough that you can always be sure of finding within it the elements of good administration.

TOWNSHIP POWERS IN NEW ENGLAND.

The people, the origin of all powers in the township as elsewhere. -- They handle the main business directly. -- No town council. -- Most township authority concentrated in the hands of the selectmen. -- How the selectmen act. -- General assembly of the inhabitants (Town Meeting). -- List of all township officials. -- Mandatory and compensated duties.

In the township, as everywhere else, the people are the source of social powers, but nowhere do they exercise their power more directly. In America, the people are a master whom it has been necessary to please to the utmost limits of the possible.

In New England, the majority acts through representatives when it comes to the general affairs of the state. This was necessary. But in the township, where legislative and governmental action is closer to the governed, the principle of representation is not accepted. There is no town council. The body of voters, after naming its officials, directs them itself in everything that is not the pure and simple execution of state law.

The same rules do not apply to the larger townships. These generally have a mayor and a municipal body divided into two branches; but this is an exception that must be authorized by law. See the law of February 22, 1822, regulating the powers of the city of Boston. Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 2, p. 588. This applies to large cities. It also frequently happens that smaller towns are subject to a special administration. In 1832, there were 104 townships administered in this manner in the state of New York (William's Register).

This arrangement is so contrary to our ideas and so opposed to our habits that a few examples are necessary to make it properly understood.

Public offices are extremely numerous and highly divided in the township, as we shall see below. Yet most administrative power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of individuals elected each year, known as the selectmen.

Three are elected in the smallest townships, nine in the largest. See The Town Officer, p. 186. See also the principal laws of Massachusetts relating to selectmen: Law of February 20, 1786, vol. 1, p. 219; February 24, 1796, vol. 1, p. 488; March 7, 1801, vol. 2, p. 45; June 16, 1795, vol. 1, p. 475; March 12, 1808, vol. 2, p. 186; February 28, 1787, vol. 1, p. 302; June 22, 1797, vol. 1, p. 539.

The general laws of the state have imposed a certain number of obligations on the selectmen. They do not need authorization from their constituents to fulfill these, and they cannot shirk them without incurring personal liability. State law charges them, for example, with compiling the voter rolls for their township; if they fail to do so, they are guilty of an offense. But in all matters left to the direction of the township government, the selectmen are the executors of popular will, much as the mayor in France is the executor of the decisions of the municipal council. Most often they act on their own responsibility, simply carrying out in practice the consequences of principles previously laid down by the majority. But should they wish to introduce any change in the established order, or undertake something new, they must go back to the source of their power. Suppose it is a question of establishing a school: the selectmen call all the voters together on a set day in a designated place. There they explain the need that has arisen, make known the means of meeting it, the money that must be spent, and the location to be chosen. The assembly, consulted on all these points, adopts the principle, settles on the location, votes the tax, and places the execution of its will in the hands of the selectmen.

The selectmen alone have the right to call the town meeting, but they can be compelled to do so. If ten property owners conceive a new plan and wish to submit it to the township's approval, they request a general meeting of the inhabitants; the selectmen are required to comply, retaining only the right to preside over the assembly.

See Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 1, p. 150; law of March 22, 1796.

These political customs, these social practices, are no doubt very far from our own. For the moment, I have no intention of judging them or explaining the hidden causes that produce and sustain them. I am content simply to describe them.

The selectmen are elected every year in April or May. At the same time, the town meeting chooses a multitude of other municipal officials charged with certain important administrative details. Some, under the name of assessors, must establish the tax. Others, called collectors, must levy it. An officer called the constable is responsible for keeping the peace, watching over public places, and enforcing the law. Another, called the town clerk, records all deliberations and keeps the civil registry. A treasurer holds the township funds. Add to these a supervisor of the poor, whose very difficult duty is to enforce the legislation on indigents; school commissioners who direct public education; road inspectors who handle all matters of highway maintenance, large and small -- and you have the list of the principal agents of township administration. But the division of functions does not stop there. Among the municipal officers you also find parish commissioners, who must regulate the expenses of public worship; inspectors of various kinds, some charged with directing citizens' efforts in case of fire, others with watching over the harvests; still others to settle provisionally any disputes that may arise over fences; and yet others to supervise the measurement of wood or to inspect weights and measures.

All these officials actually exist in practice. For details on the duties of all these township officials, see the book entitled Town Officer, by Isaac Goodwin; Worcester, 1827; and the collection of the general laws of Massachusetts, 3 vols., Boston, 1823.

There are in all nineteen principal offices in the township. Every inhabitant is compelled, under penalty of a fine, to accept these various offices. But most of them are also compensated, so that poor citizens can devote their time to them without suffering any loss. Moreover, the American system does not give fixed salaries to its officials. Generally, each act of their service has a price, and they are compensated only in proportion to what they have done.

TOWNSHIP LIFE.

Each person is the best judge of what concerns himself alone. -- Corollary of the principle of popular sovereignty. -- How American townships apply these doctrines. -- The New England township, sovereign in everything that concerns only itself, subject in everything else. -- Obligations of the township toward the state. -- In France, the government lends its agents to the township. -- In America, the township lends its agents to the government.

I said earlier that the principle of popular sovereignty hovers over the entire political system of the Anglo-Americans. Every page of this book will reveal some new application of this doctrine.

Among nations where the principle of popular sovereignty reigns, each individual forms an equal portion of the sovereign and participates equally in the government of the state.

Each individual is therefore considered to be as educated, as virtuous, and as strong as any other of his fellow citizens.

Why, then, does he obey society, and what are the natural limits of that obedience?

He obeys society not because he is inferior to those who lead it, or less capable than any other man of governing himself. He obeys society because he finds union with his fellow citizens useful, and because he knows that this union cannot exist without a regulatory power.

In everything that concerns the duties of citizens toward one another, he has therefore become a subject. In everything that concerns only himself, he has remained his own master: he is free, and accountable for his actions to God alone. From this comes the maxim that the individual is the best and the only judge of his own particular interest, and that society has no right to direct his actions except when it feels harmed by them, or when it needs his cooperation.

This doctrine is universally accepted in the United States. I will examine elsewhere what general influence it exerts even on the ordinary actions of life; but for now, I am speaking of the townships.

The township, taken as a whole and in relation to the central government, is simply an individual like any other, to whom the theory I have just described applies.

Township liberty therefore flows, in the United States, from the very principle of popular sovereignty. All the American republics have more or less recognized this independence; but among the peoples of New England, circumstances have particularly favored its development.

In this part of the Union, political life was born within the townships themselves. You might almost say that at the beginning, each township was an independent nation. When the kings of England later claimed their share of sovereignty, they limited themselves to taking the central power. They left the township as they found it. New England townships are now subject; but originally they were not, or barely so. They did not receive their powers; rather, it is they who seem to have surrendered a portion of their independence to the state -- an important distinction that should remain present in the reader's mind.

The townships are generally subject to the state only when an interest is at stake that I would call social -- that is to say, one they share with others.

In everything that concerns only themselves, the townships have remained independent bodies. Among the inhabitants of New England, I believe there is not one who would acknowledge the state government's right to intervene in purely township affairs.

You therefore see the New England townships buying and selling, suing and being sued in the courts, increasing or decreasing their budgets, without any administrative authority whatsoever thinking of interfering.

See Laws of Massachusetts, law of March 23, 1796, vol. 1, p. 250.

As for social duties, they are bound to fulfill them. If the state needs money, the township is not free to grant or refuse its cooperation.

Ibid., law of February 20, 1786, vol. 1, p. 217.

If the state wants to open a road, the township cannot close its territory to it. If the state issues a police regulation, the township must enforce it. If the state wants to organize education on a uniform plan throughout the whole country, the township must create the schools required by law.

See same collection, law of June 25, 1789, and March 8, 1827, vol. 1, p. 367, and vol. 3, p. 179.

We will see, when we discuss administration in the United States, how and by whom townships are compelled to obey in all these various cases. Here I merely want to establish that the obligation exists. This obligation is strict, but the state government, in imposing it, only decrees a principle; for its execution, the township generally recovers all its rights of individuality. Thus, the tax is, it is true, voted by the legislature, but it is the township that apportions and collects it. The existence of a school is imposed, but it is the township that builds, pays for, and runs it.

In France, the state's tax collector levies the township taxes; in America, the township tax collector levies the state's tax.

Thus, in France, the central government lends its agents to the township; in America, the township lends its officials to the government. That fact alone shows how profoundly the two societies differ.

TOWNSHIP SPIRIT IN NEW ENGLAND.

Why the New England township commands the affection of its inhabitants. -- The difficulty encountered in Europe in creating township spirit. -- Township rights and duties contribute in America to forming this spirit. -- The homeland has more character in the United States than elsewhere. -- How township spirit manifests itself in New England. -- What happy effects it produces.

In America, not only do township institutions exist, but there is also a township spirit that sustains and animates them.

The New England township combines two advantages that, wherever they are found, powerfully engage people's interest: independence and power. It acts, it is true, within a circle it cannot leave, but within that circle its movements are free. This independence alone would give it a real importance, even if its population and territory did not.

You must be firmly convinced that people's affections generally settle only where there is strength. You do not see patriotism flourish for long in a conquered country. The inhabitant of New England is attached to his township not so much because he was born there, but because he sees in it a free and strong corporation of which he is a member, and which is worth the effort of trying to lead.

In Europe, it often happens that the rulers themselves lament the absence of township spirit, because everyone agrees that township spirit is a great element of order and public tranquility. But they do not know how to produce it. By making the township strong and independent, they fear they will be sharing social power and exposing the state to anarchy. Yet take away the strength and independence of the township, and you will only ever find administered subjects there, never citizens.

Note, moreover, an important fact: the New England township is so constituted that it can serve as a focus of strong affections, and at the same time there is nothing next to it that powerfully attracts the ambitious passions of the human heart.

County officials are not elected, and their authority is limited. The state itself has only secondary importance; its existence is quiet and obscure. Few people would consent, in order to gain the right to administer it, to move away from the center of their interests and disrupt their lives.

The federal government confers power and glory on those who lead it, but the number of people who can influence its destinies is very small. The presidency is a high office that you can hardly reach except at an advanced age; and when you arrive at other high-ranking federal positions, it is partly by chance, after having already made yourself famous in another career. Ambition cannot make these positions the permanent goal of its efforts. It is in the township, at the center of the ordinary relations of life, that the desire for esteem, the need for real interests, the taste for power and attention all come together. These passions that so often trouble society change their character when they can be exercised close to the domestic hearth and, so to speak, within the family.

See with what care, in the American township, power has been -- if I may put it this way -- scattered, so as to interest more people in public affairs. Beyond the voters who are called from time to time to perform acts of government, how many diverse offices there are, how many different magistrates, each of whom, within the sphere of his duties, represents the powerful corporation in whose name he acts! How many people thus exploit the township's power for their own benefit and take an interest in it for their own sake!

The American system, while distributing municipal power among a great number of citizens, does not shrink from multiplying township duties either. In the United States, people rightly believe that love of country is a kind of worship to which human beings become attached through practice.

In this way, township life makes itself felt at almost every moment; it manifests itself each day through the fulfillment of a duty or the exercise of a right. This political existence gives society a continuous but peaceful movement that stirs it without disturbing it.

Americans are attached to their town for a reason similar to the one that makes mountain dwellers love their homeland. For them, the homeland has marked and distinctive features; it has more character than elsewhere.

The New England townships generally enjoy a happy existence. Their government is to their taste as well as their choice. In the midst of the deep peace and material prosperity that reign in America, the engines of municipal life are few. Running township affairs is easy. Moreover, the political education of the people was completed long ago -- or rather, they arrived already educated on the soil they now occupy. In New England, the division of ranks does not even exist as a memory; there is therefore no part of the township tempted to oppress another, and the injustices that strike only isolated individuals are lost in the general contentment. Even if the government has defects -- and it is certainly easy to point them out -- they do not catch the eye, because the government truly emanates from the governed, and it is enough for it to get along more or less well for a kind of paternal pride to protect it. Besides, they have nothing to compare it to. England once ruled the colonies as a whole, but the people always directed township affairs. Popular sovereignty in the township is therefore not merely an old condition but an original one.

The inhabitant of New England is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he takes an interest in it because he helps to direct it; he loves it because he has no cause to complain of his lot there. He places in it his ambition and his future; he involves himself in every incident of township life. In this limited sphere within his reach, he practices governing society; he grows accustomed to the forms without which liberty proceeds only through revolutions; he absorbs their spirit, develops a taste for order, comes to understand the harmony of powers, and at last gathers clear and practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.

THE COUNTY IN NEW ENGLAND.

The New England county, analogous to the French arrondissement. -- Created for purely administrative purposes. -- Has no representative body. -- Administered by non-elected officials.

The American county bears a strong resemblance to the French arrondissement. It has been given, like the latter, an arbitrary boundary. It forms a body whose various parts have no necessary connection to one another, and to which neither affection, nor memory, nor shared existence attach. It was created for purely administrative purposes.

The township was too small to contain the administration of justice. The county therefore forms the first judicial center. Each county has a court of justice, a sheriff to execute the rulings of the courts, and a prison to hold criminals.

See the law of February 14, 1821, Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 1, p. 551.

There are needs that are felt more or less equally by all the townships in a county; it was natural that a central authority be charged with meeting them. In Massachusetts, this authority resides in the hands of a certain number of magistrates designated by the governor of the state with the advice of his council.

See the law of February 20, 1819, Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 2, p. 494.

The governor's council is an elected body.

The county administrators have only a limited and exceptional power, which applies only to a very small number of predetermined cases. The state and the township are sufficient for the ordinary course of affairs. These administrators merely prepare the county budget; the legislature votes it. There is no assembly that directly or indirectly represents the county.

See the law of November 2, 1791, Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 1, p. 61.

The county therefore has no political existence, properly speaking.

A double tendency can be observed in most American constitutions, leading legislators to divide executive power and to concentrate legislative power. The New England township has, in itself, a principle of life that it is not stripped of; but creating that life artificially in the county has not been felt to be worthwhile. All the townships combined have only a single representation: the state, the center of all national powers. Beyond township action and national action, you can say there are only individual forces.

*

ADMINISTRATION IN NEW ENGLAND.

In America, you cannot see the administration. -- Why. -- Europeans believe they are establishing liberty by stripping some rights from social power; Americans, by dividing its exercise. -- Nearly all administration proper is confined within the township and divided among township officials. -- No trace of an administrative hierarchy can be seen, either within the township or above it. -- Why this is so. -- How it is that the state is still administered in a uniform manner. -- Who is responsible for enforcing the law on township and county administrations. -- The introduction of judicial power into administration. -- Consequences of extending the elective principle to all officials. -- The justice of the peace in New England. -- Who appoints him. -- He administers the county. -- He oversees township administration. -- The court of sessions. -- How it acts. -- Who brings cases before it. -- The right of inspection and complaint is scattered, like all administrative functions. -- Informers encouraged by sharing in fines.

What strikes the European traveling through the United States most forcefully is the absence of what we would call government or administration. In America, you see written laws; you can see them being carried out day by day; everything moves around you, and nowhere can you discover the motor. The hand that directs the social machine escapes your view at every moment.

Yet just as all peoples must, in order to express their thoughts, resort to certain grammatical forms that constitute human languages, so all societies must submit to a certain sum of authority without which they fall into anarchy. This authority can be distributed in different ways, but it must exist somewhere.

There are two ways of diminishing the force of authority in a nation.

The first is to weaken power at its very root, by stripping society of the right or the ability to defend itself in certain cases. To weaken authority in this way is generally what people in Europe call establishing liberty.

There is a second way of diminishing the action of authority: this one does not consist of stripping society of some of its rights, or of paralyzing its efforts, but of dividing the use of its strength among many hands -- of multiplying officials by giving each of them all the power he needs to do the job he is meant to carry out. There are peoples for whom even this division of social powers could lead to anarchy; in itself, however, it is not anarchic. By dividing authority in this way, you do make its action less irresistible and less dangerous, but you do not destroy it.

The revolution in the United States was produced by a mature and considered taste for liberty, not by a vague and undefined instinct for independence. It was not built on passions for disorder; on the contrary, it marched hand in hand with a love of order and legality.

In the United States, therefore, no one has claimed that a person in a free country has the right to do everything. Quite the opposite: more varied social obligations have been imposed on citizens there than elsewhere. No one thought of attacking the power of society in its very principle or of challenging its rights; they merely divided it in its exercise. The goal was to make authority great and the official small, so that society could continue to be well ordered while remaining free.

There is no country in the world where the law speaks in tones as absolute as in America, and there is also none where the right to apply it is divided among so many hands.

In its constitution, administrative power in the United States has nothing centralized or hierarchical about it. That is why you do not notice it. Power exists, but you do not know where to find its representative.

We have seen above that the New England townships are not under guardianship. They therefore take care of their own particular interests themselves.

It is also the municipal officials who are most often charged with seeing to the execution of the state's general laws, or with executing them themselves.

See The Town Officer, particularly under the headings selectmen, assessors, collectors, schools, surveyors of highways. Example among a thousand: the state forbids traveling without cause on Sunday. It is the tythingmen, township officers, who are specifically charged with enforcing this law. See the law of March 8, 1792, Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 1, p. 410. The selectmen prepare the voter rolls for the election of the governor and transmit the result of the vote to the secretary of the commonwealth. Law of February 24, 1796, ibid., vol. 1, p. 488.

Apart from the general laws, the state sometimes issues general police regulations; but ordinarily it is the townships and their officers who, together with the justices of the peace and according to local needs, regulate the details of social life and issue provisions concerning public health, order, and the morality of the citizens.

Example: the selectmen authorize the construction of sewers, designate locations for slaughterhouses and for businesses whose proximity is a nuisance. See law of June 7, 1785, vol. 1, p. 193.

Finally, it is the municipal officials who, on their own initiative and without needing any outside prompting, provide for the unforeseen needs that societies often experience.

Example: the selectmen watch over public health in case of contagious diseases, taking necessary measures together with the justices of the peace. Law of June 22, 1797, vol. 1, p. 539.

It follows from what we have just said that in Massachusetts, administrative power is almost entirely contained within the township -- but it is divided there among many hands.

I say almost, because there are several aspects of township life that are regulated either by individual justices of the peace or by the justices of the peace assembled as a body at the county seat. Example: it is the justices of the peace who grant licenses. See the law of February 28, 1787, vol. 1, p. 297.

In a French township, there is, strictly speaking, only one administrative official: the mayor.

We have seen that in a New England township, there are at least nineteen.

These nineteen officials do not generally depend on one another. The law has carefully drawn a circle of action around each of these magistrates. Within that circle they are all-powerful in fulfilling the duties of their office and are answerable to no township authority.

If you look above the township, you can barely see the trace of an administrative hierarchy. It sometimes happens that county officials overturn decisions made by townships or township magistrates;

Example: licenses are granted only to those who present a certificate of good character from the selectmen. If the selectmen refuse to issue the certificate, the person may appeal to the justices of the peace assembled in the court of sessions, and the latter may grant the license. See the law of March 12, 1808, vol. 2, p. 136. The townships have the right to make by-laws and to enforce them through fines whose amounts are fixed; but these by-laws must be approved by the court of sessions. See the law of March 23, 1786, vol. 1, p. 284.

but in general, the administrators of the county do not have the right to direct the conduct of township administrators.

In Massachusetts, county administrators are often called upon to evaluate the acts of township administrators; but they do so as a judicial power, not as an administrative authority.

They command them only in matters relating to the county.

Township officials and county officials are required, in a very small number of predetermined cases, to communicate the results of their work to officers of the central government.

Example: township school committees are required to make an annual report on the condition of the school to the secretary of the commonwealth. See the law of March 10, 1827, vol. 3, p. 183.

But the central government is not represented by anyone charged with issuing general police regulations or orders for the execution of laws, regularly communicating with the administrators of the county or the township, inspecting their conduct, directing their actions, or punishing their faults.

There is therefore no central point to which the rays of administrative power converge.

How, then, does society manage to be run on a roughly uniform plan? How can the counties and their administrators, the townships and their officials, be made to obey?

In the New England states, legislative power extends to more subjects than it does among us. The legislator penetrates, so to speak, into the very heart of administration. The law descends into the minutest details; it prescribes at the same time both the principles and the means of applying them, thus enclosing local bodies and their administrators within a multitude of strict and rigorously defined obligations.

The result is that if all the local bodies and all the officials conform to the law, society proceeds in a uniform manner throughout all its parts. But the question remains: how can you force local bodies and their officials to conform to the law?

In general terms, society has only two means at its disposal to compel officials to obey the law.

It can entrust one of them with the discretionary power to direct all the others and to dismiss them in case of disobedience.

Or it can charge the courts with imposing judicial penalties on violators.

You are not always free to choose between these two methods.

The right to direct an official presupposes the right to dismiss him if he disobeys orders, or to promote him if he zealously fulfills all his duties. Now, you can neither dismiss nor promote an elected magistrate. It is in the nature of elective office to be irrevocable until the end of its term. In reality, the elected magistrate has nothing to hope for or to fear except from the voters, when all public offices are filled by election. There can therefore be no true hierarchy among officials, since you cannot combine in the same person the right to command and the right to effectively punish disobedience, nor can you join the power to command with the power to reward and punish.

Peoples who introduce the elective principle into the lower levels of their government are therefore necessarily led to make heavy use of judicial penalties as a means of administration.

This is not immediately obvious. Rulers regard it as a first concession to make offices elective, and as a second concession to subject the elected official to the rulings of judges. They dread both innovations equally, and since they are pressed more to make the first than the second, they grant the election of the official but leave him independent of the judge. Yet one of these two measures is the only counterweight that can be given to the other. Mark this well: an elective power not subject to judicial power will sooner or later escape all control, or be destroyed. Between the central power and elected administrative bodies, only the courts can serve as intermediary. They alone can compel the elected official to obey without violating the right of the voter.

The extension of judicial power into the political world must therefore be proportional to the extension of elective power. If these two things do not advance together, the state ends up falling into anarchy or servitude.

It has always been observed that judicial habits are rather poor preparation for the exercise of administrative power.

The Americans borrowed from their forebears, the English, an institution that has no equivalent in what we know on the continent of Europe: the justice of the peace.

The justice of the peace stands midway between the private citizen and the magistrate, between the administrator and the judge. The justice of the peace is an educated citizen, but not necessarily one versed in the knowledge of the law. That is why he is charged only with keeping the peace of society -- a task that requires more good sense and integrity than learning. When the justice of the peace takes part in administration, he brings a certain taste for legal forms and publicity that makes him a very inconvenient instrument for despotism; but he does not show himself to be a slave to the legal superstitions that make trained judges poor governors.

The Americans adopted the institution of the justice of the peace while stripping it of the aristocratic character that distinguished it in the mother country. The governor of Massachusetts appoints a certain number of justices of the peace in every county, whose terms last seven years.

We will see later what the governor is; for now, I must say that the governor represents the executive power of the entire state.

See the constitution of Massachusetts, chapter II, section I, paragraph 9; chapter III, paragraph 3.

Moreover, from among these justices of the peace, the governor designates three who form in each county what is called the court of sessions.

The justices of the peace take part individually in public administration. Sometimes they are charged, jointly with elected officials, with certain administrative acts; sometimes they form a court before which magistrates summarily prosecute a citizen who refuses to obey, or a citizen reports offenses committed by magistrates. But it is in the court of sessions that the justices of the peace exercise the most important of their administrative functions.

Example among many: a stranger arrived in a township coming from a country ravaged by a contagious disease. He falls ill. Two justices of the peace, with the advice of the selectmen, can order the county sheriff to transport him elsewhere and watch over him. Law of June 23, 1797, vol. 1, p. 540. In general, justices of the peace intervene in all the important acts of administrative life and give them a semi-judicial character.

The court of sessions meets twice a year at the county seat. It is the body in Massachusetts that is responsible for keeping the greatest number of public officials in line.

I say the greatest number, because certain administrative offenses are in fact referred to the ordinary courts. Example: when a township refuses to raise the necessary funds for its schools or to appoint a school committee, it is fined a very substantial sum. It is the supreme judicial court or the court of common pleas that imposes this fine. See law of March 10, 1827, vol. 3, p. 190. Ibid. Also when a township fails to provide munitions of war. Law of February 21, 1822, vol. 2, p. 570.

Justices of the peace participate, in their individual capacity, in the government of townships and counties. The most important acts of township life generally take place only with the participation of one of them.

It is important to understand that in Massachusetts, the court of sessions is at once a genuinely administrative body and a political tribunal.

We have said that the county has only an administrative existence. It is the court of sessions that directs on its own the small number of interests that belong to several townships at once, or to all the townships in the county, and that therefore cannot be entrusted to any one township in particular.

The county-related matters the court of sessions handles can be reduced to these: (1) the construction of prisons and courthouses; (2) the draft of the county budget (it is the state legislature that votes it); (3) the apportionment of the taxes thus voted; (4) the distribution of certain licenses; (5) the building and repair of county roads.

When it comes to the county, the duties of the court of sessions are therefore purely administrative, and if it often introduces judicial forms into its proceedings, that is only a way of informing itself and a guarantee it gives to those it administers.

Thus, when it comes to a road, the court of sessions resolves nearly all the difficulties of execution through the jury.

But when it comes to ensuring the administration of the townships, it acts nearly always as a judicial body, and only in rare cases as an administrative one.

The first difficulty that presents itself is getting the township itself -- a nearly independent power -- to obey the general laws of the state.

We have seen that townships must each year appoint a certain number of magistrates who, under the name of assessors, apportion the tax. Suppose a township tries to escape the obligation of paying taxes by not appointing assessors. The court of sessions fines it heavily.

See law of February 20, 1786, vol. 1, p. 117.

The fine is levied against all the inhabitants personally. The county sheriff, an officer of the court, executes the judgment. Thus, in the United States, power seems eager to hide itself carefully from view. The administrative command is nearly always wrapped in a judicial mandate; and it is all the more powerful for it, since it then has on its side the nearly irresistible force that people grant to legal forms.

This procedure is easy to follow and readily understood. What is required of the township is, in general, clear and defined: it consists of a simple fact, not a complex one -- a principle, not a detailed application.

There is an indirect way of making the township obey. Townships are required by law to keep their roads in good condition. If they neglect to vote the funds for maintenance, the township official in charge of roads is then authorized to levy the necessary money on his own authority. Since he is personally liable to private individuals for the poor condition of the roads, and since they can sue him before the court of sessions, he is sure to use against the township the extraordinary power the law gives him. Thus, by threatening the official, the court of sessions forces the township to obey. See the law of March 5, 1787, vol. 2, p. 305.

But the difficulty begins when it comes to compelling not the township itself, but the township officials, to obey.

Every punishable action that a public official can commit falls ultimately into one of these categories:

He can do what the law commands without energy or zeal.

He can fail to do what the law commands.

He can do what the law forbids.

A court can reach the conduct of an official only in the last two cases. It needs a positive and verifiable fact to serve as the basis for judicial action.

Thus, if the selectmen fail to follow the formalities required by law in the case of a township election, they can be fined.

Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 2, p. 45.

But when a public official performs his duty without intelligence, when he obeys the commands of the law without energy or zeal, he is entirely beyond the reach of any judicial body.

The court of sessions, even when it is exercising its administrative powers, is powerless to force him in such cases to fulfill his obligations completely. Only the fear of removal can prevent these quasi-offenses, and the court of sessions does not hold the source of township powers; it cannot remove officials it did not appoint.

Furthermore, to ascertain that there has been negligence and lack of zeal, you would need to exercise continuous surveillance over the lesser official. Now, the court of sessions meets only twice a year; it does not inspect -- it judges cases that are reported to it.

Only the arbitrary power to remove public officials can guarantee on their part that kind of enlightened and active obedience which judicial sanctions cannot impose.

In France, we seek this final guarantee in administrative hierarchy; in America, they seek it in election.

So, to summarize in a few words what I have just laid out:

If a New England public official commits a crime in the exercise of his duties, the ordinary courts are always called upon to do justice.

If he commits an administrative offense, a purely administrative tribunal is charged with punishing him, and when the matter is serious or urgent, the judge does what the official should have done.

Example: if a township stubbornly refuses to appoint assessors, the court of sessions appoints them, and the magistrates thus chosen are invested with the same powers as elected magistrates. See the aforementioned law of February 20, 1787.

Finally, if the same official commits one of those elusive offenses that human justice can neither define nor assess, he appears annually before a court of last resort that can suddenly strip him of his power: his authority expires with his term.

This system certainly contains great advantages, but it encounters a practical difficulty in its execution that must be pointed out.

I have already noted that the administrative tribunal called the court of sessions does not have the right to inspect township magistrates. It can only act, to use a legal term, when a case is brought before it. And this is the sensitive point of the system.

The Americans of New England did not establish a public prosecutor attached to the court of sessions, and it is easy to see why it would have been difficult for them to do so.

I say attached to the court of sessions. There is a magistrate who performs some of the functions of a public prosecutor before the ordinary courts.

If they had merely placed an accusing magistrate at the county seat without giving him agents in the townships, why would he have been any better informed about what was happening in the county than the members of the court of sessions themselves? And if they had given him agents in each township, they would have been centralizing in his hands the most formidable of powers -- that of administering judicially. Laws, moreover, are the children of customs, and nothing of the kind existed in English law.

The Americans therefore divided the right of inspection and complaint, like all other administrative functions.

The members of the grand jury are required by law to inform the court before which they serve of offenses of all kinds that may be committed in their county.

For example, grand jurors are required to notify the courts of the poor condition of the roads. Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 1, p. 308.

There are certain major administrative offenses that the regular public prosecutor must pursue on his own authority.

For example, if the county treasurer fails to submit his accounts. Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 1, p. 406.

Most often, however, the obligation to have offenders punished is imposed on the fiscal officer charged with collecting the proceeds of the fine. Thus the township treasurer is responsible for prosecuting most of the administrative offenses committed before his eyes.

But it is above all to private interest that American legislation appeals.

Example among a thousand: a private citizen damages his carriage or injures himself on a poorly maintained road. He has the right to demand damages from the township or county responsible for the road before the court of sessions. Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 1, p. 309.

This is the great principle you find again and again when you study the laws of the United States.

American legislators show little confidence in human honesty, but they always assume that people are intelligent. They therefore rely most often on self-interest for the execution of the laws.

When an individual is positively and currently harmed by an administrative offense, it is easy to see that self-interest will guarantee the complaint.

But it is also easy to foresee that when it comes to a legal requirement that, while useful to society, is not of any currently felt use to any particular individual, each person will hesitate to step forward as an accuser. In this way, through a kind of tacit agreement, laws might well fall into disuse.

Pushed to this extreme by their system, the Americans are forced to give informers a stake in the outcome by offering them, in certain cases, a share of the fines.

In case of invasion or insurrection, when township officials neglect to supply the militia with the necessary equipment and munitions, the township can be fined between 200 and 500 dollars (1,000 to 2,780 francs). It is easy to see that in such a case, no one may have the interest or the desire to step into the role of accuser. That is why the law adds: "All citizens shall have the right to prosecute such offenses, and half the fine shall belong to the prosecutor." See law of March 6, 1810, vol. 2, p. 236. The same provision is found very frequently throughout the laws of Massachusetts. Sometimes it is not the private citizen whom the law encourages in this way to prosecute public officials; it is the official who is thus encouraged to punish the disobedience of private citizens. Example: a citizen refuses to do his assigned share of work on a main road. The road supervisor must prosecute him, and if he secures a conviction, half the fine goes to him. See the aforementioned laws, vol. 1, p. 308.

A dangerous expedient that secures the execution of the laws at the cost of degrading public morals.

Above the county magistrates, there is, strictly speaking, no longer any administrative power -- only governmental power.

GENERAL IDEAS ON ADMINISTRATION IN THE UNITED STATES.

How the states of the Union differ from one another in their systems of administration. -- Township life less active and less fully developed as you move south. -- The power of the magistrate grows, that of the voter shrinks. -- Administration shifts from the township to the county. -- States of New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. -- Administrative principles applicable to the whole Union. -- Election of public officials, or permanence of their positions. -- Absence of hierarchy. -- Introduction of judicial methods into administration.

I said earlier that after examining the constitution of the township and the county in New England in detail, I would cast a general glance over the rest of the Union.

Townships and township life exist in every state, but in none of the states of the confederation do you find a township identical to the New England model.

As you move south, you notice that township life becomes less active. The township has fewer officials, fewer rights, and fewer duties; the population does not exercise as direct an influence over affairs; town meetings are less frequent and deal with fewer subjects. The power of the elected magistrate is therefore comparatively greater and that of the voter smaller; the township spirit is less alert and less potent.

For the details, see The Revised Statutes of the state of New York, part I, chapter XI, entitled "Of the powers, duties and privileges of towns," vol. 1, pp. 336-364. See also the collection entitled Digest of the Laws of Pennsylvania, under the headings Assessors, Collectors, Constables, Overseers of the poor, Supervisor of highway. And the collection entitled Acts of a general nature of the state of Ohio, the law of February 25, 1834, on townships, p. 412. And then the particular provisions concerning the various township officials, such as Township's Clerks, Trustees, Overseers of the poor, Fence-Viewers, Appraisers of property, Township's Treasurer, Constables, Supervisors of highways.

You begin to notice these differences in the state of New York; they are already very pronounced in Pennsylvania; but they become less striking as you move northwest. Most of the settlers who go to found the northwestern states come from New England, and they carry the administrative habits of the mother country into their adopted homeland. The Ohio township bears a strong resemblance to the Massachusetts township.

We have seen that in Massachusetts, the principle of public administration lies in the township. The township is the focal point where people's interests and affections converge. But this ceases to be the case as you move into states where education is not as universally spread and where, consequently, the township offers fewer guarantees of wisdom and fewer elements of administration. The further you get from New England, therefore, the more township life shifts to the county. The county becomes the great administrative center, forming the intermediary power between the government and ordinary citizens.

I said that in Massachusetts, county affairs are managed by the court of sessions. The court of sessions is composed of a certain number of magistrates appointed by the governor and his council. The county has no representative body, and its budget is voted by the national legislature.

In the great state of New York, on the other hand, as in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the inhabitants of each county elect a certain number of deputies; the assembly of these deputies forms a representative body for the county.

See Revised Statutes of the state of New York, part I, chapter XI, vol. 1, p. 340. Ibid., chapter XII; ibid., p. 336. Ibid., Acts of the state of Ohio. Law of February 25, 1824, on county commissioners, p. 262. See Digest of the Laws of Pennsylvania, under the heading County-States, and levies, p. 170. In the state of New York, each township elects a deputy, and this same deputy participates at the same time in the administration of the county and of the township.

The county assembly possesses, within certain limits, the right to tax the inhabitants. In this respect it is a true legislature. It is at the same time the body that administers the county, directs the administration of the townships in several areas, and confines their powers within much narrower limits than in Massachusetts.

These are the principal differences in the constitution of the township and the county across the various states of the confederation. If I wanted to go into the details of how things are actually carried out, I would have many more dissimilarities to point out. But that is not my goal. I have not set out to give a course in American administrative law.

I have said enough, I think, to make clear the general principles on which administration in the United States rests. These principles are applied differently; they produce more or fewer consequences depending on the place. But at bottom they are everywhere the same. The laws vary; their outward appearance changes; a single spirit animates them all.

The township and the county are not organized everywhere in the same way, but you can say that the organization of the township and the county throughout the United States rests everywhere on the same idea: that each person is the best judge of what concerns only himself, and the best equipped to provide for his own particular needs. The township and the county are therefore charged with looking after their own special interests. The state governs but does not administer. You encounter exceptions to this principle, but no contrary principle.

The first consequence of this doctrine has been to have all township and county administrators chosen by the inhabitants themselves, or at least to choose these officials exclusively from among them.

Since administrators are everywhere elected -- or at least irremovable -- it follows that the rules of hierarchy could not be introduced anywhere. There have therefore been almost as many independent officials as there are offices. Administrative power has been dispersed among a multitude of hands.

Since no administrative hierarchy exists, and since administrators are elected and irremovable until the end of their term, it became necessary to introduce the courts into administration to a greater or lesser extent. Hence the system of fines, by which local bodies and their representatives are compelled to obey the laws. This system is found from one end of the Union to the other.

Moreover, the power to punish administrative offenses or to perform administrative acts when needed has not been granted to the same judges in every state.

The Anglo-Americans drew from a common source the institution of the justice of the peace; it is found in every state. But they have not always made the same use of it.

Everywhere, justices of the peace participate in the administration of townships and counties,

There are even some Southern states where the magistrates of the county courts are charged with all the details of administration. See The Statute of the state of Tennessee, under the headings Judiciary, Taxes, etc.

either by administering themselves or by punishing certain administrative offenses. But in most states, the most serious of these offenses are submitted to the ordinary courts.

So: election of administrative officials, or permanence of their tenure; absence of administrative hierarchy; introduction of judicial methods into the secondary government of society -- these are the principal characteristics by which American administration can be recognized, from Maine to Florida.

There are a few states where you can begin to detect the traces of administrative centralization. The state of New York is the furthest along in this direction.

In the state of New York, officials of the central government exercise, in certain cases, a kind of oversight and control over the conduct of local bodies.

Example: the management of public education is centralized in the hands of the government. The legislature appoints the members of the university, called regents; the governor and lieutenant-governor of the state are members by right. (Revised Statutes, vol. 1, p. 456.) The regents of the university visit all colleges and academies annually and make an annual report to the legislature. Their oversight is not illusory, for the following particular reasons: colleges, in order to become corporations that can buy, sell, and hold property, need a charter; and this charter is granted by the legislature only on the advice of the regents. Each year the state distributes to colleges and academies the interest on a special fund created to encourage learning. The regents are the distributors of this money. See chapter XV, Public Instruction, Revised Statutes, vol. 1, p. 455. Each year the commissioners of the public schools are required to send a report on conditions to the superintendent of the commonwealth. Ibid., p. 488. A similar report on the number and condition of the poor must be made to him annually. Ibid., p. 681.

In certain others, they form a kind of appeals tribunal for the resolution of disputes.

When someone believes himself harmed by certain acts of the school commissioners (who are township officials), he can appeal to the superintendent of primary schools, whose decision is final. Revised Statutes, vol. 1, p. 487. You find from time to time, in the laws of the state of New York, provisions similar to those I have just cited as examples. But in general, these attempts at centralization are weak and unproductive. While giving the major officials of the state the right to oversee and direct lower-level agents, they do not give them the right to reward or punish them. The same person is almost never charged with both giving the order and punishing disobedience; he therefore has the right to command but not the ability to make himself obeyed. In 1830, the superintendent of schools, in his annual report to the legislature, complained that several school commissioners had not transmitted the accounts they owed him, despite his warnings. "If this omission recurs," he added, "I will be reduced to prosecuting them, under the terms of the law, before the competent courts."

In the state of New York, judicial penalties are used less than elsewhere as an administrative tool. The right to prosecute administrative offenses is also placed in fewer hands.

Example: the district attorney of each county is charged with recovering all fines exceeding 50 dollars, unless the right has been expressly given by law to another magistrate. Revised Statutes, part I, chapter X, vol. 1, p. 383.

The same tendency can be faintly detected in a few other states as well.

There are several traces of administrative centralization in Massachusetts. Example: the township school committees are required to make an annual report to the secretary of state. Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 1, p. 367.

But in general, the outstanding characteristic of public administration in the United States is that it is prodigiously decentralized.

THE STATE.

I have spoken of the townships and of the administration; it remains for me to speak of the state and of the government.

Here I can move quickly without fear of not being understood. What I have to say is all laid out in written constitutions that anyone can easily obtain.

See, at the end of the volume, the text of the constitution of New York.

These constitutions rest upon a simple and rational theory.

Most of the forms they prescribe have been adopted by all constitutional peoples; they have thus become familiar to us.

I therefore need to give only a brief account here. Later I will try to judge what I am about to describe.

LEGISLATIVE POWER OF THE STATE.

Division of the legislative body into two chambers. -- Senate. -- House of Representatives. -- Different functions of these two bodies.

The legislative power of the state is entrusted to two assemblies. The first generally goes by the name of the senate.

The senate is usually a legislative body, but it sometimes becomes an administrative and judicial one.

It takes part in administration in several ways, depending on the various constitutions;

In Massachusetts, the senate has no administrative functions.

but it is ordinarily by participating in the selection of officials that it enters the sphere of executive power.

It participates in the judicial power by ruling on certain political offenses, and also sometimes by deciding certain civil cases.

As in the state of New York. See the constitution at the end of the volume.

Its members are always few in number.

The other branch of the legislature, usually called the house of representatives, has no share at all in administrative power, and takes part in judicial power only by impeaching public officials before the senate.

Members of both chambers are subject to almost the same conditions of eligibility nearly everywhere. Both are elected in the same way and by the same citizens.

The only difference between them arises from the fact that the term of senators is generally longer than that of representatives. The latter rarely remain in office more than one year; the former usually serve two or three.

By granting senators the privilege of being elected for several years and by renewing them in staggered groups, the law has taken care to maintain within the legislature a core of men already experienced in public affairs who can exert a useful influence on newcomers.

In dividing the legislative body into two branches, the Americans did not intend to create one hereditary assembly and one elective one; they did not seek to make one an aristocratic body and the other a representative of democracy. Nor was their aim to give the first a prop for executive power while leaving the second the interests and passions of the people.

The sole advantages that result from the current two-chamber system in the United States are these: to divide legislative power, thereby slowing the movement of political assemblies; and to create a court of appeals for the revision of laws.

Time and experience have taught the Americans that, reduced to these advantages, the division of legislative power is still a necessity of the first order. Pennsylvania alone, among all the united republics, had at first tried to establish a single assembly. Franklin himself, carried along by the logical consequences of the principle of popular sovereignty, had supported this measure. They were soon obliged to change the law and establish two chambers. The principle of dividing legislative power thus received its final consecration. It can henceforth be considered a demonstrated truth that legislative action must be divided among several bodies. This theory, virtually unknown to the republics of antiquity and introduced into the world almost by accident like most great truths, misunderstood by several modern peoples, has finally passed into the political science of our day as an axiom.

EXECUTIVE POWER OF THE STATE.

What the governor is in an American state. -- What position he occupies relative to the legislature. -- What are his rights and his duties. -- His dependence on the people.

The executive power of the state has the governor as its representative.

I have not chosen the word "representative" by accident. The governor does indeed represent the executive power, but he exercises only some of its rights.

The chief magistrate, called the governor, is placed alongside the legislature as a moderator and advisor. He is armed with a suspensive veto that allows him to halt or at least slow its movements at will. He presents the country's needs to the legislative body and makes known the means he thinks useful for addressing them. He is the natural executor of its will for all undertakings that concern the whole nation.

In practice, it is not always the governor who executes the undertakings the legislature has conceived. It often happens that the legislature, at the same time it votes on a principle, appoints special agents to oversee its execution.

In the absence of the legislature, he must take all measures necessary to protect the state from violent shocks and unforeseen dangers.

The governor holds in his hands all the military power of the state. He is the commander of the militia and the head of the armed forces.

When the authority of opinion that people have agreed to grant to the law is disregarded, the governor advances at the head of the state's material force, breaks the resistance, and restores the accustomed order.

In all other respects, the governor does not intervene in the administration of the townships and counties, or does so only very indirectly through the appointment of justices of the peace, whom he cannot afterward remove.

In several states, justices of the peace are not appointed by the governor.

The governor is an elected official. Care is generally taken to elect him for only one or two years, so that he remains always in close dependence on the majority that created him.

THE POLITICAL EFFECTS OF ADMINISTRATIVE DECENTRALIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES.

Distinction to be drawn between governmental centralization and administrative centralization. -- In the United States, no administrative centralization, but very great governmental centralization. -- Some unfortunate effects in the United States from extreme administrative decentralization. -- Administrative advantages of this system. -- The force that administers society, less orderly, less educated, less expert, but far greater than in Europe. -- Political advantages of the same system. -- In the United States, the homeland makes itself felt everywhere. -- Support that the governed lend to the government. -- Provincial institutions more necessary as social conditions become more democratic. -- Why.

"Centralization" is a word that is endlessly repeated these days, yet no one, as a rule, bothers to define what it means.

There are, however, two very distinct kinds of centralization that it is important to understand clearly.

Certain interests are common to all parts of the nation, such as the making of general laws and the nation's relations with foreigners.

Other interests are specific to certain parts of the nation -- township affairs, for example.

To concentrate in a single place or in a single hand the power to direct the first kind is to establish what I will call governmental centralization.

To concentrate in the same manner the power to direct the second kind is to establish what I will call administrative centralization.

There are points at which these two kinds of centralization merge. But by taking, on the whole, the matters that fall more particularly within the domain of each, you can readily distinguish them.

It is easy to see that governmental centralization acquires immense strength when combined with administrative centralization. In this way it accustoms people to make a complete and continual abstraction of their own will -- to obey not just once and on one point, but in everything and every day. Not only does it then subdue them by force; it also captures them through their habits. It isolates them and then seizes them one by one from the common mass.

These two kinds of centralization lend each other mutual support and attract one another; but I cannot believe they are inseparable.

Under Louis XIV, France saw the greatest governmental centralization conceivable, since the same man made the general laws, had the power to interpret them, represented France abroad, and acted in her name. "I am the State," he said -- and he was right.

Yet under Louis XIV, there was much less administrative centralization than exists today.

In our own time, we see a power -- England -- in which governmental centralization is carried to a very high degree. The state seems to move as a single person; it lifts up immense masses at will, gathering and directing the full effort of its power wherever it wishes.

England, which has accomplished such great things over the past fifty years, has no administrative centralization.

For my part, I cannot conceive that a nation can live, let alone prosper, without a strong governmental centralization.

But I believe that administrative centralization only serves to enervate the peoples who submit to it, because it constantly tends to diminish civic spirit among them. Administrative centralization does manage, it is true, to gather at a given time and in a given place all the nation's available forces; but it harms the replenishment of those forces. It brings triumph on the day of battle but diminishes power over the long run. It can therefore contribute admirably to the passing greatness of one person, but not to the lasting prosperity of a people.

Take careful note: when people say a state cannot act because it has no centralization, they are almost always speaking, without knowing it, of governmental centralization. The German Empire, they repeat, was never able to get the most out of its strength. Agreed. But why? Because the national strength was never centralized there; because the state was never able to enforce obedience to its general laws; because the separate parts of that great body always had the right or the ability to refuse their cooperation to the agents of the common authority, even in matters concerning all citizens. In other words, because there was no governmental centralization. The same observation applies to the Middle Ages: what produced all the miseries of feudal society was that the power not only to administer, but to govern, was divided among a thousand hands and fractured in a thousand ways. The absence of all governmental centralization prevented the nations of Europe from marching with energy toward any goal.

We have seen that in the United States, there is no administrative centralization. You can barely find the trace of a hierarchy. Decentralization has been pushed to a degree that no European nation could tolerate, I think, without profound unease, and that even produces unfortunate effects in America. But in the United States, governmental centralization exists to the highest degree. It would be easy to prove that national power is more concentrated there than it has been in any of the old European monarchies. Not only is there in each state only one body that makes the laws; not only is there only one power that can create political life around it; but in general, care has been taken to avoid assembling numerous district or county assemblies, for fear that these assemblies might be tempted to step beyond their administrative functions and interfere with the workings of government. In America, each state's legislature faces no power capable of resisting it. Nothing can stop it in its course -- no privileges, no local immunities, no personal influence, not even the authority of reason, since the legislature represents the majority, which claims to be the sole organ of reason. Its only limits in action are therefore its own will. Beside it and under its hand stands the representative of executive power, who with the help of material force must compel the discontented to obey.

Weakness is found only in certain details of governmental action.

The American republics have no permanent armed force to suppress minorities; but minorities have never yet been reduced to making war, and the need for an army has not yet been felt. The state most often uses township or county officials to act upon the citizens. Thus, for example, in New England, it is the township assessor who apportions the tax; the township collector who levies it; the township treasurer who delivers the proceeds to the public treasury; and complaints that arise are submitted to the ordinary courts. This way of collecting taxes is slow and cumbersome; it would obstruct at every turn the workings of a government with great financial needs. In general, you want a government, for everything essential to its life, to have its own officials, chosen by it, removable by it, and rapid procedures at its disposal. But it will always be easy for the central power, organized as it is in America, to introduce, as needed, more energetic and effective means of action.

It is therefore not, as is so often repeated, because there is no centralization in the United States that the republics of the New World will perish. Far from being insufficiently centralized, it can be said that American governments are too centralized. I will prove this later. The legislative assemblies are daily swallowing up some remnant of governmental powers; they tend to gather them all into themselves, just as the Convention did. Social power, thus centralized, changes hands constantly because it is subordinate to popular power. It often lacks wisdom and foresight, because it can do everything. That is where the danger lies. It is because of its very strength, and not from weakness, that it is threatened with eventual destruction.

Administrative decentralization produces several diverse effects in America.

We have seen that the Americans have almost entirely isolated administration from government; in this they seem to me to have gone beyond the limits of sound reason, for order, even in secondary matters, is still a national interest.

The authority that represents the state, even when it does not itself administer, should not, I think, surrender the right to inspect local administration. Suppose, for example, that a government agent, stationed permanently in each county, could refer administrative offenses committed in the townships and the county to the judicial power -- would order not be more uniformly maintained without local independence being compromised? Yet nothing of the kind exists in America. Above the county courts, there is nothing; and these courts are, in a sense, made aware of the administrative offenses they must punish only by accident.

Since the state has no administrative officials of its own stationed at fixed posts throughout the territory to whom it can give a common direction, it rarely attempts to establish general rules of policing. Yet the need for such rules is keenly felt. The European is quick to notice their absence. This surface appearance of disorder convinces him at first glance that there is complete anarchy in society; only by examining the substance of things does he correct his impression.

Certain undertakings concern the entire state yet cannot be carried out because there is no national administration to direct them. Left to the care of townships and counties, entrusted to elected and temporary agents, they produce no result, or nothing lasting.

Advocates of centralization in Europe maintain that government can administer local affairs better than the localities can administer themselves. This may be true when the central power is enlightened and the localities are not, when it is active and they are inert, when it has the habit of acting and they the habit of obeying. You can even see that the more centralization increases, the more this double tendency grows, and the more the capability of the one and the incapacity of the other become pronounced.

But I deny that this is the case when the people are educated, alert to their own interests, and accustomed to thinking about them, as they are in America.

I am persuaded, on the contrary, that in such a case, the collective strength of the citizens will always be more powerful in producing social well-being than the authority of government.

I admit it is difficult to say precisely how to awaken a slumbering people, how to give it passions and knowledge it does not have. Persuading people that they must take charge of their own affairs is, I am well aware, a difficult undertaking. It would often be less trouble to interest them in the details of court etiquette than in the repair of their own town hall.

But I also believe that when central administration claims to completely replace the free cooperation of those most directly concerned, it is deceiving itself -- or trying to deceive you.

A central power, however enlightened and learned you may imagine it, cannot by itself encompass all the details of a great people's life. It cannot, because such a task exceeds human capacity. When it tries, by its own efforts alone, to create and operate so many different mechanisms, it either settles for a very incomplete result, or exhausts itself in useless effort.

Centralization easily manages, it is true, to subject people's outward behavior to a certain uniformity that you end up loving for its own sake, regardless of the things to which it is applied -- like those worshippers who adore the statue and forget the deity it represents. Centralization readily succeeds in imposing a regular pace on current affairs; in expertly managing the details of social policing; in suppressing small disorders and petty offenses; in maintaining society in a status quo that is properly speaking neither decline nor progress; in sustaining in the social body a sort of administrative drowsiness that administrators customarily call good order and public tranquility.

China seems to me to offer the most perfect emblem of the kind of social well-being that a highly centralized administration can provide to peoples who submit to it. Travelers tell us that the Chinese have tranquility without happiness, industry without progress, stability without strength, and material order without public morality. Among them, society always gets along well enough, but never very well. I imagine that when China is opened to Europeans, they will find there the finest model of administrative centralization in the universe.

In a word, it excels at preventing, not at doing. When it is a question of stirring society deeply or of setting it on a rapid course, its strength fails. The moment its measures need the cooperation of individuals, you are entirely surprised by the weakness of this immense machine; it finds itself suddenly reduced to impotence.

It sometimes happens that centralization then tries, in desperation, to call upon the citizens for help. But it says to them: "You will act as I wish, as much as I wish, and precisely in the direction I wish. You will take care of these details without aspiring to direct the whole. You will work in the dark, and you will judge my work later by its results." These are not the terms on which you obtain the cooperation of the human will. It needs freedom in its movements, responsibility in its actions. Human beings are made so that they prefer to remain motionless rather than to march without independence toward a goal they do not know.

I will not deny that in the United States, people often miss those uniform rules that seem to keep constant watch over each of us.

You encounter from time to time striking examples of social carelessness and neglect. Gross blemishes appear here and there that seem completely out of step with the surrounding civilization.

Useful enterprises that require continuous care and rigorous precision to succeed often end up being abandoned -- because in America, as elsewhere, the people proceed by momentary bursts and sudden impulses.

The European, accustomed to finding a government official always at hand who meddles in more or less everything, has difficulty adjusting to the different mechanisms of township administration. In general, it can be said that the small details of social policing that make life comfortable and pleasant are neglected in America. But the essential guarantees that people in society need exist there as much as anywhere else. Among the Americans, the force that administers the state is far less orderly, less enlightened, and less expert, but a hundred times greater than in Europe. There is no country in the world where people ultimately make as many efforts to create social well-being. I know of no people who have managed to establish schools as numerous and as effective; temples more suited to the religious needs of the inhabitants; township roads better maintained. You should not look to the United States for uniformity and permanence of vision, minute attention to detail, or perfection of administrative procedures.

A talented writer who, in a comparison of the finances of the United States with those of France, proved that intellect cannot always substitute for knowledge of facts, rightly reproaches the Americans for the sort of confusion that reigns in their township budgets. After providing a model of a French departmental budget, he adds: "Thanks to centralization, the admirable creation of a great man, municipal budgets from one end of the kingdom to the other, those of great cities as well as those of the humblest townships, display no less order and method." Now there is a result I certainly admire. But I see most of these French townships, whose accounting is so perfect, plunged in a deep ignorance of their true interests and given over to so invincible an apathy that society seems to vegetate rather than live in them. On the other side, I see in those same American townships whose budgets are not drawn up on methodical or uniform plans an enlightened, active, enterprising population; I see a society constantly at work. This spectacle astonishes me, because in my eyes the main purpose of good government is to produce the well-being of peoples, not to establish a certain order in the midst of their misery. I therefore wonder whether it might not be possible to attribute to the same cause both the prosperity of the American township and the apparent disorder of its finances, and both the distress of the French township and the perfection of its budget. In any case, I am suspicious of a good that I find mixed with so many ills, and I easily console myself for an ill that is compensated by so much good.

What you find there is an image of strength, a little raw perhaps, but full of power; of life, accompanied by accidents, but also by movement and effort.

I will concede, if you like, that the villages and counties of the United States would be more usefully administered by a central authority located far from them and to which they were strangers, than by officials drawn from their own midst. I will acknowledge, if you insist, that there would be more security in America, that social resources would be used more wisely and judiciously, if the administration of the entire country were concentrated in a single hand. The political advantages that the Americans derive from the system of decentralization would still make me prefer it to the opposite system.

What does it matter to me, after all, if there is an authority always on its feet, watching over the tranquility of my pleasures, rushing ahead of my footsteps to ward off every danger before I even need to think about it -- if that authority, while removing the slightest thorns from my path, is the absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes movement and existence to such a point that everything must languish around it when it languishes, everything must sleep when it sleeps, everything must perish if it dies?

There are nations in Europe where the inhabitant considers himself a kind of settler, indifferent to the fate of the place he lives. The greatest changes take place in his country without his participation; he does not even know precisely what has happened; he suspects it; he has heard tell of the event by chance. Worse still, the fortune of his village, the policing of his street, the fate of his church and his parsonage do not concern him. He thinks that all these things have nothing to do with him and that they belong to a powerful stranger called "the government." As for himself, he enjoys these goods like a tenant farmer, without any sense of ownership and without any thought of improvement. This detachment from himself goes so far that when his own safety or that of his children is finally at stake, instead of bestirring himself to ward off the danger, he crosses his arms and waits for the entire nation to come to his aid. This man, moreover, even though he has made so complete a sacrifice of his free will, does not love obedience any more than the next person. He submits, it is true, to the pleasure of a clerk; but he takes delight in defying the law like a defeated enemy as soon as force withdraws. And so you see him ceaselessly oscillating between servitude and license.

When nations have reached this point, they must either reform their laws and their customs or perish, for the wellspring of public virtue has all but run dry: you still find subjects there, but you no longer see citizens.

I say that such nations are ripe for conquest. If they do not disappear from the world stage, it is because they are surrounded by nations similar or inferior to themselves; because there still remains within them a kind of indefinable instinct of patriotism, some unreflecting pride in the name they bear, some vague memory of their past glory which, without attaching itself precisely to anything, is enough to give them, when needed, a conservative impulse.

It would be wrong to take comfort in the thought that certain peoples have made prodigious efforts to defend a homeland in which they lived virtually as strangers. Look closely, and you will see that religion was almost always their principal motive.

The endurance, the glory, or the prosperity of the nation had become for them sacred dogmas, and in defending their homeland they were also defending the holy city in which they were all citizens.

The Turkish populations never took any part in directing the affairs of society, yet they accomplished immense feats as long as they saw the triumph of the religion of Muhammad in the conquests of the sultans. Today the religion is fading; despotism alone remains -- and they are falling.

Montesquieu, by granting despotism a force all its own, paid it, I think, an honor it did not deserve. Despotism, by itself, cannot maintain anything lasting. When you look closely, you see that what made absolute governments prosper for so long was religion, not fear.

You will never find, no matter what you do, any true power among human beings except in the free cooperation of wills. And the only things in the world that can make the whole body of citizens march for a long time toward the same goal are patriotism and religion.

It does not lie within the power of laws to revive beliefs that are dying. But it does lie within the power of laws to make people care about the fate of their country. It lies within the power of laws to awaken and direct that vague instinct of the homeland that never entirely leaves the human heart, and -- by linking it to everyday thoughts, passions, and habits -- to make it a considered and lasting sentiment. And let no one say it is too late to attempt this. Nations do not grow old in the same way as people. Each generation born within them is like a new people coming to offer itself to the hand of the lawmaker.

What I admire most in America is not the administrative effects of decentralization, but its political effects. In the United States, the homeland makes itself felt everywhere. It is an object of concern from the village all the way up to the Union as a whole. The inhabitant takes an interest in each of his country's affairs as if they were his own. He glories in the nation's glory; in the successes it achieves, he believes he recognizes his own work, and he is uplifted by them. He rejoices in the general prosperity from which he profits. His feeling for his homeland is analogous to the feeling one has for one's family, and it is still through a kind of selfishness that he takes an interest in the state.

Often the European sees in the public official only force; the American sees right. You can therefore say that in America, no one ever obeys a person -- only justice or the law.

And so the American has formed an opinion of himself that is often exaggerated but almost always beneficial. He trusts his own abilities without fear, for they seem to him sufficient for everything. When a private citizen conceives the idea of some enterprise -- even one directly connected to the well-being of society -- it does not occur to him to appeal to the public authorities for help. He makes his plan known, offers to carry it out, calls upon individual efforts to assist his own, and fights hand to hand against every obstacle. No doubt he often succeeds less well than the state would in his place; but in the long run, the overall result of all these individual enterprises far surpasses anything the government could have done.

Because the administrative authority is placed alongside those it administers, representing them in a sense, it excites neither jealousy nor hatred. Because its means of action are limited, everyone feels that they cannot rely on it alone.

So when public authority does intervene within its proper sphere, it does not find itself abandoned and alone, as it does in Europe. No one thinks that private duties have ceased because the representative of the public has come into play. On the contrary, everyone guides him, supports him, sustains him.

The action of individual forces, joining with the action of social forces, often achieves what the most concentrated and energetic administration would be incapable of carrying out.

I could cite many facts in support of what I am saying, but I prefer to take just one -- the one I know best.

In America, the means available to the authorities for discovering crimes and pursuing criminals are few.

There is no administrative police; passports are unknown. The judicial police in the United States cannot compare with ours. The agents of the public prosecutor are few in number; they do not always take the initiative in prosecuting; the investigation is rapid and oral. I doubt, however, that in any country crime escapes punishment as rarely as it does here.

The reason is that everyone considers it in their interest to furnish proof of the offense and to help apprehend the offender.

During my time in the United States, I saw the inhabitants of a county where a serious crime had been committed spontaneously form committees with the goal of pursuing the culprit and delivering him to the courts.

In Europe, the criminal is an unfortunate wretch fighting to save his neck from the agents of power; the public watches the struggle more or less as spectators. In America, he is an enemy of the human race, and all of humanity is against him.

I believe provincial institutions are useful to all peoples, but none seems to me to have a more real need for them than one whose social conditions are democratic.

In an aristocracy, you can always be sure of maintaining a certain order within liberty.

Since those who govern have much to lose, order is greatly in their interest.

It can equally be said that in an aristocracy, the people are sheltered from the excesses of despotism, because there are always organized forces ready to resist the despot.

A democracy without provincial institutions possesses no guarantee against such evils.

How can you make a multitude that has not learned to use freedom in small things bear it in great ones?

How can you resist tyranny in a country where each individual is weak and where individuals are united by no common interest?

Those who fear license and those who dread absolute power should therefore equally desire the gradual development of provincial liberties.

I am convinced, moreover, that there are no nations more exposed to falling under the yoke of administrative centralization than those whose social conditions are democratic.

Several causes contribute to this result, but among them is this one:

The permanent tendency of such nations is to concentrate all governmental power in the hands of the sole authority that directly represents the people, because beyond the people, you can see nothing but individuals who are equal and merged into a common mass.

Now, when a single power is already invested with all the attributes of government, it finds it very difficult not to seek to penetrate into the details of administration -- and it rarely fails, in the long run, to find the opportunity to do so. We have been witnesses to this ourselves.

In the French Revolution, there were two movements in opposite directions that must not be confused: one favorable to liberty, the other favorable to despotism.

Under the old monarchy, the king alone made the law. Below the sovereign power were placed some half-destroyed remnants of provincial institutions. These provincial institutions were incoherent, poorly organized, and often absurd. In the hands of the aristocracy, they had sometimes been instruments of oppression.

The Revolution declared itself at once against the monarchy and against provincial institutions. It combined in a single hatred everything that had preceded it -- absolute power and what might have tempered its rigors. It was at once republican and centralizing.

This dual character of the French Revolution is a fact that the friends of absolute power have seized upon with great care. When you see them defending administrative centralization, you think they are working in favor of despotism? Not at all -- they are defending one of the great conquests of the Revolution. In this way, you can remain popular and be an enemy of the people's rights; a hidden servant of tyranny and an avowed lover of liberty.

I have visited the two nations that have developed the system of provincial liberties to the highest degree, and I have listened to the voice of the parties that divide them.

In America, I found men who secretly aspired to destroy their country's democratic institutions. In England, I found others who openly attacked the aristocracy. But in neither country did I find a single person who did not regard provincial liberty as a great good.

In both countries, I saw people blame the ills of the state on an infinite variety of causes -- but never on township liberty.

I heard citizens attribute the greatness or the prosperity of their homeland to a multitude of reasons; but I heard them all place in the first rank, and at the head of all other advantages, provincial liberty.

Am I to believe that people who are so naturally divided that they cannot agree on religious doctrines or political theories are unanimous on a single fact -- the one they are best positioned to judge, since it unfolds before their eyes every day -- and that this fact is mistaken?

Only peoples who have few or no provincial institutions deny their usefulness -- which is to say, only those who do not know the thing speak ill of it.

CHAPTER VI.

THE JUDICIARY IN THE UNITED STATES AND ITS INFLUENCE ON POLITICAL LIFE.

Anglo-Americans have preserved all the traditional characteristics of judicial power. -- Yet they have turned it into a major political force. -- How. -- How the American judicial system differs from all others. -- Why American judges have the right to declare laws unconstitutional. -- How American judges use this right. -- Safeguards the legislature has built against the abuse of this right.

I felt I needed to devote a separate chapter to the judiciary. Its political importance is so great that discussing it in passing would only diminish it in the reader's eyes.

Confederations have existed outside America; republics have appeared beyond the shores of the New World; the representative system has been adopted in several European states. But I do not think that any nation in the world, until now, has organized its judiciary in the same way the Americans have.

The hardest thing for a foreigner to grasp in the United States is the judicial system. There is virtually no political event in which you will not hear someone invoke the authority of a judge — and you naturally conclude that in the United States, the judge is one of the foremost political powers. When you then go on to examine the structure of the courts, at first glance you find nothing but judicial functions and judicial habits. The magistrate never seems to enter public affairs except by accident — but that same accident occurs every single day.

When the Parlement of Paris issued remonstrances and refused to register a royal edict, or when it summoned a corrupt official before its bar, the political role of judicial power was on full display. But nothing like that happens in the United States.

The Americans have preserved all the traditional features by which judicial power is recognized everywhere. They have kept it confined exactly within the sphere where it customarily operates.

The first characteristic of judicial power, in every nation, is to serve as an arbiter. For the courts to act, there must be a dispute. For there to be a judge, there must be a case. As long as a law has not given rise to a dispute, the judiciary has no occasion to concern itself with it. The law exists, but the judiciary does not see it. When a judge, in the course of a case, challenges a law relevant to that case, he extends the scope of his authority — but he does not step outside it, since he had to judge the law, in a sense, in order to judge the case. When he rules on a law without starting from a case, he steps entirely outside his sphere and enters that of the legislature.

The second characteristic of judicial power is to rule on particular cases, not on general principles. If a judge, in deciding a particular question, effectively destroys a general principle — because everyone understands that each consequence of that principle will be struck down in the same way, rendering the principle sterile — he remains within the natural bounds of his role. But if the judge attacks a general principle directly, destroying it without reference to any particular case, he steps outside the boundaries that every nation has agreed to set for him. He becomes something more important, perhaps more useful, than a magistrate — but he ceases to represent the judiciary.

The third characteristic of judicial power is that it can act only when called upon, or, in legal parlance, when it is "seized." This characteristic is not found as universally as the other two. I believe, however, that despite the exceptions, it can be considered essential. By its nature, judicial power has no will to act; it must be set in motion before it moves. Someone reports a crime, and it punishes the guilty; someone appeals for justice, and it provides it; someone submits a document, and it interprets it. But it does not go out on its own to pursue criminals, hunt for injustice, or investigate facts. The judiciary would do a kind of violence to its own passive nature if it took the initiative and set itself up as a censor of laws.

The Americans have preserved all three of these defining characteristics. The American judge can only rule when there is a dispute. He concerns himself only with particular cases. And to act, he must always wait to be called upon.

So the American judge looks perfectly like magistrates in other nations. And yet he wields immense political power.

Where does this come from? He operates within the same sphere and uses the same methods as other judges — so why does he possess a power they do not have?

The reason lies in a single fact: Americans have recognized the right of judges to base their rulings on the constitution rather than on statutes. In other words, they have allowed judges to refuse to apply laws that they consider unconstitutional.

I know that a similar right has sometimes been claimed by courts in other countries, but it has never been granted to them. In America, it is recognized by all branches of government; you will not find a single party, nor even a single person, who disputes it.

The explanation for this must lie in the very nature of American constitutions.

In France, the constitution is a work considered immutable — or treated as such. No authority has the power to change anything in it: that is the accepted theory.

In England, Parliament has the recognized right to modify the constitution. In England, therefore, the constitution can change continuously — or rather, it does not really exist. Parliament is at once a legislative body and a constituent body.

In America, political theories are simpler and more rational.

An American constitution is not treated as immutable, as in France; nor can it be modified by the ordinary powers of government, as in England. It stands as a work apart — one that, representing the will of the entire people, binds legislators just as it binds ordinary citizens, but that can be changed by the will of the people, through procedures that have been established and under conditions that have been foreseen.

In America, then, the constitution can evolve; but as long as it exists, it is the source of all powers. The supreme authority resides in it alone.

It is easy to see how these differences must affect the position and rights of the judiciary in the three countries I have named.

If, in France, the courts could disobey laws on the grounds that they found them unconstitutional, the constituent power would effectively be in their hands, since they alone would have the right to interpret a constitution whose terms no one could change. They would thus place themselves in the nation's seat and dominate society — at least to the extent that the inherent weakness of judicial power would allow them to do so.

I know that by denying judges the right to declare laws unconstitutional, we indirectly give the legislature the power to change the constitution, since it no longer encounters any legal barrier to stop it. But it is still better to grant the power of changing the people's constitution to men who imperfectly represent the people's will than to others who represent only themselves.

It would be even more unreasonable to give English judges the right to resist the will of the legislature, since Parliament, which makes the law, also makes the constitution — and consequently, a law emanating from all three powers can never, under any circumstances, be called unconstitutional.

Neither of these two arguments applies to America.

In the United States, the constitution governs legislators just as it governs ordinary citizens. It is therefore the first of all laws and cannot be modified by any ordinary law. It is therefore right that the courts should obey the constitution above all other laws. This follows from the very essence of judicial power: choosing, among the legal provisions that bind him, those that bind him most tightly is, in a sense, the magistrate's natural right.

In France, the constitution is likewise the first of all laws, and judges have an equal right to take it as the basis for their decisions. But in exercising that right, they could not avoid encroaching on another right even more sacred than their own: the right of the society in whose name they act. Here, ordinary reason must yield to reasons of state.

In America, where the nation can always reduce judges to obedience by amending its constitution, no such danger exists. On this point, politics and logic are in agreement, and both the people and the judge retain their respective privileges.

When a law is invoked before the courts of the United States that a judge considers contrary to the constitution, he may therefore refuse to apply it. This power is the only one peculiar to the American magistrate, but an enormous political influence flows from it.

In practice, very few laws can escape judicial scrutiny for long, because very few fail to injure some individual interest — and litigants can and will invoke them before the courts.

Now, from the moment a judge refuses to apply a law in a case, it instantly loses part of its moral authority. Those it has harmed are then alerted that a means exists to escape the obligation of obeying it. Lawsuits multiply, and the law falls into impotence. Then one of two things happens: the people amend their constitution, or the legislature repeals the law.

The Americans have thus entrusted their courts with an immense political power — but by requiring judges to challenge laws only through judicial means, they have greatly reduced the dangers of that power.

If a judge could have attacked laws in a theoretical and general fashion; if he could have taken the initiative and censured the legislature, he would have burst onto the political stage. Becoming the champion or the adversary of a party, he would have summoned all the passions dividing the country to join the fight. But when a judge challenges a law in an obscure proceeding over a particular application, the importance of the attack is partly hidden from the public eye. His ruling aims only to strike an individual interest; the law is wounded only by chance.

Moreover, the law thus challenged is not destroyed. Its moral force is diminished, but its material effect is not suspended. Only gradually, under the repeated blows of judicial precedent, does it finally succumb.

Furthermore, it is easy to see that by entrusting private interest with the task of provoking the review of laws — by intimately linking the case brought against a law to the case brought by one person — we ensure that legislation will not be lightly attacked. Under this system, it is no longer exposed to the daily assaults of political parties. In pointing out the legislature's mistakes, one is responding to a real need; one starts from a concrete, demonstrable fact, since it must serve as the basis for a lawsuit.

I wonder whether this way the American courts operate, while being the most favorable to public order, is not also the most favorable to liberty.

If the judge could challenge legislators only head-on, there would be times when he would be afraid to do so, and other times when partisan spirit would push him to do it every day. So laws would be attacked when the power behind them was weak, and obeyed without protest when that power was strong — which is to say, laws would be challenged precisely when it would be most useful to respect them, and respected precisely when it would be easy to oppress in their name.

But the American judge is drawn onto political ground despite himself. He judges the law only because he has a case to judge, and he cannot avoid judging the case. The political question he must resolve is tied to the interests of the litigants, and he cannot refuse to settle it without committing a denial of justice. It is by fulfilling the narrow duties imposed by the magistrate's profession that he performs the act of a citizen. True, under this arrangement, judicial review of legislation cannot extend indiscriminately to all laws, since some can never give rise to the kind of clearly formulated dispute known as a lawsuit. And even when such a dispute is possible, one can imagine that no one may come forward to bring it before the courts.

The Americans have often felt this drawback, but they have left the remedy incomplete, for fear that making it fully effective in all cases would make it dangerous.

Kept within its limits, the power granted to American courts to rule on the constitutionality of laws still forms one of the most powerful barriers ever raised against the tyranny of political assemblies.

*

OTHER POWERS GRANTED TO AMERICAN JUDGES.

In the United States, all citizens have the right to bring public officials before the ordinary courts. -- How they use this right. -- Article 75 of the French constitution of Year VIII. -- Americans and the English cannot comprehend the meaning of this article.

I hardly need to say that among a free people like the Americans, all citizens have the right to bring public officials before the ordinary courts, and all judges have the right to convict those officials — so natural is this arrangement.

It is not granting any special privilege to the courts to let them punish agents of the executive when those agents violate the law. To forbid them from doing so is to strip them of a natural right.

I did not observe that in the United States, by making all officials answerable to the courts, the springs of government had been weakened.

It seemed to me, on the contrary, that by doing this, the Americans had increased the respect owed to those who govern, since officials take much greater care to avoid criticism.

Nor did I notice that many political lawsuits were brought in the United States, which I can easily explain. A lawsuit is always, whatever its nature, a difficult and costly undertaking. It is easy enough to attack a public figure in the newspapers, but one does not lightly decide to haul him before a court. To bring a legal proceeding against an official, you need a legitimate grievance — and officials rarely provide one when they fear being prosecuted.

This has nothing to do with the republican form of government the Americans have adopted, since the same experience can be observed every day in England.

These two peoples have not believed they secured their freedom by allowing the prosecution of the leading agents of power. They thought it was through small lawsuits, placed every day within reach of the humblest citizens, that freedom was best guaranteed — not through grand proceedings that are never used, or used too late.

In the Middle Ages, when it was very difficult to catch criminals, judges who managed to seize a few of them would often inflict horrific punishments on the wretches — which did nothing to reduce the number of offenders. It has since been discovered that by making justice both more certain and more humane, one also makes it more effective.

Americans and the English believe that tyranny and arbitrary power should be treated like theft: make prosecution easy and lighten the penalty.

In Year VIII of the French Republic, a constitution appeared whose Article 75 read as follows: "Government agents, other than ministers, may not be prosecuted for actions relating to their official duties without authorization from the Council of State; in which case, prosecution takes place before the ordinary courts."

The constitution of Year VIII passed away, but this article survived it — and it is still invoked every day against the legitimate complaints of citizens.

I have often tried to explain the meaning of Article 75 to Americans and to the English, and I have always found it very difficult to succeed.

What they noticed first was that the Council of State in France, being a great tribunal fixed at the center of the kingdom, exercised a kind of tyranny by requiring all complainants to appear before it as a preliminary step.

But when I tried to make them understand that the Council of State was not a judicial body in the ordinary sense of the word, but an administrative body whose members depended on the king — so that the king, having sovereignly ordered one of his servants, called a prefect, to commit an injustice, could then sovereignly order another of his servants, called a councilor of state, to prevent anyone from punishing the first; when I showed them a citizen, injured by order of the sovereign, reduced to asking the sovereign himself for permission to obtain justice — they refused to believe in such enormities and accused me of lying and ignorance.

It often happened under the old monarchy that the Parlement would issue an arrest warrant against a public official guilty of a crime. Sometimes the royal authority would intervene and quash the proceedings. Despotism then showed itself openly, and in obeying, people submitted only to force.

So we have actually gone backward from where our ancestors stood — for we now allow, under the guise of justice and in the name of the law, what only violence once imposed on them.

CHAPTER VII.

POLITICAL TRIALS IN THE UNITED STATES.

What the author means by political trial. -- How the political trial is understood in France, England, and the United States. -- In America, the political judge concerns himself only with public officials. -- He pronounces removals from office rather than punishments. -- The political trial as a routine instrument of government. -- The political trial, as understood in the United States, is — despite its mildness, and perhaps because of its mildness — a very powerful weapon in the hands of the majority.

By political trial, I mean a verdict pronounced by a political body that has been temporarily invested with the right to judge.

In absolute governments, there is no need to give trials extraordinary forms. The sovereign, in whose name the accused is prosecuted, being master of the courts as of everything else, has no need to seek guarantees beyond the idea people already have of his power. The only fear he might have is that the very outward appearance of justice might not even be maintained, and that his authority might be dishonored in the effort to strengthen it.

But in most free countries, where the majority can never act on the courts as an absolute ruler would, it has sometimes been necessary to place judicial power temporarily in the hands of the people's own representatives. It was considered preferable to blend the powers together momentarily than to violate the essential principle of governmental unity. England, France, and the United States have all written the political trial into their laws. It is worth examining the use these three great nations have made of it.

In England and in France, the House of Peers forms the high criminal court of the nation. It does not try all political offenses, but it has the power to try any of them.

The House of Peers in England also serves as the final court of appeal in certain civil cases. See Blackstone, Book III, Chapter IV.

Alongside the House of Peers stands another political power, invested with the right to bring accusations. The only difference between the two countries on this point is this: in England, members of the House of Commons can accuse anyone they wish before the Peers, while in France they can only prosecute the king's ministers in this way.

In both countries, moreover, the House of Peers has at its disposal the full range of criminal law to apply against offenders.

In the United States, as in Europe, one branch of the legislature has the right to accuse, and the other the right to judge. The House of Representatives denounces the offender; the Senate punishes him.

But the Senate can only be engaged by the Representatives, and the Representatives can only bring accusations before it against public officials. The Senate thus has a narrower jurisdiction than the French House of Peers, while the Representatives have a broader right of accusation than our deputies.

But here is the greatest difference between America and Europe: in Europe, political courts can apply every provision of the criminal code; in America, once they have stripped the offender of the public office he held and declared him unworthy of holding any political office in the future, their authority is exhausted, and the ordinary courts take over.

Suppose the President of the United States has committed high treason.

The House of Representatives accuses him; the senators pronounce his removal. He then appears before a jury, which alone can take away his liberty or his life.

This sheds a bright light on the subject before us.

In writing political trials into their laws, the Europeans sought to reach great criminals, regardless of their birth, rank, or power within the state. To achieve this, they temporarily gathered all the powers of the courts within a great political body.

The legislator then transformed himself into a magistrate. He could establish the crime, classify it, and punish it. In granting him the rights of a judge, the law also imposed all the judge's obligations and bound him to observe every form of justice.

When a French or English political court has a public official before it and pronounces a conviction, it strips him of his office as a matter of fact and may declare him unworthy of holding any office in the future. But here, removal from office and political disqualification are consequences of the sentence — not the sentence itself.

In Europe, the political trial is therefore more of a judicial act than an administrative measure.

The opposite is true in the United States, and it is easy to see that the political trial there is an administrative measure rather than a judicial act.

Admittedly, the Senate's verdict is judicial in form: to render it, the senators must follow the formalities and procedures of a trial. It is also judicial in the grounds on which it rests, since the Senate must generally base its decision on an offense under ordinary law. But it is administrative in its purpose.

If the American lawmaker's real goal had been to arm a political body with a great judicial power, he would not have limited its reach to public officials — for the most dangerous enemies of the state may hold no office at all. This is especially true in republics, where party favor is the greatest power, and where one is often strongest precisely when exercising no legal authority.

If the American lawmaker had wanted to give society itself the right to prevent great crimes, as a judge does, through the fear of punishment, he would have placed all the resources of the criminal code at the disposal of political courts. But he gave them only an incomplete weapon — one that cannot reach the most dangerous criminals. For what does a sentence of political disqualification matter to a man who wants to overthrow the laws themselves?

The primary purpose of the political trial in the United States, then, is to take power away from someone who is misusing it, and to prevent that same citizen from being entrusted with it again. It is, as you can see, an administrative act dressed in the solemnity of a judicial verdict.

In this matter, the Americans have thus created something hybrid. They have given administrative removal all the safeguards of a political trial, while stripping the political trial of its most severe consequences.

Once this point is established, everything else falls into place. You then understand why American constitutions subject all civilian officials to the Senate's jurisdiction while exempting military officers — whose crimes are, if anything, more dangerous. In the civilian sphere, Americans have virtually no officials who can be dismissed at will: some hold their positions for life, others derive their authority from a mandate that cannot be revoked. To remove them from power, you must therefore try them all. But military officers are subordinate to the head of state, who is himself a civilian official. By reaching the head of state, you strike them all at once.

It is not that an officer can be stripped of his rank, but his command can be taken away.

Now, if we compare the European and American systems in terms of the effects each produces or can produce, we find differences no less striking.

In France and England, the political trial is regarded as an extraordinary weapon that society should use only to save itself in moments of great danger.

There is no denying that the political trial, as understood in Europe, violates the cherished principle of the separation of powers, and that it constantly threatens the liberty and lives of individuals.

The political trial in the United States deals only an indirect blow to the principle of the separation of powers. It does not threaten citizens' lives. It does not hang over every head, as in Europe, since it strikes only those who, by accepting public office, have submitted in advance to its rigors.

It is at once less fearsome and less effective.

And so the American lawmakers have not treated it as an extreme remedy for the great ills of society, but as a routine instrument of government.

Seen from this angle, it perhaps exerts more real influence on the body politic in America than in Europe. One should not be fooled by the apparent mildness of American law in the matter of political trials. Note, first, that in the United States the tribunal that renders these judgments is composed of the same elements and subject to the same influences as the body charged with bringing the accusation — which gives an almost irresistible push to the vindictive passions of parties. If political judges in the United States cannot impose penalties as severe as political judges in Europe, there is therefore less chance of being acquitted by them. The conviction is less terrifying but more certain.

The Europeans, in establishing political courts, had as their main purpose to punish the guilty. The Americans, to strip them of power. The political trial in the United States is in a sense a preventive measure. The judge should therefore not be shackled by precisely defined criminal categories.

Nothing is more frightening than the vagueness of American laws when they define political crimes proper. "The crimes that shall warrant the conviction of the President," says the Constitution of the United States (Section 4, Article 1), "are treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." Most state constitutions are even more obscure.

"Public officials," says the Constitution of Massachusetts, "shall be convicted for the guilty conduct they have engaged in and for their maladministration." "All officials who shall have endangered the state through maladministration, corruption, or other offenses," says the Constitution of Virginia, "may be accused by the House of Delegates." Some constitutions specify no crime at all, so as to impose unlimited accountability on public officials.

Chapter 1, Section 2, Paragraph 8.

See the constitutions of Illinois, Maine, Connecticut, and Georgia.

But what makes American laws truly formidable in this area springs, I dare say, from their very mildness.

We have seen that in Europe, an official's removal from office and political disqualification are consequences of the penalty, while in America they are the penalty itself. The result is this: in Europe, political courts possess terrifying powers that they sometimes do not know how to use, and they end up not punishing at all for fear of punishing too much. But in America, no one shrinks from a penalty that does not make humanity shudder. To condemn a political enemy to death in order to strip him of power strikes everyone as a horrible murder. To declare your adversary unworthy of holding that same power, and to take it from him while leaving him his liberty and his life — that can seem like the honest outcome of a struggle.

And yet this verdict, so easy to pronounce, is no less the ultimate misfortune for the ordinary people to whom it is applied. Great criminals will no doubt scoff at its hollow severity. But ordinary men will see in it a sentence that destroys their position, stains their honor, and condemns them to a shameful idleness worse than death.

The political trial in the United States therefore exerts all the greater influence on the workings of society precisely because it seems less fearsome. It does not act directly on the governed, but it makes the majority entirely the master of those who govern. It does not give the legislature an immense power that could be exercised only in a moment of crisis; it gives the legislature a moderate and steady power that can be used every day. If the force is less great, on the other hand its use is more convenient and its abuse more easy.

By preventing political courts from imposing criminal penalties, the Americans seem to me to have forestalled the most terrible consequences of legislative tyranny — rather than tyranny itself. And I wonder whether, all things considered, the political trial as understood in the United States is not the most formidable weapon ever placed in the hands of the majority.

When the American republics begin to degenerate, I believe it will be easy to recognize the signs: one need only watch whether the number of political trials increases.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION.

Up to this point, I have considered each state as a complete whole, and I have shown the various mechanisms the people set in motion within it, as well as the means of action at their disposal. But all these states that I have treated as independent are nevertheless compelled, in certain cases, to obey a higher authority — that of the Union. The time has come to examine the portion of sovereignty that has been granted to the Union, and to take a quick look at the federal constitution.

See the text of the federal constitution at the end of this volume.

*

HISTORY OF THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION.

Origins of the first Union. -- Its weakness. -- Congress appeals to the constituent power. -- The two-year interval between that moment and the promulgation of the new constitution.

The thirteen colonies that simultaneously threw off the yoke of England at the end of the last century had, as I have already said, the same religion, the same language, the same customs, nearly the same laws. They were fighting a common enemy, and so they must have had strong reasons to unite closely with one another and merge into a single nation.

But each of them, having always had a separate existence and a government within its own reach, had developed particular interests and habits of its own, and was resistant to a solid and complete union that would have swallowed up its individual importance in a common identity. Hence two opposing tendencies: one pulling the Anglo-Americans toward union, the other pulling them toward division.

As long as the war with the mother country lasted, necessity kept the principle of union on top. And although the laws that established this union were defective, the common bond survived in spite of them.

See the Articles of the first Confederation, formed in 1778. This federal constitution was not adopted by all the states until 1781. See also the analysis of this constitution in The Federalist, Numbers 15 through 22 inclusive, and Mr. Story in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, pp. 85-115.

But as soon as peace was concluded, the defects of the legislation were laid bare: the state seemed to dissolve all at once. Each colony, now an independent republic, seized full sovereignty for itself. The federal government, which its own constitution had condemned to weakness and which the sense of common danger no longer sustained, watched its flag subjected to the insults of the great nations of Europe, while it could not find the resources to stand up to the Indian nations or pay the interest on debts contracted during the War of Independence. On the verge of collapse, it officially declared its own impotence and appealed to the constituent power.

Congress made this declaration on February 21, 1787.

If America ever rose, for a few brief moments, to that pinnacle of glory where the proud imagination of its inhabitants would constantly have us see it, it was in this supreme moment — when the national government had, in a sense, just abdicated its authority.

That a people should fight with energy to win its independence is a spectacle every age has produced. Besides, the efforts the Americans made to throw off the English yoke have been greatly exaggerated. Separated from their enemies by 1,300 leagues of ocean, aided by a powerful ally, the United States owed their victory to their geographic position far more than to the valor of their armies or the patriotism of their citizens. Who would dare compare the American War to the wars of the French Revolution, or the efforts of the Americans to ours — when France, attacked by all of Europe, without money, without credit, without allies, threw a twentieth of her population against her enemies, smothering with one hand the fire that was devouring her own insides, and with the other waving the torch around her? But what is truly new in the history of societies is the sight of a great people, warned by its lawmakers that the gears of government are grinding to a halt, turning its gaze upon itself without haste and without fear, probing the depth of the problem, restraining itself for two full years in order to discover the remedy at leisure, and then, once the remedy was identified, submitting to it voluntarily — without costing humanity a single tear or a single drop of blood.

When the inadequacy of the first federal constitution made itself felt, the political passions that the revolution had sparked were partly calmed, and all the great men it had produced were still alive. This was a double stroke of luck for America. The small assembly that took on the task of drafting the second constitution contained the finest minds and noblest characters ever to appear in the New World. George Washington presided over it.

It was composed of only 25 members. Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and the two Morrises were among them.

This national commission, after long and careful deliberations, finally presented to the people for their approval the body of organic law that still governs the Union today. All the states adopted it one after another. The new federal government took office in 1789, after a two-year interregnum. The American Revolution thus ended at precisely the moment ours began.

It was not the state legislatures that adopted it. The people elected deputies for this sole purpose. The new constitution was the subject of thorough debate in each of these assemblies.

CHAPTER I.

HOW ONE CAN STRICTLY SAY THAT IN THE UNITED STATES IT IS THE PEOPLE WHO GOVERN.

In America, the people appoint both the one who makes the law and the one who executes it. The people themselves form the jury that punishes violations of the law. Not only are the institutions democratic in their principle, but also in all their workings. Thus the people elect their representatives directly and generally choose them every year, in order to keep them more completely under their control. It is therefore truly the people who govern, and although the form of government is representative, it is clear that the opinions, the prejudices, the interests, and even the passions of the people can find no lasting obstacles to prevent them from making themselves felt in the day-to-day direction of society.

In the United States, as in every country where the people reign, it is the majority that governs in the name of the people.

This majority is composed mainly of peaceful citizens who, whether by inclination or by interest, sincerely desire the good of the country. Around them, the parties are constantly in motion, trying to draw them in and claim their support.

CHAPTER II.

ON POLITICAL PARTIES IN THE UNITED STATES.

A major distinction must be drawn between parties. -- Parties that act like rival nations. -- Parties properly so called. -- The difference between great parties and small ones. -- When each type arises. -- Their distinct characters. -- America once had great parties. -- It has them no longer. -- Federalists. -- Republicans. -- The Federalists' defeat. -- The difficulty of creating parties in the United States. -- How people go about it. -- The aristocratic or democratic character found in every party. -- The struggle between General Jackson and the Bank.

I need to begin with a major distinction between types of parties.

There are countries so vast that the different populations living in them, though united under the same sovereignty, have contradictory interests, which give rise to permanent opposition between them. The various fractions of such a people don't really form parties, strictly speaking, but distinct nations; and if civil war breaks out, it's a conflict between rival peoples rather than a struggle between factions.

But when citizens disagree on matters that concern all parts of the country equally -- the general principles of government, for example -- then you see the emergence of what I would call parties in the true sense.

Parties are an evil inherent in free governments; but they don't have the same character and the same instincts at all times.

There are periods when nations feel themselves tormented by troubles so great that the idea of a total overhaul of their political constitution enters their minds. There are others when the malaise runs deeper still, when the social order itself is under threat. These are the times of great revolutions and great parties.

Between these centuries of disorder and misery, there are others when societies rest and the human race seems to catch its breath. But this is really only an appearance; time no more stands still for peoples than for individuals; both advance each day toward a future they cannot foresee; and when we think they are standing still, it is only that their movements escape our notice. They are people walking; they appear motionless only to those who are running.

However that may be, there are periods when the changes happening in a people's political constitution and social order are so slow and so imperceptible that people think they have reached a final state; the human mind then believes itself firmly settled on certain foundations and does not look beyond a certain horizon.

These are the times of intrigue and small parties.

What I call great political parties are those that attach themselves to principles rather than to their consequences; to generalities rather than to particular cases; to ideas rather than to men. These parties generally have nobler features, more generous passions, more genuine convictions, and a bolder, more forthright bearing than the others. Private interest, which always plays the biggest role in political passions, here hides itself more skillfully behind the veil of public interest; it sometimes even manages to conceal itself from the very people it animates and drives to action.

Small parties, by contrast, are generally without political conviction. Since they don't feel themselves elevated and sustained by great purposes, their character is stamped with a selfishness that shows itself openly in everything they do. They always get heated without real cause; their language is violent, but their course of action is timid and uncertain. The means they employ are as contemptible as the very ends they pursue. That is why, when a period of calm follows a violent revolution, great men seem to vanish all at once and souls seem to retreat into themselves.

Great parties shake society to its foundations; small parties merely agitate it. The former tear it apart; the latter corrupt it. The first sometimes save it by shaking it up; the second always disturb it to no purpose.

America once had great parties; today they no longer exist. It has gained a great deal in happiness, but not in morality.

When the War of Independence ended and it came time to establish the foundations of the new government, the nation found itself divided between two views. These views were as old as the world itself, and they can be found in different forms and dressed in different names in every free society. One sought to restrict popular power; the other to extend it indefinitely.

The struggle between these two views never took on the violent character in America that has so often marked it elsewhere. In America, the two parties agreed on the most essential points. Neither one, in order to prevail, needed to destroy an old order or overturn an entire social system. Neither one, consequently, tied a great many individual livelihoods to the triumph of its principles. But they touched on immaterial interests of the highest order -- the love of equality and of independence. That was enough to stir up violent passions.

The party that wanted to restrict popular power sought above all to apply its doctrines to the Constitution of the Union, which earned it the name of Federalist.

The other, which claimed to be the exclusive champion of liberty, took the title of Republican.

America is the land of democracy. The Federalists were therefore always in the minority; but they counted among their ranks nearly all the great men that the War of Independence had brought forth, and their moral authority was considerable. Circumstances, moreover, favored them. The collapse of the first confederation made the people fear falling into anarchy, and the Federalists took advantage of this fleeting mood. For ten or twelve years they directed the nation's affairs and were able to apply some, though not all, of their principles -- because the opposing current was growing too strong by the day for anyone to dare resist it.

In 1801, the Republicans finally seized power. Thomas Jefferson was elected president; he brought them the support of a famous name, great talent, and immense popularity.

The Federalists had never maintained themselves except by artificial means and with the help of temporary resources; it was the virtue and talent of their leaders, along with a fortunate combination of circumstances, that had propelled them to power. When the Republicans arrived in their turn, the opposing party was engulfed as if by a sudden flood. An immense majority declared against them, and they found themselves in such a tiny minority so quickly that they immediately despaired. From that moment on, the Republican -- or Democratic -- party has marched from conquest to conquest and has taken hold of the entire society.

Feeling defeated beyond recovery and finding themselves isolated in the midst of the nation, the Federalists split apart: some joined the victors; others laid down their banner and changed their name. It has already been a good many years since they entirely ceased to exist as a party.

The Federalists' time in power is, in my view, one of the most fortunate events to have accompanied the birth of the great American union. The Federalists were fighting against the irresistible current of their century and their country. Whatever the merits or flaws of their theories, those theories had the defect of being inapplicable in their entirety to the society they wanted to govern; what happened under Jefferson would therefore have happened sooner or later. But the Federalists' government at least gave the new republic time to establish itself on firm ground, allowing it afterward to withstand without harm the rapid development of the very doctrines they had fought against. A great many of their principles eventually found their way into their adversaries' creed; and the federal constitution, which still endures in our time, is a lasting monument to their patriotism and their wisdom.

And so today one sees no great political parties in the United States. There are indeed parties that threaten the future of the Union; but none that appear to be attacking the present form of government or the general direction of society. The parties that threaten the Union rest not on principles, but on material interests. In the various provinces of so vast an empire, these interests create rival nations rather than parties. Thus we recently saw the North defend the system of trade protections and the South take up arms in favor of free trade, for the simple reason that the North is a manufacturing region and the South an agricultural one, and the restrictive system works to the benefit of one and the detriment of the other.

For lack of great parties, the United States swarms with small ones, and public opinion fragments endlessly over questions of detail. You cannot imagine the trouble people go to in creating parties; it's no easy thing in our time. In the United States, there's no religious hatred, because religion is universally respected and no sect is dominant; no class hatred, because the people are everything and no one yet dares to struggle against them; and no public misery to exploit, because the material condition of the country offers so vast a field for enterprise that you need only leave people to their own devices for them to work wonders. Yet ambition must somehow manage to create parties, since it is hard to overthrow the person in power simply because you want their place. The whole skill of political operators therefore consists in assembling parties. A politician in the United States first tries to identify his own interest and to see which similar interests might cluster around it; then he sets about discovering whether there might happen to exist, somewhere in the world, a doctrine or a principle that could conveniently be placed at the head of the new association, to give it the right to appear and circulate freely. It's like the royal warrant that our forefathers used to print on the first page of their books and incorporate into the volume -- even though it was no part of it.

Once this is done, the new power is introduced onto the political stage.

To a foreigner, nearly all of the Americans' domestic quarrels seem, at first glance, incomprehensible or childish, and you don't know whether to pity a people that seriously occupies itself with such trifles or to envy it the good fortune of being able to do so.

But when you study carefully the hidden instincts that govern factions in America, you easily discover that most of them are connected, more or less, to one or the other of the two great parties that have divided humanity ever since free societies have existed. As you penetrate more deeply into these parties' inner thinking, you realize that some are working to narrow the use of public power, while others are working to extend it.

I am not saying that American parties always have as their avowed goal -- or even their hidden goal -- the advancement of aristocracy or democracy in the country. What I am saying is that aristocratic or democratic passions are easily found at the bottom of every party, and that although they hide from view, they form, as it were, the nerve center and the soul of each.

Let me give a recent example. The president attacks the Bank of the United States; the country is stirred up and divided; the educated classes generally side with the bank, the people with the president. Do you think the people managed to reason their way through a question so difficult that even experienced men hesitate over it? Not at all. But the bank is a great institution with an independent existence; the people, who create or destroy every power, can do nothing against it -- and that astonishes them. In the midst of society's universal motion, this fixed point strikes their eye, and they want to see whether they can set it moving like everything else.

REMNANTS OF THE ARISTOCRATIC PARTY IN THE UNITED STATES.

The secret opposition of the wealthy to democracy. -- They withdraw into private life. -- The taste they display at home for exclusive pleasures and luxury. -- Their outward simplicity. -- Their affected condescension toward the people.

It sometimes happens, among a people divided by opinion, that the balance between parties breaks down and one of them acquires an irresistible dominance. It crushes every obstacle, overwhelms its adversary, and exploits the entire society for its own benefit. The defeated, despairing of success, hide or fall silent. A universal stillness and silence descend. The nation seems united in a single thought. The victorious party rises and says: "I have brought peace to the country; you owe me thanks."

But beneath this apparent unanimity, deep divisions and real opposition still lie hidden.

This is what happened in America. When the Democratic party gained the upper hand, it seized exclusive control of affairs. Since then, it has never stopped molding customs and laws to its own desires.

In our day, it can be said that in the United States the wealthy classes are almost entirely shut out of political life, and that wealth, far from being a qualification, is a real cause of disfavor and an obstacle to gaining power.

The rich therefore prefer to abandon the arena rather than sustain a struggle that is often unequal against their poorest fellow citizens. Unable to occupy a public rank comparable to the one they hold in private life, they give up the former to concentrate on the latter. They form within the state a kind of separate society with its own tastes and its own pleasures.

The rich man submits to this state of affairs as an incurable evil; he is even very careful to avoid showing that it wounds him. So you hear him publicly praising the blessings of republican government and the advantages of democratic forms. For after hating their enemies, what is more natural to people than flattering them?

Look at this wealthy citizen. Wouldn't you take him for a Jew in the Middle Ages, afraid of letting anyone suspect his riches? His dress is simple, his manner modest; within the four walls of his home, he worships luxury. He admits to this sanctuary only a few chosen guests, whom he insolently calls his equals. You will find no nobleman in Europe more exclusive in his pleasures, more jealous of the slightest advantages that a privileged position confers. But there he is, leaving his house to go work in a dusty little office he occupies in the center of town and business, where anyone is free to approach him. Halfway there, his shoemaker happens to pass, and they stop; the two of them begin to talk. What can they have to say? These two citizens are discussing the affairs of state, and they will not part without shaking hands.

Beneath this forced enthusiasm and these obsequious manners toward the dominant power, it is easy to see that the rich harbor a deep disgust for the democratic institutions of their country. The people are a power they fear and despise. If the poor governance of democracy were ever to bring about a political crisis, if monarchy ever presented itself in the United States as something practicable, you would soon discover the truth of what I am saying.

The two great weapons that parties use to succeed are newspapers and associations.

CHAPTER III.

ON FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IN THE UNITED STATES.

The difficulty of restricting freedom of the press. -- Particular reasons that certain peoples have for valuing this freedom. -- Freedom of the press is a necessary consequence of popular sovereignty as understood in America. -- The violence of the periodical press's language in the United States. -- The periodical press has instincts of its own; the American example proves it. -- American opinion on the judicial punishment of press offenses. -- Why the press is less powerful in the United States than in France.

Freedom of the press makes its power felt not only on political opinions but on all of people's opinions. It modifies not only laws but customs and values. In another part of this work, I will try to determine the degree of influence that press freedom has exercised on civil society in the United States; I will try to identify the direction it has given to ideas, the habits it has instilled in the minds and feelings of Americans. For now, I want to examine only the effects that freedom of the press has produced in the political world.

I confess that I do not feel for press freedom that complete and instinctive love that one grants to things supremely good by their nature. I value it far more for the evils it prevents than for the good it does.

If someone could show me, between complete independence and total subjugation of thought, some intermediate position where I might hope to hold my ground, I might perhaps settle there. But who will find this intermediate position? You start from the unruliness of the press and march toward order: what do you do? You begin by subjecting writers to juries; but juries acquit, and what was merely one man's opinion becomes the opinion of the country. So you have done too much and too little; you must keep marching. You hand authors over to permanent magistrates; but judges are obliged to hear a case before condemning, and what people were afraid to confess in a book is proclaimed with impunity in the courtroom; what was said obscurely in one piece of writing is thus repeated in a thousand others. Expression is the outward form -- the body, if I may put it that way -- of thought, but it is not thought itself. Your courts seize the body, but the soul slips through their hands. So you have done too much and too little; you must continue marching. You finally hand writers over to censors -- very good! We are getting closer. But isn't the political platform still free? So you have accomplished nothing yet. I'm wrong -- you have made things worse. Do you perhaps take thought for one of those material forces that grow stronger with the number of their agents? Will you count writers the way you count soldiers in an army? Unlike all material forces, the power of thought often increases with the very smallness of the number who express it. The word of one powerful man, penetrating alone into the passions of a silent assembly, has more power than the confused cries of a thousand orators; and if people can speak freely in even one public place, it is as if they were speaking publicly in every village. So you must destroy the freedom to speak as well as the freedom to write; this time, you've reached port: everyone is silent. But where have you arrived? You set out from the abuses of liberty, and I find you at the feet of a despot.

You have traveled from extreme independence to extreme servitude without finding, in all that vast distance, a single place where you could rest.

There are peoples who, apart from the general reasons I have just laid out, have particular ones that should bind them to press freedom.

In certain nations that call themselves free, any agent of power can violate the law with impunity, because the country's constitution gives the oppressed no right to bring their complaint before the courts. Among these peoples, the independence of the press must be considered not merely as one guarantee among others, but as the only remaining guarantee of citizens' liberty and security.

If the men who govern these nations were to speak of stripping the press of its independence, the entire people could respond: Let us prosecute your crimes before the ordinary courts, and perhaps we will then consent not to appeal to the court of public opinion.

In a country where the principle of popular sovereignty openly prevails, censorship is not just a danger -- it is a great absurdity.

When you grant everyone a right to participate in governing society, you must also recognize their capacity to choose among the different opinions stirring their contemporaries and to evaluate the different facts that might guide them.

Popular sovereignty and freedom of the press are therefore two entirely correlative things; censorship and universal suffrage, by contrast, are two things that contradict each other and cannot long coexist in the political institutions of the same people. Among the twelve million people living on the territory of the United States, not a single one has yet dared to propose restricting freedom of the press.

The first newspaper that fell under my eye when I arrived in America contained the following article, which I translate faithfully:

"Throughout this whole affair, the language Jackson (the president) has used has been that of a heartless despot, occupied solely with preserving his power. Ambition is his crime, and he will find his punishment in it. His calling is intrigue, and intrigue will confound his designs and strip him of his power. He governs by corruption, and his guilty maneuvers will turn to his own confusion and shame. He has appeared in the political arena like a gambler without shame or restraint. He has succeeded; but the hour of justice approaches. Soon he will have to give back what he has won, cast aside his illusions, and end his days in some retreat where he can blaspheme freely against his own folly; for repentance is not a virtue his heart was ever given to know."

(Vincennes Gazette.)

Many people in France imagine that the violence of our press is rooted in the instability of our social conditions, in our political passions, and in the general malaise that follows from them. They are forever waiting for a time when society will settle down and the press will in turn grow calm. For my part, I would happily attribute to the causes mentioned above the extreme hold the press has over us; but I do not believe these causes have much influence on its language. The periodical press seems to me to have instincts and passions of its own, independent of the circumstances in which it operates. What is happening in America confirms this for me.

America is perhaps, at this moment, the country in the world that contains within itself the fewest seeds of revolution. In America, however, the press has the same destructive tastes as in France and the same violence, without the same causes for anger. In America, as in France, it is that extraordinary power, so strangely mixed with good and evil, that without it liberty could not survive, yet with it order can barely be maintained.

What must be said is that the press has much less power in the United States than among us. Nothing, however, is rarer in that country than a judicial prosecution directed against it. The reason is simple: the Americans, having adopted among themselves the principle of popular sovereignty, have applied it sincerely. They never thought of building, from elements that change every day, constitutions meant to last forever. To attack existing laws is therefore not criminal, so long as you don't seek to evade them through violence.

They believe, moreover, that the courts are powerless to moderate the press, and that the suppleness of human language constantly eludes judicial analysis, so that offenses of this nature slip, as it were, from the hand that reaches out to seize them. They think that in order to act effectively against the press, one would need to find a court that was not only devoted to the existing order but could also place itself above the public opinion swirling around it -- a court that judged without admitting the public, rendered its verdicts without giving reasons, and punished intent even more than words. Anyone with the power to create and maintain such a court would be wasting his time pursuing freedom of the press; for then he would be absolute master of society itself and could rid himself of writers and their writings at the same time. When it comes to the press, then, there is really no middle ground between servitude and license. To reap the inestimable benefits that press freedom ensures, one must submit to the inevitable evils it brings. To try to obtain the former while escaping the latter is to surrender to one of those illusions with which sick nations typically comfort themselves, when, exhausted by struggle and worn out by effort, they seek ways to make hostile opinions and contradictory principles coexist on the same soil.

The limited power of newspapers in America owes to several causes, of which these are the main ones.

The freedom to write, like all other freedoms, is more fearsome the newer it is; a people that has never heard the affairs of state discussed in its presence believes the first demagogue who comes along. Among the Anglo-Americans, this freedom is as old as the founding of the colonies. The press, moreover, however skilled at inflaming human passions, cannot create them all by itself. Now, in America, political life is active, varied, even turbulent, but it is rarely troubled by deep passions; these seldom arise when material interests are not at stake, and in the United States those interests are prospering. To judge the difference that exists on this point between the Anglo-Americans and ourselves, I need only glance at the newspapers of the two peoples. In France, commercial advertisements occupy only a very limited space, and the news itself is sparse; the vital part of a newspaper is the section devoted to political discussion. In America, three-quarters of the enormous paper placed before your eyes are filled with advertisements; the rest is usually taken up by political news or simple anecdotes. Only from time to time, in some overlooked corner, do you spot one of those fiery opinion pieces that are the daily fare of readers in our country.

Every power increases its effectiveness to the degree that it centralizes its direction -- this is a general law of nature that observation confirms for the student, and that an instinct surer still has always made known to even the pettiest despots.

In France, the press combines two distinct kinds of centralization.

Nearly all its power is concentrated in one place and, so to speak, in the same hands, since its organs are very few in number.

Constituted in this way in the midst of a skeptical nation, the power of the press is bound to be almost limitless. It is an enemy with whom a government can make truces of varying length, but one it will find hard to live alongside for long.

Neither of these two kinds of centralization I have just described exists in America.

The United States has no capital; knowledge and power are dispersed throughout every part of this vast land. The rays of human intelligence, instead of radiating from a single center, cross in every direction. The Americans have placed nowhere a central command of thought, any more than of affairs.

This owes to local circumstances beyond human control; but here is something that comes from the laws:

In the United States, there are no licensing requirements for printers, no stamp taxes or registration fees for newspapers; and the rule of security deposits is unknown.

The result is that creating a newspaper is a simple and easy venture; a few subscribers are enough for a journalist to cover his costs. So the number of periodical and semi-periodical publications in the United States exceeds anything you could imagine. The most enlightened Americans attribute the press's lack of power to this incredible dispersal of its forces; it is an axiom of political science in the United States that the only way to neutralize the effects of newspapers is to multiply their number. I find it hard to believe that a truth this obvious has not yet become more widely accepted among us. Let those who want to make revolutions with the help of the press try to give it only a few powerful outlets -- that I understand well enough. But that the official champions of the established order and the natural defenders of existing laws should think they can weaken the press's impact by concentrating it -- that I simply cannot comprehend. The governments of Europe seem to me to be acting toward the press the way knights of old acted toward their adversaries: they have observed from their own experience that centralization is a powerful weapon, and they want to furnish their enemy with one -- no doubt so they can have more glory in resisting him.

In the United States, there is hardly a small town that doesn't have its newspaper. It is easy to see that among so many combatants, neither discipline nor unity of action can be established; and so you see each one raise his own banner. It's not that all the political newspapers of the Union have lined up for or against the administration; they attack it and defend it by a hundred different means. Newspapers in the United States therefore cannot create those great currents of opinion that surge over and burst through the most powerful dams. This dispersal of the press's forces produces other equally remarkable effects: since creating a newspaper is easy, anyone can do it; on the other hand, competition means that no newspaper can hope for very large profits, which keeps people of great business talent from getting involved in these kinds of enterprises. Even if newspapers were a source of wealth, there are so many of them that talented writers could not be found to run them all. Journalists in the United States therefore generally occupy a low social position; their education is only half-finished, and the cast of their ideas is often vulgar. Now, in all things the majority sets the standard; it establishes certain ways of doing things that everyone then follows. The sum of these common habits is called a spirit -- there is the spirit of the bar, the spirit of the court. The spirit of journalism in France is to discuss the great interests of the state in a manner that is violent but elevated, and often eloquent -- if this is not always so, it is because every rule has its exceptions. The spirit of journalism in America is to attack, crudely, without preparation, and without art, the passions of those it addresses; to abandon principles in order to seize on people; to follow them into their private lives and lay bare their weaknesses and vices.

We must deplore such an abuse of thought. Later, I will have occasion to examine what influence newspapers exert on the taste and morals of the American people; but, I repeat, at the moment I am concerned only with the political world. One cannot deny that the political effects of this license of the press contribute indirectly to the maintenance of public tranquility. The result is that people who already hold a high position in the opinion of their fellow citizens do not dare to write for newspapers, and thus lose the most formidable weapon they could use to stir popular passions to their advantage.

They write in newspapers only in rare cases where they want to address the people and speak in their own name -- when, for example, slanderous accusations have been spread about them and they wish to restore the truth of the facts.

The further result, above all, is that the personal views expressed by journalists carry virtually no weight with readers. What people look for in a newspaper is knowledge of the facts; it is only by distorting or falsifying these facts that the journalist can lend his opinion any influence.

Reduced to these resources alone, the press still wields immense power in America. It sends political life circulating through every part of this vast territory. Its ever-open eye constantly lays bare the secret springs of politics and forces public men to come one after another before the court of public opinion. It is the press that rallies interests around certain doctrines and gives parties their creed; it is through the press that parties speak to one another without meeting, that they reach agreement without being in contact. When a large number of press outlets manage to march in the same direction, their influence eventually becomes nearly irresistible, and public opinion, struck always from the same side, finally yields under their blows.

In the United States, each newspaper individually has little power; but the periodical press is still, after the people, the foremost power in the land.

*

On how opinions established under press freedom in the United States are often more tenacious than those formed elsewhere under censorship.

In the United States, democracy is constantly bringing new men to the helm of affairs; the government therefore puts little continuity and order into its measures. But the general principles of government are more stable there than in many other countries, and the main opinions that shape society prove more durable. When an idea takes hold of the American mind, whether it is sound or unreasonable, nothing is harder than to root it out.

The same thing has been observed in England -- the country in Europe where, for a century, the greatest freedom of thought has coexisted with the most invincible prejudices.

I attribute this to the very cause that, at first glance, would seem to prevent it: freedom of the press. Peoples who enjoy this freedom cling to their opinions out of pride as much as conviction. They love their opinions because they seem right, and also because they chose them; and they hold to them not only as something true but as something that is their own.

There are several other reasons as well.

A great man once said that ignorance lay at both ends of knowledge. It might have been more accurate to say that deep convictions are found only at the two extremes, and that doubt lies in the middle. One can, in fact, consider the human mind in three distinct and often successive states.

A person believes firmly, because they accept without examining. They doubt when objections present themselves. Often they manage to resolve all their doubts, and then they begin to believe again. This time they no longer seize truth at random and in the dark; they see it face to face and walk directly toward its light.

And yet I wonder whether this reflective, self-mastered conviction ever raises a person to the same degree of ardor and devotion as dogmatic belief.

When press freedom finds people in the first state, it leaves them for a long time yet with their habit of believing firmly without reflection; it merely changes the object of their unexamined beliefs each day. Across the entire intellectual horizon, the human mind thus continues to see only one point at a time; but that point shifts constantly. These are the times of sudden revolutions. Woe to the generations that are the first to embrace freedom of the press!

Soon, however, the circle of new ideas is more or less traversed. Experience arrives, and people plunge into universal doubt and distrust.

One can be fairly sure that the majority of people will always stop at one of these two states: they will believe without knowing why, or they will not know precisely what they should believe.

As for that other kind of conviction -- reflective and self-mastered -- that arises from knowledge and emerges from the very midst of doubt's turbulence, only the efforts of a very few people will ever attain it.

Now, it has been observed that in centuries of religious fervor, people sometimes changed their beliefs, whereas in centuries of doubt, everyone stubbornly kept their own. The same thing happens in politics under the reign of press freedom. Once all social theories have been challenged and fought over in turn, those who have settled on one of them hold onto it -- not so much because they are sure it is good, as because they are not sure there is a better one.

In such times, people do not so readily die for their opinions; but they don't change them either. You find, all at once, fewer martyrs and fewer apostates.

Add to this reason another one, more powerful still: amid the doubt surrounding opinions, people end up clinging exclusively to instincts and material interests, which are by their nature far more visible, more tangible, and more permanent than opinions.

It is a very difficult question to decide: who governs better -- democracy or aristocracy? But it is clear that democracy inconveniences one class and aristocracy oppresses the other.

That is a truth that establishes itself and needs no discussion: you are rich and I am poor.

CHAPTER IV.

ON POLITICAL ASSOCIATION IN THE UNITED STATES.

The daily use Anglo-Americans make of the right of association. -- Three kinds of political association. -- How Americans apply the representative system to associations. -- The dangers this poses to the state. -- The great convention of 1831 on the tariff. -- The legislative character of that convention. -- Why the unlimited exercise of the right of association is not as dangerous in the United States as elsewhere. -- Why it may be considered necessary there. -- The usefulness of associations in democratic peoples.

America is the country in the world that has made the most of association, and that has applied this powerful instrument of action to the greatest variety of purposes.

Apart from the permanent associations created by law under the names of townships, cities, and counties, there are a multitude of others that owe their existence and growth entirely to individual initiative.

From birth, the inhabitant of the United States learns that he must rely on himself to fight against the troubles and difficulties of life. He casts only a wary, distrustful eye on the authority of society, and appeals to its power only when he cannot do without it. You can start to see this as early as school, where children submit, even in their games, to rules they have made themselves and punish among themselves offenses they have defined on their own. The same spirit runs through every act of social life. A problem arises on a public road; the way is blocked, traffic stopped. The neighbors immediately form a deliberative body; out of this improvised assembly comes an executive power that remedies the problem, before the idea of some preexisting authority beyond that of the interested parties has occurred to anyone. If it's a question of entertainment, people will associate to lend more splendor and order to the celebration. They even join forces to fight purely intellectual enemies: they wage a common war against intemperance. In the United States, people form associations for purposes of public safety, commerce, industry, morality, and religion. There is nothing the human will despairs of achieving through the free action of the collective power of individuals.

I will have occasion later to discuss the effects that association produces in civil life. For now, I must confine myself to the political world.

Once the right of association is recognized, citizens can exercise it in different ways.

An association consists simply in the public endorsement that a certain number of individuals give to some doctrine or other, and in the commitment they make to work together in some fashion to make it prevail. The right to associate in this way is nearly indistinguishable from the freedom to write; yet an association already possesses more power than the press. When an opinion is represented by an association, it is forced to take a clearer and more precise form. It counts its supporters and enlists them in its cause. These supporters come to know one another, and their ardor grows with their numbers. An association bundles the efforts of divergent minds and drives them vigorously toward a single clearly defined goal.

The second degree in the exercise of the right of association is the power to assemble. When a political association is allowed to establish centers of action at key points across the country, its activity becomes greater and its influence more widespread. There, people see one another face to face; means of action are coordinated; opinions unfold with a force and a warmth that the written word can never achieve.

There is, finally, a last degree in the exercise of the right of association in political matters: the supporters of a single opinion can form electoral colleges and choose delegates to go represent them in a central assembly. This is, properly speaking, the representative system applied to a party.

Thus, in the first case, people who share the same opinion establish among themselves a purely intellectual bond; in the second, they gather in small assemblies that represent only a fraction of the party; in the third, they form what amounts to a separate nation within the nation, a government within the government. Their delegates, like the true representatives of the majority, represent by themselves the entire collective strength of their supporters. Like those representatives, they arrive with an air of national legitimacy and all the moral authority that comes with it. It is true that, unlike the majority's representatives, they don't have the right to make law; but they have the power to attack the law that exists and to draft in advance the one that should replace it.

Imagine a people not perfectly accustomed to the exercise of liberty, or one in which deep political passions are fermenting. Alongside the majority that makes the laws, I place a minority that concerns itself only with the preamble and stops short of the verdict -- and I cannot help believing that public order is exposed to great risks.

Between proving that one law is better in itself than another, and proving that it ought to be substituted for the other, there is no doubt a great distance. But where the minds of educated people still see a wide gap, the imagination of the crowd no longer perceives one. Moreover, there are times when the nation splits almost equally between two parties, each claiming to represent the majority. If, beside the power that governs, a power of nearly equal moral authority comes into being, can you really believe it will confine itself for long to speaking without acting?

Will it always stop at the metaphysical consideration that the purpose of associations is to guide opinions, not to compel them -- to advise the law, not to make it?

The more I consider press independence in its principal effects, the more I become convinced that among modern peoples, press independence is the essential, indeed the constitutive element of liberty. A people that wants to remain free therefore has the right to demand that it be respected at all costs. But the unlimited freedom of association in political matters cannot be entirely equated with the freedom to write. The former is at once less necessary and more dangerous than the latter. A nation can set limits on it without ceasing to be master of itself; indeed, it must sometimes do so in order to remain so.

In America, the freedom to associate for political purposes is unlimited.

An example will make clearer than anything I could add just how far this freedom is tolerated.

People will recall how intensely the tariff question -- free trade versus protectionism -- stirred passions in America. The tariff favored or attacked not just opinions but very powerful material interests. The North attributed part of its prosperity to it; the South, nearly all of its misery. It is fair to say that for a long time, the tariff was the source of the only political passions that agitated the Union.

In 1831, when the quarrel was at its bitterest, an obscure citizen of Massachusetts had the idea of proposing, through the newspapers, that all enemies of the tariff send delegates to Philadelphia to deliberate together on the means of restoring free trade. This proposal circulated within days, by the power of the printing press, from Maine to New Orleans. The enemies of the tariff embraced it eagerly. They assembled from all directions and chose delegates. Most of these were prominent men, and some had become famous. South Carolina, which was later seen taking up arms in the same cause, sent sixty-three delegates for its part. On October 1, 1831, the assembly -- which, following American custom, had taken the name of convention -- convened in Philadelphia; it had more than two hundred members. Its discussions were public and took on, from the very first day, a wholly legislative character: the extent of Congress's powers was debated, along with the theories of free trade and the various provisions of the tariff. After ten days, the assembly dissolved, having drafted an address to the American people. In this address it declared: first, that Congress did not have the right to impose a tariff, and that the existing tariff was unconstitutional; second, that it was not in the interest of any people, and in particular of the American people, for trade not to be free.

It must be acknowledged that the unlimited freedom to associate in political matters has not produced, up to this point, the disastrous results in the United States that one might expect from it elsewhere. The right of association is an English import, and it has existed since the earliest days in America. The exercise of this right has now passed into habits and into customs.

In our time, freedom of association has become a necessary safeguard against the tyranny of the majority. In the United States, once a party has become dominant, all public power passes into its hands; its close allies occupy every office and control every organized force. The most distinguished members of the opposing party, unable to cross the barrier that separates them from power, must be able to establish themselves outside it. The minority must oppose its full moral force to the material power that oppresses it. One danger is thus set against a greater one.

The majority's absolute power strikes me as such a great peril for the American republics that the dangerous means used to limit it still seems to me a good thing.

Here I will express a thought that recalls what I said elsewhere about township liberties: there is no country where associations are more necessary -- to prevent the despotism of parties or the arbitrary rule of a prince -- than one where the social order is democratic. In aristocratic nations, secondary bodies form natural associations that check abuses of power. In countries where such associations do not exist, if individuals cannot artificially and temporarily create something that resembles them, I see no remaining barrier against any kind of tyranny, and a great people may be oppressed with impunity by a handful of schemers or by a single man.

The convening of a great political convention (for there are conventions of every kind), which can often be a necessary measure, is always -- even in America -- a serious event, and one that the country's friends contemplate with apprehension.

This was clearly seen in the convention of 1831, where all the efforts of the distinguished men who took part in the assembly were directed toward moderating its language and narrowing its scope. It is likely that the convention of 1831 did in fact exert a great influence on the spirit of the discontented and prepared them for the open revolt against the Union's commercial laws that took place in 1832.

One cannot deny that the unlimited freedom of association in political matters is, of all freedoms, the last that a people can endure. If it does not plunge them into anarchy, it brings them, so to speak, to the very brink at every moment. This freedom, however dangerous, offers one guarantee: in countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America, there are troublemakers, but no conspirators.

*

On the different ways the right of association is understood in Europe and in the United States, and the different uses made of it.

After the freedom to act alone, the most natural freedom for human beings is that of combining their efforts with those of their fellows and acting in common. The right of association therefore seems to me almost as inalienable by its nature as individual liberty. The lawmaker cannot seek to destroy it without attacking society itself. Yet if there are peoples among whom the freedom to unite is purely beneficial and productive of prosperity, there are also others who, through their excesses, distort it and turn an element of life into a cause of destruction. It seemed to me that a comparison of the different paths associations follow -- in countries where liberty is well understood and in those where it degenerates into license -- would be useful to both governments and parties.

Most Europeans still see in association a weapon of war, hastily forged to be tested at once on the battlefield.

People do associate with the aim of talking, but the immediate thought of action preoccupies every mind. An association is an army: you talk to count your forces and rally your spirits, and then you march against the enemy. In the eyes of those who compose it, legal methods may look like means, but they are never the only means of success.

That is not at all how the right of association is understood in the United States. In America, citizens who form the minority associate, first, in order to establish their numbers and thus weaken the moral authority of the majority. The second aim of the members is to put ideas to the test and thereby discover the arguments most likely to make an impression on the majority -- for they always hope to win it over and then to wield power in its name.

Political associations in the United States are therefore peaceful in their aims and legal in their methods; and when they claim to want to triumph only through the laws, they are generally telling the truth.

The difference that one observes on this point between Americans and ourselves owes to several causes.

In Europe, there are parties that differ so completely from the majority that they can never hope to win its support, and these same parties believe themselves strong enough on their own to fight against it. When a party of this kind forms an association, it does not seek to persuade but to fight. In America, those who are placed very far from the majority by their opinions can do nothing against its power; all the others hope to win it over.

The exercise of the right of association therefore becomes dangerous in proportion to the impossibility of great parties ever becoming the majority. In a country like the United States, where opinions differ only by shades, the right of association can remain virtually without limits.

What further leads us to see in freedom of association only the right to make war on governments is our inexperience with liberty. The first idea that occurs to a party, as to an individual, when it gains strength, is the idea of violence; the idea of persuasion comes only later -- it is born of experience.

The English, who are divided among themselves in such a profound way, rarely abuse the right of association, because they have a longer history of exercising it.

We also have, in our country, such a passionate taste for war that there is no enterprise so senseless -- even if it would overthrow the state -- in which a person would not consider it glorious to die with weapons in hand.

But of all the causes that work to moderate the violence of political associations in the United States, the most powerful is perhaps universal suffrage. In countries where universal suffrage is accepted, the majority is never in doubt, because no party can reasonably set itself up as the representative of those who did not vote. Associations therefore know -- and everyone knows -- that they do not represent the majority. This follows from the very fact of their existence; for if they did represent it, they would change the law themselves rather than merely demand its reform.

The moral force of the government they attack is greatly increased by this; their own, greatly weakened.

In Europe, there is hardly an association that does not claim -- or believe -- that it represents the will of the majority. This claim or belief prodigiously increases their strength and serves wonderfully to legitimize their actions. For what is more excusable than violence in the service of the oppressed cause of right?

Thus, in the immense complexity of human affairs, it sometimes happens that extreme liberty corrects the abuses of liberty, and that extreme democracy prevents the dangers of democracy.

In Europe, associations see themselves as something like the legislative and executive council of a nation that cannot raise its own voice; starting from this idea, they act and command. In America, where they represent in everyone's eyes only a minority within the nation, they speak and they petition.

The means that associations use in Europe are consistent with the goal they set for themselves.

Since the main aim of these associations is to act rather than to talk, to fight rather than to persuade, they are naturally led to adopt an organization that has nothing civil about it and to introduce into their ranks military habits and maxims. Accordingly, they centralize the direction of their forces as much as they can and place all power in the hands of a very few.

The members of these associations respond to a watchword like soldiers in the field; they profess the doctrine of passive obedience -- or rather, by joining, they have made a single, total sacrifice of their judgment and their free will. As a result, within these associations there often reigns a tyranny more unbearable than the one exercised in society at large by the government under attack.

This greatly diminishes their moral force. They lose the sacred character that attaches to the struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. For someone who consents to obey slavishly, in certain cases, a few of his fellow men -- who surrenders his will and submits even his thought -- how can such a person claim to want to be free?

The Americans have also established a kind of government within their associations; but it is, if I may put it this way, a civil government. Individual independence has its place in it: as in society at large, all members move together toward the same goal, but no one is required to march there by exactly the same path. No one sacrifices their will or their reason; instead, they apply their will and their reason to the success of an enterprise they share.

CHAPTER V.

ON DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE IN AMERICA.

I know I am walking on burning ground here. Every word of this chapter is bound to offend some faction among those dividing my country. I will say what I think regardless.

In Europe, we struggle to judge democracy's true character and permanent instincts, because in Europe two opposing principles are at war, and we cannot tell precisely what should be attributed to the principles themselves and what to the passions that the struggle has produced.

It is not the same in America. There, the people rule without obstacles; they have no dangers to fear and no wrongs to avenge.

In America, then, democracy is left to its own tendencies. Its behavior is natural and all its movements are free. That is where we should judge it. And for whom would this study be interesting and useful, if not for us — driven forward each day by an irresistible movement, marching blindly, perhaps toward despotism, perhaps toward a republic, but certainly toward a democratic social order?

ON UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE.

I said earlier that every state in the Union has adopted universal suffrage. You find it among populations at very different levels on the social scale. I had the chance to observe its effects in diverse places and among groups of people whose language, religion, or customs make them almost foreign to one another: in Louisiana as in New England, in Georgia as in Canada. I noticed that universal suffrage was far from producing, in America, all the benefits and all the harms expected of it in Europe, and that its effects were generally different from what people suppose.

ON THE PEOPLE'S CHOICES, AND THE INSTINCTS OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IN ITS CHOICES.

I have said that in many European countries, people believe — without saying so, or say without believing — that one of the great advantages of universal suffrage is that it puts people worthy of public trust in charge of public affairs. The people cannot govern themselves, they say, but they always sincerely want the good of the state, and their instinct rarely fails to identify those who share that desire and are most capable of holding power.

For my part, I must say it: what I saw in America does not authorize me to think this is the case. When I arrived in the United States, I was struck with surprise to discover how much talent existed among the governed and how little among the governors. It is a constant fact that, in our day, the most remarkable men in the United States are rarely called to public office, and one must recognize that this has increasingly been the case as democracy has pushed past all its former limits. It is clear that the caliber of American statesmen has shrunk dramatically over the past half-century.

Several causes can be identified for this phenomenon.

It is impossible, no matter what you do, to raise the people's level of education above a certain point. You can make human knowledge more accessible, improve teaching methods, and put learning within everyone's reach — you will never get people to educate themselves and develop their minds without dedicating time to it.

The degree to which the people can live without working therefore sets the necessary limit on their intellectual progress. This limit is set higher in some countries, lower in others; but for it not to exist at all, the people would have to be free from all material cares — which is to say, they would no longer be "the people." It is therefore as hard to imagine a society where everyone is highly educated as a state where every citizen is rich; these are two linked difficulties. I will readily grant that the mass of citizens very sincerely wants the good of the country; I will go further and say that the lower classes of society seem to me, in general, to mix less personal calculation into this desire than the upper classes; but what they always lack, more or less, is the skill to judge the means while sincerely wanting the end. What a long study, what a variety of knowledge is required to form an accurate picture of a single person's character! The greatest minds get it wrong, and the crowd is supposed to succeed! The people never have the time or the means to devote themselves to this work. They must always judge in haste and latch onto whatever is most eye-catching. That is why charlatans of every stripe know so well how to please them, while their truest friends so often fail at it.

Besides, it is not always the ability to choose men of merit that democracy lacks, but the desire and the taste for it.

We should not fool ourselves: democratic institutions develop the feeling of envy in the human heart to a very high degree. This is not so much because they offer everyone the means to become equal to everyone else, but because those means constantly fail the people using them. Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to fully satisfy it. This complete equality slips from the people's hands every day just as they think they have seized it, and flees, as Pascal said, in an eternal flight; the people burn in pursuit of this good all the more precious because it is near enough to be glimpsed, far enough not to be tasted. The chance of succeeding excites them, the uncertainty of success irritates them; they agitate, they grow weary, they grow bitter. Everything that surpasses them in any way then seems an obstacle to their desires, and there is no superiority so legitimate that the sight of it does not tire their eyes.

Many people imagine that this secret instinct that leads the lower classes in France to push the upper classes away from public affairs as much as possible is a uniquely French phenomenon; this is an error: the instinct I am describing is not French, it is democratic; political circumstances may have given it a particular bitterness, but they did not create it.

In the United States, the people feel no hatred for the upper classes of society; but they feel little goodwill toward them, and carefully keep them out of power; they do not fear great talents, but they have little taste for them. In general, one notices that anything that rises without the people's support has difficulty winning their favor.

While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to push distinguished men away from power, an equally strong instinct leads those same men to distance themselves from political careers, where it is so hard for them to remain fully themselves and to advance without debasing themselves. This idea is expressed quite candidly by Chancellor Kent. That celebrated author, after lavishing praise on the part of the constitution that grants the executive the power to appoint judges, adds: "It is likely, in fact, that the men best suited to fill these positions would have too much reserve in their manners, and too much severity in their principles, to ever win a majority of votes in an election based on universal suffrage." (Kent's Commentaries, vol. I, p. 272.) This was printed without contradiction in America in the year 1830.

I am convinced that those who regard universal suffrage as a guarantee of good choices are completely deluding themselves. Universal suffrage has other advantages, but not that one.

ON CAUSES THAT MAY PARTIALLY CORRECT THESE DEMOCRATIC INSTINCTS.

When great dangers threaten the state, the people are often seen to choose the citizens best suited to save it.

It has been observed that a person in immediate danger rarely stays at their usual level; they rise far above it, or fall below. The same happens with nations. Extreme dangers, rather than elevating a nation, sometimes finish it off; they stir up its passions without guiding them, and confuse its judgment rather than enlightening it. The Jews were still slaughtering one another amid the smoking ruins of the temple. But it is more common, among nations as among individuals, for extraordinary virtues to be born from the very imminence of danger. Great characters then stand out in relief, like those monuments hidden by the darkness of night that are suddenly revealed in the glow of a fire. Genius no longer disdains to step forward of its own accord, and the people, struck by their own perils, forget for a time their envious passions. It is not rare to see famous names emerge from the ballot box at such moments. I said earlier that in America the statesmen of our day seem far inferior to those who appeared at the helm fifty years ago. This is not only due to the laws, but to circumstances. When America was fighting for the most just of causes — a people escaping the yoke of another people; when it was a matter of bringing a new nation into the world — all souls rose to meet the height of their endeavor. In that general excitement, superior men ran toward the people, and the people, taking them in their arms, placed them at their head. But such events are rare; it is by the ordinary course of things that we must judge.

If passing events sometimes manage to combat democracy's passions, education, and above all customs and values, exert an influence on its tendencies that is no less powerful but more lasting. This can be seen clearly in the United States.

In New England, where education and liberty are the children of morality and religion; where society, already old and long established, has been able to form its own maxims and habits; the people, while escaping every superiority that wealth and birth have ever created among human beings, have learned to respect intellectual and moral superiority and to submit to it without resentment: and so democracy in New England makes better choices than anywhere else.

As you move south, on the other hand, into states where the social bond is newer and weaker, where education has spread less widely, and where the principles of morality, religion, and liberty have combined less happily, you see that talent and virtue grow increasingly rare among the governors.

When you finally enter the new states of the Southwest, where the social body — formed only yesterday — is still just an agglomeration of adventurers or speculators, you are stunned to see into whose hands public power has been placed, and you wonder by what force, independent of legislation and of men, the state can grow and society prosper there.

There are certain laws that are democratic in nature yet manage to partially correct these dangerous instincts of democracy.

When you enter the chamber of the House of Representatives in Washington, you are struck by the common appearance of that great assembly. Your eye often searches in vain for a single famous face. Almost all its members are obscure figures whose names bring no image to mind. Most are small-town lawyers, shopkeepers, or even men from the lowest classes. In a country where education is almost universally spread, it is said that the people's representatives do not always know how to write correctly.

Two steps away, the Senate chamber opens, and within its narrow walls sits a large share of America's famous men. You can hardly spot a single person there who does not call to mind a recent distinction. They are eloquent lawyers, distinguished generals, skilled judges, or well-known statesmen. Every word that escapes from that assembly would do honor to the greatest parliamentary debates in Europe.

Where does this bizarre contrast come from? Why does the elite of the nation end up in one chamber rather than the other? Why does the first assembly contain so many common elements, while the second seems to hold a monopoly on talent and knowledge? Both, after all, come from the people; both are the product of universal suffrage; and no voice has yet been raised in America to claim the Senate is hostile to popular interests. Where, then, does such an enormous difference come from? I can see only one fact that explains it: the election that produces the House of Representatives is direct; the election from which the Senate emerges involves two degrees. All citizens elect the legislature of each state, and the federal constitution, transforming each of these legislatures into an electoral body in turn, draws the members of the Senate from them. Senators therefore express, albeit indirectly, the result of the universal vote; for the legislature that appoints senators is not an aristocratic or privileged body drawing its electoral right from itself; it depends essentially on all the citizens; it is generally elected by them every year, and they can always steer its choices by filling it with new members. But it is enough for the popular will to pass through this chosen assembly to be refined within it, so to speak, and emerge dressed in nobler and more beautiful forms. The men thus elected therefore always represent exactly the majority of the governing nation; but they represent only the elevated thoughts circulating within it, the generous instincts that animate it, and not the petty passions that often agitate it or the vices that dishonor it.

It is easy to foresee a time when American republics will be forced to multiply two-degree elections in their electoral system, or perish miserably among the shoals of democracy.

I will freely admit it: I see in the two-degree electoral system the only means of putting the use of political liberty within reach of every class. Those who hope to make this method the exclusive weapon of a party, and those who fear it, seem to me to fall into equal error.

THE INFLUENCE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY ON ELECTORAL LAWS.

When elections come only at long intervals, with each election the state risks upheaval.

Parties then make prodigious efforts to seize a fortune that passes so rarely within their reach; and since there is almost no remedy for the losing candidates, their ambition, pushed to despair, is something to fear. If, on the other hand, the legal contest is soon to be renewed, the losers are patient.

When elections follow one another rapidly, their frequency maintains a feverish agitation in society and keeps public affairs in a state of continual flux.

So on one side, there is a risk of unrest; on the other, a risk of revolution. The first system hurts the quality of government; the second threatens its existence.

The Americans preferred to expose themselves to the first evil rather than the second. In this, they were guided more by instinct than by reasoning, since democracy pushes the taste for variety to the point of passion. The result is a remarkable instability in legislation.

Many Americans consider the instability of their laws as the necessary consequence of a system whose general effects are useful. But there is no one, I believe, in the United States who would claim this instability does not exist or who would not regard it as a great evil.

Hamilton, after demonstrating the usefulness of a power that could prevent or at least delay the passing of bad laws, adds: "It may perhaps be said that the power of preventing bad laws includes that of preventing good ones. This objection will have little weight with those who can properly estimate the mischief of that inconstancy and mutability in the laws which form the greatest blemish in the character and genius of our government." (Federalist, no. 73.)

"The ease with which laws can be changed," says Madison, "and the excess to which legislative power can be abused, seem to me the most dangerous diseases to which our government is exposed." (Federalist, no. 62.)

Jefferson himself, the greatest democrat ever to emerge from the heart of American democracy, pointed to the same dangers.

"The instability of our laws is truly a serious problem," he said. "I think we should have addressed it by deciding that there would always be a one-year interval between a bill's introduction and the final vote. It would then be debated and voted on without changing a single word, and if circumstances seemed to require faster action, the measure could only be adopted by a two-thirds majority in both chambers."

Letter to Madison, December 20, 1787, translated by M. Conseil.

ON PUBLIC OFFICIALS UNDER AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.

Public officials in the United States remain mixed in with the crowd of ordinary citizens; they have no palaces, no guards, no ceremonial robes. This simplicity among the governors is not simply a quirk of the American temperament, but reflects the fundamental principles of the society.

In the eyes of democracy, government is not a good thing, but a necessary evil. Officials must be given a certain amount of power — for without it, what would be the point of them? — but the outward trappings of power are not indispensable to getting things done; they needlessly offend the public's eyes.

The officials themselves feel perfectly well that they have earned the right to place themselves above others through their authority only on the condition of lowering themselves to everyone's level through their manners.

I cannot imagine anyone more unassuming in their conduct, more accessible to all, more attentive to requests, and more polite in their responses than an American public official.

I like this natural bearing of democratic government; in this inner strength that attaches to the office more than to the officeholder, to the person more than to the outward signs of power, I see something robust and worthy of admiration.

As for the influence of official uniforms and costumes, I think their importance is greatly exaggerated in a century like ours. I did not notice that in America the official, in exercising his authority, was received with any less regard or respect for being stripped of everything but his own merit.

On the other hand, I very much doubt that a special outfit makes public officials respect themselves when they are not naturally inclined to do so; for I cannot believe they have more regard for their clothes than for their person.

When I see, among us in France, certain judges treating parties with rudeness or flinging witticisms at them, shrugging their shoulders at the arguments of the defense and smirking with satisfaction at the listing of the charges, I wish someone would try taking their robes away, to see whether, finding themselves dressed like ordinary citizens, that might not remind them of the natural dignity of the human species.

None of the public officials of the United States wear a costume, but all receive a salary.

This follows even more naturally than the above from democratic principles. A democracy may surround its officials with pomp and dress them in silk and gold without directly attacking the principle of its existence. Such privileges are temporary; they belong to the office, not to the person. But to create unpaid offices is to create a class of rich and independent officials — to form the nucleus of an aristocracy. Even if the people retain the right to choose, the exercise of that right then has necessary limits.

When a democratic republic makes salaried offices unpaid, I believe one can conclude that it is heading toward monarchy. And when a monarchy begins paying for offices that were once unpaid, that is a sure sign of movement toward either despotism or a republic.

The substitution of salaried offices for unpaid ones seems to me, all by itself, to constitute a genuine revolution.

I regard the complete absence of unpaid offices in America as one of the most visible signs of democracy's absolute dominion. Services rendered to the public, whatever they may be, are paid for; so everyone has not only the right but the actual ability to perform them.

If, in democratic states, all citizens can obtain public positions, not all are tempted to seek them. What limits the voters' choice is not the conditions of candidacy but the number and quality of the candidates.

Among peoples where the elective principle extends to everything, there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a public career. People arrive at positions almost by chance and have no assurance of keeping them. This is especially true when elections are annual. It follows that, in calm times, public office holds little appeal for ambition. In the United States, it is people with moderate desires who plunge into the twists and turns of politics. Great talents and great passions generally steer clear of power to pursue wealth instead; and it often happens that a person takes on the management of the state's fortunes only when they feel poorly equipped to manage their own.

It is to these causes as much as to the poor choices of democracy that we must attribute the large number of common men occupying public office. In the United States, I do not know whether the people would choose the superior men who might seek their votes, but it is certain that those men do not seek them.

ON THE DISCRETIONARY POWER OF OFFICIALS UNDER AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.

I use the word "officials" here in its broadest sense: I apply it to all those charged with executing the laws.

There are two types of government under which a great deal of discretionary power is mixed into the actions of officials: this is the case under the absolute rule of a single person and under democratic government.

This similar effect stems from nearly analogous causes.

In despotic states, no one's position is secure — neither that of public officials nor that of ordinary individuals. The sovereign, holding in his hands the life, fortune, and sometimes the honor of those he employs, thinks he has nothing to fear from them, and he grants them great freedom of action because he is confident they will never abuse it against him.

In despotic states, the sovereign is so jealous of his power that he fears the constraints of his own rules; and he likes to see his agents act more or less at random, so he can be sure of never finding in them a tendency contrary to his wishes.

In democracies, the majority — able each year to take power away from whoever holds it — does not fear its abuse either. Being able to make its will known to the governors at any moment, it prefers to leave them to their own efforts rather than chain them to an invariable rule that, by constraining them, would in some sense constrain itself as well.

Looking more closely, one even discovers that under democracy, the discretionary power of the official must be greater still than in despotic states.

In despotic states, the sovereign can instantly punish every fault he notices; but he cannot flatter himself that he notices every fault he should punish. In democracies, by contrast, the sovereign is both all-powerful and everywhere at once; and so we see that American officials are far freer within the sphere of action the law marks out for them than any official in Europe. Often they are simply shown the goal they should aim for, and left to choose the means.

In New England, for example, the selectmen of each township are entrusted with drawing up the jury list; the only rule imposed on them is this: they must choose jurors from among citizens who have voting rights and a good reputation.

See the law of February 27, 1813. General Collection of the Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 2, p. 331. It should be noted that the jurors are subsequently drawn by lot from the lists.

In France, we would think people's lives and liberty were in danger if we entrusted any official, whoever it might be, with the exercise of such a formidable power.

In New England, these same officials can post the names of drunkards in taverns and prohibit, on pain of a fine, the residents from selling them wine.

Law of February 28, 1787. See General Collection of the Laws of Massachusetts, vol. 1, p. 302. Here is the text: "The selectmen of each township shall post in the shops of tavern-keepers, innkeepers, and retailers a list of persons reputed to be drunkards, gamblers, and who are in the habit of wasting their time and fortune in said establishments; and the proprietor of said establishments who, after this notice, shall have permitted said persons to drink and gamble in his dwelling, or shall have sold them spirituous liquors, shall be fined."

Such a censorial power would revolt the people in the most absolute monarchy; here, however, people submit to it without complaint.

Nowhere has the law left a greater share to discretionary authority than in democratic republics, because discretionary authority seems nothing to fear there. One can even say that the official becomes freer the lower the voting franchise descends and the shorter the term of office becomes.

From this it follows that it is very difficult to convert a democratic republic into a monarchy. The official, ceasing to be elected, generally retains the rights and habits of an elected official. That leads to despotism.

It is only in limited monarchies that the law, while marking out a sphere of action around public officials, also takes the trouble to guide them at every step within it. The reason for this fact is easy to state.

In limited monarchies, power is divided between the people and the prince. Both have an interest in keeping the official's position stable.

The prince does not want to place the officials' fate in the people's hands, for fear they would betray his authority; for their part, the people fear that officials placed in absolute dependence on the prince might serve to oppress their liberty; so the officials are made dependent on no one, so to speak.

The same cause that leads the prince and the people to make officials independent also leads them to seek guarantees against the abuse of that independence, so it is not turned against the authority of one or the liberty of the other. Both therefore agree on the need to lay out a course of conduct for the public official in advance, and both find it in their interest to impose rules from which it is impossible for the official to deviate.

ADMINISTRATIVE INSTABILITY IN THE UNITED STATES.

People passing through power for only a moment, then vanishing into a crowd that itself changes face every day — the result is that the actions of society in America often leave less of a trace than the actions of a single family. Public administration there is essentially oral and traditional. Nothing is written down, or what is written down flies away at the slightest breeze, like the Sibyl's leaves, and disappears without return.

The only historical records of the United States are newspapers. If a single issue goes missing, the chain of time is broken: the present and the past no longer connect. I have no doubt that in fifty years it will be harder to gather authentic documents about the details of American social life today than about the administration of France in the Middle Ages; and if a barbarian invasion were to surprise the United States, one would have to turn to other nations' histories to learn anything about the people who lived there.

Administrative instability began by penetrating people's habits; I could almost say that today everyone has come to develop a taste for it. No one worries about what was done before them. No method is adopted; no collection is assembled; no documents are gathered, even when it would be easy to do so. When people happen to possess them, they do not care much about keeping them. I have among my papers original documents that were given to me in government offices to answer some of my questions. In America, society seems to live day to day, like an army in the field. Yet the art of administration is certainly a science; and all sciences, to progress, need to link together the discoveries of successive generations. One person, in the short space of a life, notices a fact; another conceives an idea; this one invents a method; that one finds a formula; humanity gathers these various fruits of individual experience in passing and forms the sciences. It is very difficult for American administrators to learn anything from one another. They therefore bring to the management of society whatever knowledge is generally available, and not any expertise of their own. Democracy, pushed to its furthest limits, therefore hinders the progress of the art of governing. In this respect, it is better suited to a people whose administrative education is already complete than to a people still new to the experience of public affairs.

This, moreover, is not limited to administrative science alone. Democratic government, founded on an idea so simple and natural, always presupposes the existence of a highly civilized and learned society.

I am obviously speaking here of democratic government applied to a nation, not a small tribe.

At first you might think it belongs to the earliest ages of the world; but look more closely, and you easily discover that it could only have come last.

ON PUBLIC SPENDING UNDER AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.

Is the government of a democracy economical? First we must know what we are comparing it to.

The question would be easy to resolve if we wanted to draw a parallel between a democratic republic and an absolute monarchy. We would find that public spending is greater in the former than in the latter. But the same is true of all free states compared to those that are not. Despotism ruins people by preventing them from producing, far more than by taking the fruits of their production; it dries up the source of wealth while often sparing existing wealth. Liberty, on the contrary, produces a thousand times more goods than it destroys, and among nations that know it, the people's resources always grow faster than their taxes.

What matters to me right now is to compare free peoples to one another, and among them, to determine what influence democracy exerts on state finances.

Societies, like organisms, follow certain fixed rules in their formation that they cannot escape. They are composed of certain elements found everywhere and in every era.

It will always be easy to divide any people, conceptually, into three classes.

The first class will be made up of the rich. The second will include those who, while not rich, live in comfortable circumstances. In the third will be found those with little or no property, who live mainly on the work provided by the first two classes.

The individuals in these different categories may be more or less numerous depending on the social order; but you cannot make these categories disappear.

It is obvious that each of these classes will bring its own particular instincts to the management of state finances.

Suppose only the first class makes the laws: it will probably worry little about economizing on public funds, because a tax that falls on a large fortune takes only from the surplus and produces little noticeable effect.

Suppose instead that the middle classes alone make the law. You can count on them not to waste taxes, because there is nothing so disastrous as a heavy tax falling on a modest fortune.

Government by the middle class seems to me to be, among free governments, I will not say the most enlightened, or especially the most generous, but the most economical.

Now suppose that the last class is exclusively charged with making the law; I see plenty of reason to think that public spending will increase rather than decrease, for two reasons:

The majority of those voting for the law have no taxable property, so all the money spent in the interest of society appears to benefit them without ever harming them; and those who do have some property easily find ways to structure taxes so they fall only on the rich and benefit only the poor — something the rich could not do on their side when they control the government.

Countries where the poor are exclusively charged with making the law could not, therefore, expect great economy in public spending: spending will always be high, either because taxes cannot reach those who vote for them, or because they are structured so as not to reach them. In other words, the government of democracy is the only one where the person who votes for the tax can escape the obligation of paying it.

The word "poor" here, and throughout this chapter, is used in a relative, not absolute sense. America's poor, compared to Europe's, could often seem rich; but one is still right to call them poor when comparing them to their fellow citizens who are wealthier.

It is useless to object that the people's enlightened self-interest lies in preserving the fortunes of the rich, since the people would soon feel the effects of the hardship they created. But is it not also in kings' interest to make their subjects happy, and in nobles' interest to open their ranks at the right time? If long-term interest could prevail over the passions and needs of the moment, there would never have been tyrannical sovereigns or an exclusive aristocracy.

Someone will stop me again to say: Who has ever imagined putting the poor exclusively in charge of making the law? Who? Those who established universal suffrage. Is it the majority or the minority that makes the law? The majority, of course; and if I prove that the poor always make up the majority, will I not be right to add that in countries where they are called to vote, the poor alone make the law?

Now, it is certain that until now, among all the nations in the world, the greatest number has always been composed of those who had no property, or whose property was too small for them to live comfortably without working. Universal suffrage therefore truly gives the government of society to the poor.

The unfortunate influence that popular power can sometimes exert on state finances was clearly visible in certain democratic republics of antiquity, where the public treasury was drained to help indigent citizens or to put on games and spectacles for the people.

It is true that the representative system was virtually unknown in antiquity. In our day, popular passions find their way into public affairs with more difficulty; one can count, however, that in the long run, the representative will always end up conforming to the spirit of his constituents and making their inclinations as well as their interests prevail.

The extravagance of democracy is, moreover, less to be feared in proportion as the people become property owners, because then, on one hand, the people have less need of the rich man's money, and on the other, they encounter more difficulty in not hitting themselves when imposing taxes. In this regard, universal suffrage would be less dangerous in France than in England, where nearly all taxable property is concentrated in a few hands. America, where the great majority of citizens own property, is in a more favorable position than France.

There are still other causes that can increase the sum of public spending in democracies.

When the aristocracy governs, those who conduct the affairs of state are, by their very position, exempt from all material needs; content with their lot, they ask of society mainly power and glory; and, placed above the obscure crowd of citizens, they do not always clearly see how the general welfare might contribute to their own greatness. It is not that they view the poor man's suffering without pity; but they cannot feel his misery as if they shared it themselves; provided the people seem to accept their lot, the aristocrats consider themselves satisfied and expect nothing more from government. The aristocracy thinks about maintaining more than about improving.

When, on the contrary, public power is in the hands of the people, the sovereign looks everywhere for something better, because he feels that things are not right.

The spirit of improvement then extends to a thousand different things; it descends into infinite detail, and above all it applies itself to the kinds of improvements that can only be achieved by paying for them; for the goal is to improve the condition of the poor, who cannot help themselves.

There also exists in democratic societies a purposeless restlessness; a kind of permanent fever reigns that turns toward innovation of every kind, and innovations are nearly always costly.

In monarchies and aristocracies, the ambitious flatter the natural taste that leads the sovereign toward fame and power, and thus often push him into great expenditures.

In democracies, where the sovereign is needy, his goodwill can hardly be won except by increasing his well-being; and that can almost never be done without money.

Moreover, when the people themselves begin to reflect on their situation, a host of needs is born that they had not previously felt, and that can only be satisfied by drawing on state resources. This is why public spending generally seems to grow with civilization, and why taxes rise as education spreads.

There is one final cause that often makes democratic government more expensive than other kinds. Sometimes democracy wants to be economical in its spending, but cannot manage it, because it lacks the art of being economical.

Since it changes its plans frequently and its personnel even more frequently, its undertakings are either poorly managed or left unfinished: in the first case, the state spends disproportionately to the goal it aims to achieve; in the second, it makes unproductive expenditures.

ON THE INSTINCTS OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IN SETTING OFFICIALS' SALARIES.

There is one strong reason that generally leads democracies to economize on the salaries of public officials.

In democracies, those who set the salaries are very numerous and have very little chance of ever collecting them themselves.

In aristocracies, by contrast, those who set the large salaries almost always have a vague hope of benefiting from them. These are investments they create for themselves, or at least resources they prepare for their children.

It must be admitted, however, that democracy is extremely tight-fisted only toward its top officials.

In America, lower-ranking officials are better paid than elsewhere, but senior officials are paid much less.

These opposite effects are produced by the same cause: in both cases, the people set public officials' salaries; they think about their own needs, and the comparison enlightens them. Since they themselves live in considerable comfort, it seems natural to them that those who serve them should share it.

The comfortable circumstances of lower-ranking officials in the United States also stems from another cause, unrelated to the general instincts of democracy: every kind of private career is very profitable; the state would find no lower-ranking officials if it did not consent to pay them well. It is therefore in the position of a business that, whatever its economical preferences, must sustain costly competition.

But when it comes to setting the pay of the state's highest officers, this rule escapes them, and they proceed more or less at random.

The poor person has no clear idea of the needs that the upper classes of society may feel. What would seem a modest sum to a rich person appears prodigious to the poor one, who gets by on the bare necessities; and he thinks the state governor, provided with his two thousand ecus, should still count himself lucky and be the envy of others.

The state of Ohio, with a population of one million, gives its governor only 1,200 dollars in salary, or 6,504 francs.

If you try to explain to him that the representative of a great nation must appear before foreigners with a certain splendor, he will understand you at first; but when, turning to think of his own simple dwelling and the modest fruits of his hard labor, he considers all he could do himself with the salary you consider insufficient, he will be amazed and almost alarmed at the sight of so much wealth.

Add to this that the lower-ranking official is nearly on a level with the people, while the senior one towers above them. The former can still inspire their interest; the latter begins to arouse their envy.

This is clearly visible in the United States, where salaries seem to decrease, so to speak, as the officials' power grows.

To make this truth plain, it is enough to examine the salaries of some of the federal government's agents. I thought I should place alongside them the salaries attached to similar positions in France, so the comparison might fully enlighten the reader.

UNITED STATES. TREASURY DEPARTMENT. francs Messenger 3,734 Lowest-paid clerk 5,420 Highest-paid clerk 8,672 Chief clerk 10,840 Secretary of State 32,520 Head of government (the President) 135,000

FRANCE. MINISTRY OF FINANCE. francs Minister's messenger 1,500 Lowest-paid clerk 1,000-1,800 Highest-paid clerk 3,200-3,600 Secretary-general 20,000 Minister 80,000 Head of government (the King) 12,000,000

I may have been wrong to use France as a point of comparison. In France, where democratic instincts penetrate the government more every day, there is already a strong tendency for the chambers to raise low salaries and especially to reduce high ones. Thus the Minister of Finance, who in 1834 receives 80,000 francs, received 160,000 under the Empire; the directors-general of finance, who receive 20,000, received 50,000 then.

Under the rule of aristocracy, the opposite occurs: senior officials receive very large salaries while the lower ones often have barely enough to live on. It is easy to find the reason for this in causes similar to those we have indicated above.

If democracy does not appreciate the rich person's pleasures or envies them, aristocracy for its part does not understand the poor person's miseries — or rather ignores them. The poor person is not, strictly speaking, the rich person's equal; he is a being of a different species. The aristocracy therefore cares little about the fate of its lower-ranking agents. It raises their salaries only when they refuse to serve at too cheap a price.

It is democracy's stingy tendency toward top officials that has earned it a reputation for thrift that it does not deserve.

The truth is that democracy barely gives its rulers enough to live decently, but it spends enormous sums to relieve the people's needs or to make their lives more comfortable.

See, among other things, the American budgets for what it costs to maintain the poor and for free education. In 1831, the state of New York spent 1,290,000 francs on the support of the poor. And the sum devoted to public education is estimated at no less than 5,420,000 francs. (Williams's New York Annual Register, 1832, pp. 205 and 243.) The state of New York had in 1830 only 1,900,000 inhabitants — not even twice the population of the department of the Nord.

That is a better use of tax revenue, not an economy.

In general, democracy gives little to the governors and much to the governed. The opposite is true in aristocracies, where state money primarily benefits the class that runs things.

THE DIFFICULTY OF IDENTIFYING THE CAUSES BEHIND THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT'S ECONOMY.

Anyone who looks to the facts for the real influence that laws exert on the fate of humanity is exposed to great errors, for nothing is harder to assess than a fact.

One people is naturally frivolous and enthusiastic; another is reflective and calculating. This stems from their very physical constitution, or from distant causes I cannot identify.

You see peoples who love spectacle, noise, and joy, who do not regret a million spent on fireworks. You see others who value only solitary pleasures and who seem ashamed to appear happy.

In some countries, great importance is attached to the beauty of buildings. In others, no value whatsoever is placed on art, and people despise anything that does not turn a profit. There are nations that love fame, and others that put money above all else.

Independent of the laws, all these causes exert a very powerful influence on how the state manages its finances.

If Americans have never spent public money on festivals, this is not solely because, in their country, the people vote the tax — it is because the people do not like to celebrate.

If they reject ornament in their architecture and value only material, practical advantages, this is not only because they are a democratic nation — it is also because they are a commercial people.

The habits of private life have carried over into public life; and one must carefully distinguish, among Americans, the economies that stem from their institutions from those that flow from their habits and values.

CAN WE COMPARE THE PUBLIC SPENDING OF THE UNITED STATES TO THAT OF FRANCE?

Much attention has been devoted in recent years to comparing the public spending of the United States to ours. All such efforts have been fruitless, and a few words will suffice, I think, to prove that they were bound to be.

In order to assess the extent of a people's public spending, two operations are necessary: you must first learn the wealth of that people, and then what portion of that wealth they devote to state expenditures. Anyone who looks at the size of the taxes without showing the extent of the resources that must cover them is engaged in a pointless exercise; for what matters is not the spending itself, but the ratio of spending to revenue.

The same tax that a rich taxpayer bears with ease will finish driving a poor one into misery.

The wealth of nations is composed of several elements: real estate forms the first, and movable property constitutes the second.

It is difficult to know the extent of a nation's cultivable land and its natural or acquired value. It is even more difficult to estimate all the movable property a people possesses. These escape, by their diversity and number, almost every effort at analysis.

And so we see that even the most anciently civilized nations of Europe, including those with centralized administrations, have not yet precisely established the state of their wealth.

In America, the idea has not even been conceived. And how could anyone hope to succeed in a country where society has not yet settled into a stable and definitive form, where the national government does not have at its disposal, as ours does, a multitude of agents whose efforts it can command and direct simultaneously, where statistics are not cultivated because no one has the ability to gather documents or the time to read through them?

So the basic elements of our calculations cannot be obtained. We do not know the comparative wealth of France and the Union. The wealth of one has not yet been determined, and the means to establish the other's do not exist.

But I am willing, for a moment, to set aside this necessary term of comparison; I give up trying to know the ratio of tax to revenue, and content myself with trying to establish the amount of tax alone.

The reader will see that in narrowing the scope of my research I have not made my task any easier.

I do not doubt that the central administration of France, aided by all the officials at its disposal, could manage to determine exactly the total of direct and indirect taxes weighing on its citizens. But this work, which a private individual cannot undertake, the French government itself has not yet completed, or at least has not made its results known. We know what the state's charges are; the total of departmental spending is known to us; we do not know what happens in the townships: no one can therefore say, at present, how much total public spending amounts to in France.

If I turn now to America, I see the difficulties becoming more numerous and more insurmountable. The Union tells me exactly what its charges are; I can obtain the individual budgets of the twenty-four states that compose it; but who will tell me what the citizens spend on the administration of the county and the township?

Americans, as we can see, have four kinds of budgets: the Union has its own; the states, counties, and townships each have theirs as well. During my time in America, I conducted extensive research to learn the total of public expenditures in the townships and counties of the Union's principal states. I was able to obtain the budgets of the larger townships easily enough, but it was impossible to get those of the small ones. I therefore cannot form any precise idea of township spending. As for county expenditures, I do possess some documents that, though incomplete, may perhaps be worth the reader's attention. I owe to the kindness of Mr. Richard, former mayor of Philadelphia, the budgets of thirteen Pennsylvania counties for the year 1830. They are: Lebanon, Centre, Franklin, Lafayette, Montgomery, Luzerne, Dauphin, Butler, Allegheny, Columbia, Northumberland, Northampton, and Philadelphia. They contained, in 1830, 495,207 inhabitants. If you look at a map of Pennsylvania, you will see that these thirteen counties are scattered in every direction and subject to all the general causes that can influence the state of the country, so that it would be impossible to say why they would not provide an accurate idea of the financial state of Pennsylvania's counties. Now, these same counties spent during the year 1830 the sum of 1,800,221 francs, which gives 3 francs 64 centimes per inhabitant. I calculated that each of these inhabitants, during 1830, had devoted 12 francs 70 centimes to the federal Union and 3 francs 80 centimes to Pennsylvania; from which it follows that in 1830, these same citizens gave to society, to cover all public expenditures (except township expenses), the sum of 20 francs 14 centimes. This result is doubly incomplete, as one can see, since it applies to only a single year and to only part of public spending; but it has the merit of being certain.

The federal authority cannot extend so far as to compel the state governments to enlighten us on this point; and even if these governments were willing to lend us their simultaneous cooperation, I doubt they would be in a position to do so. Apart from the natural difficulty of the undertaking, the country's political organization would work against the success of their efforts. The township and county officials are not appointed by the state administrators and do not answer to them. It is therefore fair to assume that if the state wanted to obtain the information we need, it would encounter great obstacles in the negligence of the lower-level officials it would have to use.

Those who have tried to draw a parallel between American and French spending have rightly sensed that it was impossible to compare the total of French public spending with the total of the Union's; but they tried to compare detached portions of these expenditures. It is easy to prove that this second approach is no less flawed than the first. What would I compare our national budget to, for example? To the Union's budget? But the Union concerns itself with far fewer things than our central government, and its charges must naturally be much smaller. Would I set our departmental budgets against the budgets of the individual states? But in general the individual states attend to interests that are more important and more numerous than those administered by our departments; their expenditures are therefore naturally larger. As for county budgets, there is nothing in our financial system that resembles them. Should we fold the expenses shown there into the state budget or the township budget? Township expenses exist in both countries, but they are not always comparable. In America, the township takes charge of several matters that in France are left to the department or the state. What should we even mean by township expenses in America? Township organization differs from state to state. Shall we take as our standard what happens in New England or in Georgia, in Pennsylvania or in Illinois? It is easy to see a kind of analogy between certain budgets of the two countries; but since the elements composing them always differ to a greater or lesser degree, no serious comparison can be established between them.

It is pointless, moreover, to inquire what the Americans could do in this matter, since it is certain that until now they have done nothing.

There is therefore not a single person today in America or in Europe who can tell us what each citizen of the Union pays annually to meet the charges of society.

Even if one managed to learn the precise sum each French or American citizen pays into the public treasury, that would be only part of the truth. Governments do not ask taxpayers only for money; they also demand personal efforts that can be valued in money. The state raises an army; besides the pay that the entire nation takes upon itself to provide, the soldier must also give his time, which has a greater or lesser value depending on what use he could have made of it had he remained free. The same is true of militia service. The man who serves in the militia temporarily devotes precious time to public safety and truly gives the state what he himself fails to earn. I have cited these examples; I could cite many more. The governments of France and America levy taxes of this kind: these taxes weigh on their citizens; but who can accurately assess their amount in the two countries? This is not the last difficulty you encounter when trying to compare Union spending to ours. The state in France takes on certain obligations that it does not assume in America, and vice versa. The French government pays the clergy; the American government leaves that to the faithful. In America, the state takes charge of the poor; in France, it leaves them to public charity. We give all our officials a fixed salary; Americans allow theirs to collect certain fees. In France, compulsory road labor applies only on a small number of roads; in the United States, on nearly all of them. Our roads are open to travelers who can use them without paying anything; in the United States one encounters many toll roads. All these differences in how taxpayers meet the charges of society make comparison between these two countries very difficult; for there are certain expenses that citizens would not make, or that would be smaller, if the state did not undertake to act on their behalf.

Let us conclude that it is as difficult to fruitfully compare American social expenditures to ours as the wealth of the Union to that of France. I would add that it would even be dangerous to attempt it. When statistics are not founded on rigorously accurate calculations, they mislead rather than guide. The mind is easily taken in by the false air of precision that statistics retain even in their errors, and it rests without anxiety on mistakes dressed up in the mathematical forms of truth.

Let us abandon the numbers, then, and try to find our evidence elsewhere.

Does a country present the appearance of material prosperity; after paying the state, does the poor man still have resources and the rich man still have surplus; do both seem content with their lot and seek each day to improve it further, so that capital never fails industry and industry in turn never fails capital: these are the signs to which, in the absence of positive data, one can turn to learn whether the public charges weighing on a people are proportionate to its wealth.

The observer who relied on these indicators would no doubt judge that the American in the United States gives the state a smaller share of his income than the Frenchman.

But how could it be otherwise?

Part of France's debt is the result of two invasions; the Union has none to fear. Our position forces us to keep a large army permanently under arms; the Union's isolation allows it to have only 6,000 soldiers. We maintain nearly 300 ships; the Americans have only 52.

See the detailed budgets of the French Ministry of the Navy, and for America, the National Calendar of 1833, p. 228.

How could the citizen of the Union possibly pay as much to the state as the citizen of France?

There is therefore no parallel to draw between the finances of countries so differently situated.

It is by examining what happens within the Union, and not by comparing the Union to France, that we can judge whether American democracy is truly economical.

I look at each of the various republics that make up the confederation, and I discover that their government often lacks persistence in its plans and does not maintain continuous oversight of the men it employs. I naturally draw the conclusion that it must often spend taxpayers' money needlessly, or devote more than is necessary to its undertakings.

I see that, faithful to its popular origins, it makes prodigious efforts to satisfy the needs of the lower classes of society, to open the paths of power to them, and to spread well-being and education among them. It maintains the poor, distributes millions each year to schools, pays for all services, and compensates even its lowest agents generously. If such a way of governing seems useful and reasonable to me, I am forced to recognize that it is expensive.

I see the poor man directing public affairs and disposing of national resources; and I cannot believe that, taking advantage of the state's spending, he does not often lead the state into new spending.

I therefore conclude, without resorting to incomplete figures and without trying to make risky comparisons, that the democratic government of the Americans is not, as is sometimes claimed, a government that runs cheaply; and I do not hesitate to predict that if great difficulties were one day to assail the peoples of the United States, taxes there would rise as high as in most of the aristocracies or monarchies of Europe.

ON CORRUPTION AND THE VICES OF THOSE WHO GOVERN IN A DEMOCRACY; ON THE EFFECTS THIS HAS ON PUBLIC MORALITY.

Aristocracy and democracy hurl the charge of corruption at each other; a distinction is needed:

In aristocratic governments, those who reach power are rich men who want only power. In democracies, the statesmen are poor and have their fortunes to make.

It follows that in aristocratic states, the governors are not very susceptible to corruption and have only a very moderate appetite for money, while the opposite is true among democratic peoples.

But in aristocracies, those who want to reach the top of public affairs command great wealth, and the number of those who can put them there is often limited; government is, in a sense, put up for auction. In democracies, by contrast, those who seek power are almost never rich, and the number of those who help confer it is very large. Perhaps in democracies there are no fewer men for sale, but there are almost no buyers; and besides, one would have to buy too many people at once to achieve the goal.

Among the men who have held power in France over the past forty years, several have been accused of enriching themselves at the expense of the state and its allies — a charge that was rarely leveled against the public men of the old monarchy. But in France, it is almost unheard of for a voter's ballot to be bought with money, while this is done publicly and notoriously in England.

I never heard it said that in the United States riches were used to win over the governed; but I often heard the integrity of public officials called into question. Even more often I heard their success attributed to low intrigues or shady maneuvers.

If, then, those who lead aristocracies sometimes seek to corrupt, the leaders of democracies show themselves to be corrupt. In the former, public morality is attacked directly; in the latter, an indirect influence is exerted on the public conscience that is even more to be feared.

Among democratic peoples, those at the head of state are almost always the target of unpleasant suspicions, and they thereby lend the support of government, as it were, to the crimes of which they are accused. They thus present dangerous examples to virtue that still struggles, and provide flattering comparisons to vice that hides.

It is useless to say that dishonorable passions are found in all ranks; that they often rise to the throne by right of birth; and that one can therefore encounter deeply contemptible men at the head of aristocratic nations just as easily as in the heart of democracies.

This answer does not satisfy me: in the corruption of those who arrive at power by chance, there is something crude and vulgar that makes it contagious for the crowd; there reigns, by contrast, even in the depravity of great lords, a certain aristocratic refinement, an air of grandeur that often prevents it from spreading.

The people will never penetrate the obscure labyrinth of the courtier's mind; they will always struggle to see the baseness hiding beneath elegant manners, refined tastes, and the graces of language. But to steal from the public treasury, or to sell the state's favors for money — the lowest wretch understands that and can flatter himself that he could do the same.

What should be feared, moreover, is not so much the sight of the powerful being immoral as the sight of immorality leading to power. In a democracy, ordinary citizens see a man rising from their ranks and reaching wealth and power in a few years; this spectacle excites their surprise and their envy; they try to understand how someone who was their equal yesterday is today invested with the right to lead them. To attribute his rise to his talents or virtues is uncomfortable, because that means admitting that they themselves are less virtuous and less capable than he. So they place the main cause of his rise in some of his vices, and they are often right to do so. In this way, a certain odious mixture takes shape between the ideas of baseness and power, of unworthiness and success, of usefulness and dishonor.

WHAT EFFORTS DEMOCRACY IS CAPABLE OF.

I should warn the reader that I am speaking here of a government that follows the real wishes of the people, not one that merely commands in the people's name.

There is nothing so irresistible as a tyrannical power that commands in the name of the people, because being clothed in the moral authority that belongs to the will of the majority, it acts at the same time with the decisiveness, speed, and tenacity of a single individual.

It is rather difficult to say what degree of effort a democratic government is capable of in times of national crisis.

No great democratic republic has ever existed until now. It would be an insult to republics to give that name to the oligarchy that reigned in France in 1793. The United States alone presents this new spectacle.

Now, in the half-century since the Union was formed, its existence has been put in question only once — during the War of Independence. At the beginning of that long war, there were extraordinary displays of enthusiasm for the service of the country.

One of the most remarkable, in my opinion, was the resolution by which the Americans temporarily gave up the use of tea. Those who know that people generally cling more to their habits than to their lives will no doubt be astonished by this great and obscure sacrifice, obtained from an entire people.

But as the struggle dragged on, individual selfishness reappeared: money stopped flowing into the public treasury; men stopped showing up for the army; the people still wanted independence, but they recoiled before the means of obtaining it. "In vain have we multiplied taxes and tried new methods of levying them," says Hamilton in the Federalist (no. 12); "the public expectation has always been disappointed, and the state treasuries have remained empty. The democratic forms of administration, which are inherent to the democratic nature of our government, combining with the scarcity of currency produced by the languishing state of our commerce, have until now rendered useless every effort made to raise considerable sums. The different legislatures have finally understood the futility of such attempts."

Since that time, the United States has not had a single serious war to fight.

To judge what sacrifices democracies are capable of imposing on themselves, we must therefore wait for the time when the American nation will have to put half its income into the hands of its government, as England did, or throw one-twentieth of its entire population onto the battlefield at once, as France did.

In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for money. Forced recruitment is so contrary to American ideas and so alien to the habits of the American people that I doubt anyone would ever dare introduce it into law. What we call conscription in France is surely the heaviest of all our taxes; but without conscription, how could we sustain a major continental war?

The Americans have not adopted the English system of impressment. They have nothing resembling our naval conscription. The state navy, like the merchant marine, is recruited entirely through voluntary enlistment.

Now, it is not easy to see how a people could sustain a great naval war without resorting to one of the two methods indicated above: and so the Union, though it has fought on the seas with glory, has never had large fleets, and the outfitting of its small number of ships has always cost it dearly.

I have heard American statesmen admit that the Union will have difficulty maintaining its rank on the seas if it does not resort to impressment or naval conscription; but the difficulty is forcing the people — who govern — to accept impressment or naval conscription.

It is indisputable that free peoples generally display, in times of danger, an energy infinitely greater than those who are not free; but I am inclined to believe this is especially true of free peoples in which the aristocratic element dominates. Democracy seems to me much better suited to directing a peaceful society, or to making a sudden and vigorous effort when needed, than to braving the great storms of political life for a long time. The reason is simple: people expose themselves to dangers and privations through enthusiasm, but they remain exposed to them for a long time only through reflection. In what is called instinctive courage itself, there is more calculation than people think; and although passions alone generally produce the first efforts, it is with the result in view that people continue them. You risk a part of what you hold dear in order to save the rest.

Now, it is precisely this clear perception of the future, founded on education and experience, that democracy must often lack. The people feel far more than they reason; and if the present evils are great, there is reason to fear they will forget the even greater evils that perhaps await them in case of defeat.

There is yet another cause that must make the efforts of a democratic government less durable than those of an aristocracy.

The people not only see less clearly than the upper classes what they can hope or fear from the future, but they also suffer far more than those classes from the evils of the present. The nobleman, in risking his person, faces as many chances for glory as for danger. In handing over the greater part of his income to the state, he temporarily gives up some of the pleasures of wealth; but for the poor man, death holds no prestige, and the tax that merely inconveniences the rich often strikes at the very sources of life for the poor.

This relative weakness of democratic republics in times of crisis is perhaps the greatest obstacle to the founding of such a republic in Europe. For a democratic republic to survive without difficulty among a European people, it would need to be established simultaneously among all the others.

I believe that democratic government must, in the long run, increase the real strength of society; but it cannot bring together, at a single point and at a given moment, as many forces as an aristocratic government or an absolute monarchy. If a democratic country remained under republican government for a century, one can believe that at the end of the century it would be richer, more populous, and more prosperous than the despotic states around it; but during that century, it would have run the risk several times over of being conquered by them.

ON THE POWER THAT AMERICAN DEMOCRACY GENERALLY EXERCISES OVER ITSELF.

This difficulty that democracy has in conquering its passions and silencing its immediate needs for the sake of the future is visible in the United States in the smallest things.

The people, surrounded by flatterers, struggle to triumph over themselves. Every time someone tries to get them to accept a privation or a constraint, even for a purpose their reason approves, they almost always begin by refusing. Americans' obedience to the law is rightly praised. But it must be added that in America, the law is made by the people and for the people. In the United States, the law therefore favors those who, everywhere else, have the greatest interest in violating it. It is fair to assume, then, that a burdensome law whose present usefulness the majority did not feel would either not be passed or not be obeyed.

In the United States, there is no legislation dealing with fraudulent bankruptcy. Is that because there are no bankruptcies? No — quite the contrary, because there are so many. The fear of being prosecuted as a bankrupt outweighs, in the majority's mind, the fear of being ruined by bankruptcies; and a kind of guilty tolerance forms in the public conscience for the offense that each person individually condemns.

In the new states of the Southwest, citizens almost always take justice into their own hands, and murders are constantly repeated. This is because the habits of the people are too rough, and education too little spread in those wilds, for people to feel the usefulness of giving the law its force: duels are still preferred to lawsuits.

Someone said to me one day, in Philadelphia, that almost all crimes in America were caused by the abuse of hard liquor, which the lower classes could use at will because it was sold to them so cheaply. "Why don't you put a tax on spirits?" I asked. "Our legislators have often thought about it," he replied, "but the thing is difficult. People fear a revolt; and besides, the members who voted for such a law would be certain not to be reelected." "So then," I said, "among you the drinkers are in the majority, and temperance is unpopular."

When you point these things out to statesmen, they simply reply: Give it time; the awareness of the problem will educate the people and show them their needs. This is often true: if democracy has more chances of going wrong than a king or a body of nobles, it also has more chances of returning to the truth once the light reaches it, because there is generally no interest within it that is opposed to that of the majority and that fights against reason. But democracy can only reach truth through experience, and many peoples cannot wait for the results of their errors without perishing.

The great privilege of Americans, then, is not simply being more enlightened than others, but having the ability to make mistakes that can be repaired.

Add to this that, for democracy to easily profit from past experience, it must have already reached a certain degree of civilization and education.

You see peoples whose early education was so defective, and whose character presents such a strange mixture of passions, ignorance, and erroneous ideas about everything, that they cannot by themselves discern the cause of their miseries; they succumb to ills they do not understand.

I have traveled through vast regions once inhabited by powerful Indian nations that no longer exist; I lived among tribes already mutilated, who watch their numbers shrink and the brilliance of their savage glory fade with each passing day; I have heard these Indians themselves predict the final destiny reserved for their race. There is no European, however, who does not see what would need to be done to save these unfortunate peoples from inevitable destruction. But they themselves do not see it; they feel the ills that pile up on their heads each year, and they will perish to the last one while rejecting the remedy. It would take force to compel them to live.

One is astonished to see the new nations of South America thrashing about, for a quarter century, amid endlessly recurring revolutions, and each day one expects to see them return to what is called their "natural state." But who can say that revolutions are not, in our time, the most natural state for the Spanish peoples of South America? In that country, society struggles at the bottom of an abyss from which its own efforts cannot extract it.

The people inhabiting that beautiful half of a hemisphere seem obstinately bent on tearing out their own entrails; nothing can divert them from it. Exhaustion makes them fall for a moment into rest, and rest soon returns them to new furies. When I consider them in this alternating state of misery and crime, I am tempted to believe that despotism would be a blessing for them.

But those two words can never be united in my mind.

HOW AMERICAN DEMOCRACY CONDUCTS THE FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF THE STATE.

We have seen that the federal constitution placed the permanent direction of the nation's foreign interests in the hands of the president and the Senate,

"The President," says the Constitution, Art. II, Sect. 2, para. 2, "shall make treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate." The reader should keep in mind that senators serve six-year terms, and being chosen by each state's legislature, they are the product of a two-degree election.

which places the Union's general policy, up to a certain point, beyond the direct and daily influence of the people. One cannot therefore say absolutely that democracy, in America, conducts the foreign affairs of the state.

Two men have set the direction for American policy that is still followed today; the first is Washington, and Jefferson is the second.

Washington said, in that admirable letter addressed to his fellow citizens, which forms something like the political testament of that great man:

"To extend our commercial relations with foreign peoples and establish as few political connections as possible between them and us — this should be the rule of our policy. We must faithfully fulfill the commitments already made, but we must be careful not to enter into new ones.

"Europe has a certain number of interests that are its own and that bear no relation, or only a very indirect relation, to ours; Europe must therefore frequently find itself embroiled in quarrels that are naturally foreign to us. To bind ourselves by artificial ties to the vicissitudes of its politics, to enter into the various combinations of its friendships and hatreds, and to take part in the resulting struggles, would be to act imprudently.

"Our isolation and distance from Europe invite us to adopt a contrary course and allow us to follow it. If we continue to form a single nation governed by a strong government, the time is not far off when we shall have nothing to fear from anyone. Then we will be able to adopt a posture that commands respect for our neutrality; the belligerent nations, feeling the impossibility of gaining anything from us, will fear provoking us without cause; and we will be in a position to choose peace or war, taking no other guides for our actions than our interest and justice.

"Why would we abandon the advantages we can derive from so favorable a situation? Why would we leave ground that is our own to go stand on foreign ground? Why, finally, linking our destiny to that of any part of Europe, would we expose our peace and prosperity to the ambition, the rivalries, the interests, or the whims of the peoples who inhabit it?

"Our true policy is to contract no permanent alliance with any foreign nation, at least so long as we are still free not to do so, for I am far from wishing that we should fail to honor existing commitments. Honesty is always the best policy — a maxim I hold to be equally applicable to the affairs of nations and of individuals. I therefore think we must carry out in their full extent the commitments we have already made; but I believe it useless and imprudent to contract others. Let us always place ourselves so as to command respect for our position, and temporary alliances will suffice to allow us to face all dangers."

Earlier, Washington had stated this beautiful and just idea: "The nation that indulges in habitual feelings of love or hatred toward another becomes in a sense a slave. It is a slave to its hatred or its love."

Washington's political conduct was always guided by these maxims. He managed to keep his country at peace while the rest of the world was at war, and he established as a point of doctrine that the enlightened self-interest of Americans was to never take sides in Europe's internal quarrels.

Jefferson went even further, and he introduced into the Union's policy this additional maxim: "That Americans should never ask for privileges from foreign nations, so as not to be obliged to grant any themselves."

These two principles, whose obvious justice easily put them within reach of the crowd, have enormously simplified the foreign policy of the United States.

The Union, not meddling in European affairs, has virtually no foreign interests to debate, for it does not yet have powerful neighbors in America. Placed by its situation as much as by its will outside the passions of the Old World, it has no more need to guard against them than to embrace them. As for those of the New World — the future still hides them.

The Union is free of prior commitments; it therefore profits from the experience of the old peoples of Europe without being obliged, as they are, to make use of the past and adapt it to the present. Nor is it forced to accept the immense inheritance bequeathed to it by its forefathers — a mixture of glory and misery, of national friendships and hatreds. The foreign policy of the United States is eminently one of waiting; it consists far more in abstaining than in acting.

It is therefore very difficult to know, at the present moment, what skill American democracy will develop in conducting the foreign affairs of the state. On this point, its adversaries and its friends alike must suspend their judgment.

As for me, I will not hesitate to say it: it is in the direction of the foreign interests of society that democratic governments seem to me decidedly inferior to others. Experience, customs and values, and education almost always end up creating in democracy that kind of everyday practical wisdom and that knowledge of the small events of life that we call common sense. Common sense suffices for the ordinary business of society; and among a people whose education is complete, democratic liberty applied to the state's internal affairs produces more goods than the errors of democratic government could cause harm. But this is not always the case in the relations of one people to another.

Foreign policy demands the use of almost none of the qualities that are natural to democracy, and requires on the contrary the development of almost all those it lacks. Democracy promotes the growth of the state's internal resources; it spreads prosperity, develops public spirit, strengthens respect for the law among the different classes of society — all things that have only an indirect influence on a people's position relative to another people. But democracy can only with difficulty coordinate the details of a great enterprise, fix on a plan and then follow it stubbornly through obstacles. It is scarcely able to combine measures in secret and patiently await their results. These are qualities that belong more particularly to an individual or to an aristocracy. Now, these are precisely the qualities that, in the long run, enable a people, like an individual, to achieve dominance.

If, on the other hand, you consider the natural defects of aristocracy, you will find that their effects are almost negligible in the conduct of foreign affairs. The chief vice charged against aristocracy is that it works only for itself and not for the mass. In foreign policy, it is very rare for the aristocracy to have an interest distinct from that of the people.

The tendency that leads democracy, in politics, to obey feelings rather than reasoning, and to abandon a long-matured plan for the satisfaction of a momentary passion, was clearly visible in America when the French Revolution broke out. The simplest rational considerations sufficed then, as now, to make Americans understand that it was not in their interest to embroil themselves in the struggle that was about to drench Europe in blood, and from which the United States could suffer no harm.

The sympathies of the people in favor of France declared themselves, however, with such violence that nothing less than the inflexible character of Washington and the immense popularity he enjoyed could prevent a declaration of war against England. And even so, the efforts that great man's austere reason made to fight against the generous but thoughtless passions of his fellow citizens nearly cost him the only reward he had ever reserved for himself — the love of his country. The majority declared against his policy; today the entire people approves it.

See the fifth volume of Marshall's Life of Washington. "In a government constituted like that of the United States," he says on page 314, "the chief magistrate cannot, however firm he may be, long resist the torrent of popular opinion; and the one then prevailing seemed to lead to war. Indeed, during the session of Congress held at that time, it was very frequently observed that Washington had lost the majority in the House of Representatives." Outside Congress, the violence of the language used against him was extreme; at one political meeting, he was indirectly compared to the traitor Arnold (page 265). "Those who held to the opposition party," Marshall continues (page 355), "claimed that the supporters of the administration constituted an aristocratic faction that was subservient to England and that, wishing to establish a monarchy, was therefore hostile to France; a faction whose members formed a sort of nobility, holding as their titles shares of the Bank, and who so feared any measure that might affect the funds that they were insensible to the affronts that both the honor and interest of the nation equally required them to repel."

If the constitution and public favor had not given Washington the direction of foreign affairs, it is certain that the nation would have done precisely then what it condemns today.

Nearly all the peoples that have powerfully influenced the world, those that have conceived, pursued, and carried out great designs — from the Romans to the English — were led by an aristocracy, and how could this be surprising?

What is most constant in its views, in all the world, is an aristocracy. The mass of the people can be seduced by its ignorance or its passions; a king's mind can be caught off guard and made to waver in his plans; and besides, a king is not immortal. But an aristocratic body is too numerous to be captured, yet not numerous enough to easily yield to the intoxication of reckless passions. An aristocratic body is a firm and enlightened man who never dies.

CHAPTER VI.

THE REAL ADVANTAGES THAT AMERICAN SOCIETY DERIVES FROM DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT.

Before beginning this chapter, I feel the need to remind the reader of something I have already indicated several times in the course of this book.

The political constitution of the United States seems to me one of the forms that democracy can give to its government; but I do not consider American institutions to be the only ones, or even the best ones, that a democratic people should adopt.

In showing the benefits that Americans derive from democratic government, I am therefore far from claiming or thinking that similar advantages can only be obtained through the same laws.

ON THE GENERAL TENDENCY OF LAWS UNDER AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, AND ON THE INSTINCTS OF THOSE WHO APPLY THEM.

Democracy's flaws are visible at a glance. -- Its advantages only become apparent over time. -- American democracy is often clumsy, but the general tendency of its laws is beneficial. -- Under American democracy, public officials have no permanent interests that differ from those of the majority. -- What follows from this.

The flaws and weaknesses of democratic government are easy to see; they can be demonstrated with clear facts, while its beneficial influence operates in a way that is imperceptible and almost invisible. Its defects jump out at you immediately, but its strengths only reveal themselves over time.

The laws of American democracy are often flawed or incomplete; they sometimes violate established rights or sanction dangerous ones. Even if they were good, their sheer frequency would still be a serious problem. All of this is obvious at first glance.

So why do the American republics survive and prosper?

We need to carefully distinguish, in any body of laws, the goal they pursue from the way they go about pursuing it; their absolute quality from their relative quality.

Suppose the legislator's aim is to favor the interests of the few at the expense of the many. His provisions are cleverly designed to achieve his intended result in the least time and with the least effort. The law will be well crafted, but its purpose will be bad; it will be dangerous in direct proportion to its effectiveness.

The laws of democracy generally aim at the good of the greatest number, because they come from the majority of all citizens, who can be mistaken but cannot have an interest opposed to their own.

The laws of aristocracy, by contrast, tend to monopolize wealth and power in the hands of the few, because an aristocracy by its nature always forms a minority.

So we can say, as a general matter, that democracy's purpose in its legislation is more useful to humanity than aristocracy's purpose in its own.

But that is where democracy's advantages end.

Aristocracy is infinitely more skilled in the science of legislation than democracy could ever be. Master of itself, it is not subject to momentary impulses; it has long-term plans that it knows how to let ripen until the right moment comes. Aristocracy proceeds expertly; it knows the art of making all its laws converge simultaneously toward a single point.

This is not how democracy works: its laws are almost always flawed or poorly timed.

Democracy's methods are therefore more imperfect than aristocracy's: it often works against itself without meaning to; but its purpose is more beneficial.

Imagine a society that nature, or its constitution, has organized in such a way that it can withstand the passing effects of bad laws and can wait, without perishing, for the results of the general tendency of those laws, and you will see that democratic government, despite its defects, is still the best suited of all to make that society prosper.

That is precisely what happens in the United States; I will repeat here what I have already said elsewhere: the great privilege of Americans is being able to make mistakes that can be fixed.

Let me say something similar about public officials.

It is easy to see that American democracy often makes poor choices in the people it entrusts with power; but it is not as easy to say why the state prospers in their hands.

Notice first that in a democratic state, if the rulers are less honest or less capable, the governed are more informed and more attentive.

The people in democracies, constantly preoccupied with their own affairs and jealous of their rights, prevent their representatives from straying too far from the general course that their interests dictate.

Notice also that if the democratic official makes worse use of power than another kind of official, he generally holds it for less time.

But there is a more general and more satisfying reason than that one.

It matters, no doubt, to the well-being of nations that their rulers have virtues or talents; but what may matter even more is that their rulers have no interests opposed to those of the mass of the governed — because, in that case, virtues could become almost useless and talents destructive.

I said that it mattered for rulers not to have interests contrary to or different from those of the mass of the governed; I did not say it mattered for them to have interests identical to those of all the governed, for I am not aware that such a thing has ever existed.

No one has yet discovered a form of government that equally favors the development and prosperity of all the classes that make up a society. These classes have continued to form something like so many distinct nations within the same nation, and experience has shown that entrusting any one of them with the fate of the others is almost as dangerous as making one people the arbiter of another's destiny. When the rich alone govern, the interests of the poor are always at risk; and when the poor make the law, those of the rich face great hazards. So what is democracy's advantage? The real advantage of democracy is not, as some have claimed, to promote the prosperity of all, but merely to serve the well-being of the greatest number.

Those entrusted with running public affairs in the United States are often inferior in ability and character to the people that aristocracy would bring to power; but their interests merge and become one with those of the majority of their fellow citizens. They may therefore commit frequent errors and serious mistakes, but they will never systematically pursue a course hostile to that majority; and they will never manage to give the government an exclusive and dangerous direction.

Besides, the bad administration of a single official under democracy is an isolated event that has influence only during the short period of that administration. Corruption and incompetence are not common interests that can permanently bind people together.

A corrupt or incompetent official will not join forces with another official merely because the latter is also corrupt and incompetent, and these two people will never work together to make corruption and incompetence flourish among their descendants. On the contrary, the ambition and schemes of one will help unmask the other. In democracies, the vices of an official are generally his alone.

But public figures under aristocratic government have a class interest that, though it sometimes aligns with that of the majority, often remains distinct from it. This interest forms a common and lasting bond among them; it invites them to unite and combine their efforts toward a goal that is not always the happiness of the greatest number. It does not merely bind the rulers to one another; it also ties them to a considerable portion of the governed, since many citizens who hold no office are themselves part of the aristocracy.

The aristocratic official therefore finds constant support in society at the same time as he finds it in government.

This common purpose that, in aristocracies, links officials to the interests of one part of their contemporaries also ties them to the interests of future generations. They work for the future as much as for the present. The aristocratic official is thus pushed toward a single point all at once — by the passions of the governed, by his own, and I could almost say by the passions of his posterity.

How could he possibly resist? And so we often see, in aristocracies, the class spirit carrying along even those it does not corrupt, making them unwittingly reshape society for their own use and prepare it for their descendants.

I do not know whether a more liberal aristocracy than England's has ever existed, or one that supplied the country's government so steadily with leaders so worthy and so well-informed.

Yet it is easy to see that in English legislation, the interests of the poor have ended up being repeatedly sacrificed to those of the rich, and the rights of the majority to the privileges of the few. The result is that England today contains the most extreme fortunes imaginable, and you find misery there that nearly equals her power and her glory.

In the United States, where public officials have no class interest to advance, the general and continuous course of government is beneficial, even though the rulers are often unskilled and sometimes contemptible.

There is, therefore, at the heart of democratic institutions, a hidden tendency that often makes people contribute to the general prosperity despite their vices or their mistakes, while in aristocratic institutions there is sometimes a secret inclination that, in spite of talents and virtues, leads them to contribute to the misery of their fellow human beings. This is how it can happen that in aristocratic governments, public figures do harm without meaning to, and in democracies they produce good without intending it.

ON PUBLIC SPIRIT IN THE UNITED STATES.

Instinctive love of country. -- Reflective patriotism. -- Their different characteristics. -- That peoples should strive with all their might toward the second when the first disappears. -- The efforts Americans have made to achieve this. -- Individual interest intimately linked to that of the country.

There is a love of country whose main source lies in that unreflective, selfless, and indefinable feeling that ties a person's heart to the place where he was born. This instinctive love blends with a taste for old customs, with reverence for ancestors and the memory of the past; those who feel it cherish their country the way you love your family home. They love the peace they enjoy there; they cling to the quiet habits they have formed; they are attached to the memories it holds for them, and find a certain sweetness even in living there under obedience. Often this love of country is heightened by religious zeal, and then you see it work wonders. It is itself a kind of religion; it does not reason, it believes, it feels, it acts. Some peoples have, in a way, personified their country and glimpsed it in the prince. They transferred to him some of the feelings that compose patriotism; they took pride in his triumphs and were proud of his power. There was a time, under the old monarchy, when the French felt a kind of joy in surrendering themselves without recourse to the king's arbitrary will, and said with pride: "We live under the most powerful king in the world."

Like all unreflective passions, this love of country drives great bursts of effort rather than sustained commitment. After saving the state in a time of crisis, it often lets it wither in peace.

When peoples are still simple in their customs and firm in their beliefs; when society rests comfortably on an old order whose legitimacy is unquestioned, you see this instinctive love of country reign.

There is another patriotism, more rational; less generous and less passionate, perhaps, but more productive and more lasting. This one is born of knowledge; it develops with the help of laws; it grows through the exercise of rights; and it eventually merges, in a way, with personal interest. A person comes to understand how the country's well-being affects his own; he knows that the law allows him to contribute to producing that well-being; and he takes an interest in his country's prosperity, first because it is useful to him, and then because it is partly his own work.

But there sometimes comes a moment in the life of nations when old customs are changed, values destroyed, beliefs shaken, the prestige of memory vanished, and yet knowledge remains incomplete and political rights uncertain or restricted. People then see their country only in a faint and doubtful light; they no longer locate it in the soil, which has become in their eyes lifeless ground, nor in the customs of their ancestors, which they have been taught to regard as a yoke; nor in religion, which they doubt; nor in the laws, which they did not make; nor in the legislator, whom they fear and despise. They see their country nowhere, neither in its own form nor in any other, and they retreat into a narrow and unenlightened selfishness. These people escape from prejudice without recognizing the authority of reason; they have neither the instinctive patriotism of monarchy nor the reflective patriotism of the republic; they have stopped between the two, in the midst of confusion and misery.

What can be done in such a state? Go backward. But peoples no more return to the feelings of their youth than individuals return to the innocent pleasures of childhood; they can mourn those feelings but not bring them back to life. You have to move forward, then, and work quickly to link individual interest to the interest of the country in the eyes of the people, because selfless love of country is gone for good.

I am certainly far from claiming that, in order to reach this result, you should suddenly grant political rights to everyone; but I do say that the most powerful means — and perhaps the only one left to us — for getting people to care about the fate of their country is to let them participate in its government. In our time, civic spirit seems to me inseparable from the exercise of political rights; and I believe that from now on, the number of true citizens in Europe will grow or shrink in proportion to the extension of those rights.

Why is it that in the United States, where the inhabitants arrived only recently on the soil they occupy, where they brought with them neither customs nor memories; where they meet for the first time without knowing one another; where, in a word, the instinct of homeland can barely exist — why is it that each person takes as much interest in the affairs of his township, his county, and the entire state as in his own? Because each person, in his sphere, takes an active part in governing society.

The ordinary American has grasped the influence that general prosperity has on his own happiness — an idea so simple and yet so little understood by the common people elsewhere. What is more, he has grown accustomed to regarding that prosperity as his own handiwork. He therefore sees in the public fortune his own, and he works for the good of the state not only out of duty or pride, but I would almost dare say out of greed.

You do not need to study American institutions and history to see the truth of this; the social habits tell you enough. The American, taking part in everything done in his country, feels duty-bound to defend everything that is criticized there — because it is not just his country that is being attacked, it is himself. And so you see his national pride resorting to every trick and descending to every pettiness of personal vanity.

There is nothing more tiresome in daily life than this prickly patriotism of the Americans. Foreigners would be quite willing to praise much about their country; but they would like to be allowed to criticize something, and that is absolutely refused.

America is therefore a land of liberty where, in order not to offend anyone, a foreigner must speak freely about nothing — neither individuals nor the state, neither the governed nor the governors, neither public enterprises nor private ones; nothing, in fact, that one encounters there, except perhaps the climate and the soil; and even then, you find Americans ready to defend both as if they had personally created them.

In our time, we have to face facts and dare to choose between patriotism for all and government by the few; for you cannot combine the social strength and energy that the first provides with the guarantees of peace that the second sometimes offers.

ON THE IDEA OF RIGHTS IN THE UNITED STATES.

No great people without an idea of rights. -- How to give the people an idea of rights. -- Respect for rights in the United States. -- Where it comes from.

After the general idea of virtue, I know of none more beautiful than that of rights — or rather, the two ideas merge. The idea of rights is nothing other than the idea of virtue introduced into the political world.

It is with the idea of rights that people have defined what tyranny and license are. Enlightened by it, each person has been able to show independence without arrogance and submission without servility. A person who obeys violence bends and is diminished; but when he submits to the right of command that he recognizes in a fellow human being, he rises in a sense above the very person who commands him. There are no great individuals without virtue; without respect for rights there is no great people — you could almost say there is no society at all; for what is a gathering of rational and intelligent beings whose only bond is force?

I ask myself what is, in our time, the way to instill in people the idea of rights, and to make it, so to speak, tangible to them; and I see only one: give them all the peaceful exercise of certain rights. You can see this clearly with children, who are simply adults minus the strength and experience. When a child begins to move among external objects, instinct leads him to grab everything within reach; he has no concept of other people's property, not even of their existence. But as he learns the value of things and discovers that he too can be stripped of what he has, he becomes more careful and ends up respecting in others what he wants respected in himself.

What happens to the child with his toys happens later to the adult with everything he owns. Why is it that in America, the most democratic country of all, nobody raises the kinds of complaints against property in general that so often ring out in Europe? Need I say it? It is because in America there are no proletarians. Since everyone has something of his own to defend, everyone recognizes the right of property in principle.

In the political world, it is the same. In America, the common person has formed a high idea of political rights because he has political rights; he does not attack those of others so that his own will not be violated. And while in Europe the same kind of person fails to respect even sovereign authority, the American submits without complaint to the power of the least of his magistrates.

This truth shows up in the smallest details of a people's life. In France, few pleasures are exclusively reserved for the upper classes; the poor are admitted almost everywhere the rich can go. So you see them behave with decency and respect everything that serves enjoyments they share. In England, where wealth has the privilege of joy as well as the monopoly of power, people complain that when the poor manage to sneak into a place set aside for the rich, they love to cause pointless damage. Why be surprised? Care has been taken to ensure that they have nothing to lose.

Democratic government brings the idea of political rights down to the lowest citizen, just as the distribution of property puts the idea of property rights within the reach of all. This is one of its greatest merits in my eyes.

I am not saying that it is easy to teach all people to use political rights; I am only saying that when it can be done, the results are immense.

And I will add that if there is an age when such an undertaking must be attempted, this age is ours.

Do you not see that religions are weakening and that the divine notion of rights is disappearing? Do you not notice that customs are decaying and that with them the moral notion of rights is fading?

Do you not see beliefs everywhere giving way to calculations, and sentiments to reasoning? If, in the midst of this universal upheaval, you cannot manage to link the idea of rights to personal interest — which presents itself as the only fixed point in the human heart — then what will you have left to govern the world, except fear?

So when I am told that laws are weak and the governed unruly; that passions are fierce and virtue powerless; and that in this situation one must not think of expanding the rights of democracy — I reply that it is precisely because of these things that I believe we must think about it. And in truth, I believe that governments have an even greater stake in this than society does, because governments die, but society cannot.

For the rest, I do not want to overuse the example of America.

In America, the people were invested with political rights at a time when it was difficult for them to misuse those rights, because the citizens were few and simple in their customs. As Americans grew in number, they did not so much expand the powers of democracy as extend its domain.

There is no doubt that the moment when political rights are granted to a people long deprived of them is a moment of crisis — often a necessary crisis, but always a dangerous one.

A child kills without knowing the value of life; he takes another's property before realizing that his own can be taken from him. When the common person is suddenly granted political rights, he finds himself, in relation to those rights, in the same position as the child in relation to all of nature — and it is appropriate to apply that famous phrase to him: Homo puer robustus — man is a robust child.

This truth reveals itself in America as well. The states where citizens have enjoyed their rights the longest are the ones where they still know best how to use them.

It cannot be said often enough: nothing is more fertile in wonders than the art of being free; but nothing is harder than freedom's apprenticeship. The same is not true of despotism. Despotism often presents itself as the healer of all past suffering; it is the champion of justice, the defender of the oppressed, and the founder of order. Peoples fall asleep in the fleeting prosperity it creates; and when they wake up, they are wretched. Freedom, by contrast, is usually born in the midst of storms; it establishes itself painfully amid civil strife; and only when it has grown old can you know its blessings.

ON RESPECT FOR LAW IN THE UNITED STATES.

Americans' respect for the law. -- The paternal affection they feel for it. -- The personal interest everyone has in strengthening the law's power.

It is not always possible to call the entire people, directly or indirectly, to the making of law; but no one can deny that when this is practicable, the law gains great authority. This popular origin, which often hurts the quality and wisdom of legislation, contributes remarkably to its power.

There is a prodigious force in the expression of the will of an entire people. When it comes out into the open, even the imagination of those who would resist it is overwhelmed.

Political parties know this well.

So you see them contesting the majority wherever they can. When they lack it among those who voted, they place it among those who abstained; and when it escapes them there too, they find it among those who did not have the right to vote.

In the United States, except for slaves, servants, and paupers supported by the townships, there is no one who is not a voter and who does not thereby share indirectly in the making of law. Those who want to attack the laws are therefore reduced to doing one of two things openly: they must either change the opinion of the nation, or trample its will underfoot.

Add to this first reason another, more direct and more powerful: in the United States, each person has a kind of personal interest in everyone's obedience to the laws; for whoever is not part of the majority today may be in its ranks tomorrow, and the respect he now professes for the will of the legislator he will soon have occasion to demand for his own. However objectionable a law may be, the resident of the United States submits to it willingly, not only because it is the work of the majority but because it is his own; he regards it as a contract in which he is a party.

You do not see, therefore, in the United States, a large and perpetually unruly mob that views the law as a natural enemy and looks upon it with nothing but fear and suspicion. On the contrary, you cannot help noticing that all classes show great confidence in the legislation that governs the country and feel a kind of paternal affection for it.

I am wrong to say all classes. In America, the European scale of power being inverted, the rich find themselves in a position analogous to that of the poor in Europe: they are the ones who often distrust the law. As I have said elsewhere: the real advantage of democratic government is not to guarantee the interests of all, as some have claimed, but only to protect those of the greatest number. In the United States, where the poor govern, the rich always have reason to fear that the poor will abuse their power against them.

This attitude on the part of the rich may produce a quiet resentment; but society is not violently disrupted by it, because the same reason that prevents the rich man from trusting the legislator also prevents him from defying his commands. He does not make the law because he is rich, and he dares not break it because of his wealth. In civilized nations, it is generally only those who have nothing to lose who revolt. So if the laws of democracy are not always worthy of respect, they are almost always respected; for those who usually break laws cannot help but obey the ones they have made and from which they benefit, and citizens who might have an interest in breaking them are led by temperament and position to submit to whatever the legislator wills. Besides, in America the people obey the law not only because it is their work but also because they can change it whenever it happens to hurt them; they submit to it first as a self-imposed hardship, and then as a temporary one.

THE ACTIVITY THAT PERVADES EVERY PART OF THE BODY POLITIC IN THE UNITED STATES; THE INFLUENCE IT HAS ON SOCIETY.

The political activity that reigns in the United States is harder to grasp than the liberty or equality found there. -- The great commotion that constantly stirs the legislatures is only an episode, an extension of a universal movement. -- The difficulty the American has in minding only his own business. -- Political agitation spills over into civil society. -- The industrial energy of Americans partly coming from this cause. -- Indirect advantages that society derives from democratic government.

When you travel from a free country to one that is not, you are struck by an extraordinary sight: in one, everything is activity and movement; in the other, everything seems calm and still. In the first, the talk is all of improvement and progress; the second seems, after having acquired every blessing, to aspire only to rest and enjoy. Yet the country that goes to so much trouble to be happy is generally richer and more prosperous than the one that seems so satisfied with its lot. And when you look at both of them, it is hard to understand how so many new needs make themselves felt every day in the first, while so few seem to arise in the second.

If this observation applies to free countries that have kept the monarchical form and to those where aristocracy dominates, it applies far more to democratic republics. There, it is no longer one segment of the people that takes on the task of improving society's condition; the whole people takes charge. It is not just a matter of providing for the needs and comforts of one class, but of all classes at once.

It is not impossible to conceive of the immense liberty that Americans enjoy; you can also form an idea of their extreme equality; but what you cannot understand without having witnessed it firsthand is the political activity that reigns in the United States.

The moment you set foot on American soil, you find yourself in the middle of a kind of tumult; a confused clamor rises from every direction; a thousand voices reach your ears at once, each expressing some social need. Around you, everything is in motion: here, the people of a neighborhood are meeting to decide whether to build a church; there, they are working to choose a representative; farther on, delegates from a county are hurrying to the city to discuss certain local improvements; in another place, farmers from a village are abandoning their fields to go debate the plan for a road or a school. Citizens assemble for the sole purpose of declaring that they disapprove of the government's course, while others gather to proclaim that the men in office are fathers of the country. And still others, viewing drunkenness as the chief source of the nation's ills, come to pledge solemnly to set an example of temperance.

Temperance societies are associations whose members pledge to abstain from hard liquor. During my time in the United States, these societies already had more than 270,000 members, and their effect had been to reduce, in the state of Pennsylvania alone, the consumption of hard liquor by 500,000 gallons per year.

The great political movement that constantly stirs American legislatures, the only one visible from the outside, is merely an episode and a kind of extension of the universal movement that begins in the lowest ranks of the people and then spreads, step by step, through all classes of citizens. No people on earth works harder at being happy.

It is hard to say how much of an American's life is taken up by the concerns of politics. Getting involved in governing society and talking about it — that is the American's greatest business and, so to speak, the only pleasure he knows. This shows up in the smallest habits of daily life: women themselves often attend public meetings and take a break from household cares by listening to political speeches. For them, clubs to some extent take the place of the theater. An American does not know how to converse, but he debates; he does not make speeches, but he holds forth. He always talks to you as if addressing an assembly; and if he happens to get worked up, he will say "Gentlemen" while speaking to his one companion.

In some countries, people accept the political rights that the law grants them with a kind of reluctance; dealing with public affairs seems like stealing their time, and they prefer to shut themselves up in a narrow selfishness whose exact boundaries are four ditches topped with a hedge.

But the moment the American were reduced to minding only his own business, half his existence would be taken from him; he would feel an immense void in his days and become incredibly unhappy.

The same thing was observed in Rome under the first Caesars. Montesquieu remarks somewhere that nothing equaled the despair of certain Roman citizens who, after the upheavals of political life, suddenly found themselves returned to the calm of private existence.

I am convinced that if despotism ever managed to establish itself in America, it would find it harder to overcome the habits that freedom has created than to overcome the love of freedom itself.

This constantly renewed agitation that democratic government has introduced into the political world then spills over into civil society. I am not sure that, all things considered, this is not the greatest advantage of democratic government, and I praise it far more for what it makes people do than for what it does itself.

It is undeniable that the people often manage public affairs very badly; but the people cannot engage in public affairs without broadening their horizons and breaking free from their ordinary routine. The common person who is called to participate in governing society develops a certain self-respect. Since he is then a power, very capable minds put themselves at his service. People constantly approach him seeking his support, and in trying to deceive him in a thousand different ways, they enlighten him. In politics, he takes part in enterprises he did not conceive, but which give him a general taste for enterprise. Every day, new improvements to common property are suggested to him; and he feels the desire to improve what is his own. He is perhaps neither more virtuous nor happier, but more informed and more active than those who came before him. I have no doubt that democratic institutions, combined with the physical nature of the country, are the cause — not the direct cause, as so many people claim, but the indirect cause — of the prodigious industrial energy you see in the United States. It is not the laws that create it, but the people learn to produce it by making the law.

When the enemies of democracy claim that one person does a better job at what he takes on than the government of all, I think they are right. The government of one, assuming equal levels of knowledge on both sides, shows more consistency in its undertakings than the multitude; it displays more perseverance, a better sense of the whole, greater attention to detail, and a sharper eye in choosing people. Those who deny these things have never seen a democratic republic, or have judged from too few examples. Democracy, even when local circumstances and the character of the people allow it to survive, does not present the appearance of administrative regularity and methodical order in government — that is true. Democratic liberty does not carry out each of its enterprises with the same perfection as an intelligent despotism; it often abandons them before reaping the results, or undertakes dangerous ones. But in the long run, it produces more; it does each thing less well, but it does more things. Under its rule, what is great is not so much what the public administration accomplishes but what is accomplished without it and outside of it. Democracy does not give the people the most skillful government, but it does something that the most skillful government is often powerless to create: it spreads through the entire social body a restless energy, a surplus of strength, a vitality that never exists without it, and that, as long as circumstances are even slightly favorable, can produce wonders. Those are its true advantages.

In this age, when the destiny of the Christian world hangs in the balance, some rush to attack democracy as a hostile power while it is still growing; others already worship it as a new god emerging from nothing. But both sides know only imperfectly the object of their hatred or their desire; they fight in the dark and strike only at random.

What do you want from society and its government? You have to be clear about that.

Do you want to give the human mind a certain elevation, a generous way of looking at the things of this world? Do you want to inspire in people a kind of contempt for material goods? Do you wish to create or sustain deep convictions and prepare the way for great acts of devotion?

Is it your aim to refine customs, to elevate manners, to make the arts shine? Do you want poetry, fame, glory?

Do you intend to organize a people so that it acts powerfully upon all others? Do you mean it to attempt great enterprises, and, whatever the result of its efforts, to leave an immense mark on history?

If that, in your view, is the principal purpose that people in society should set for themselves, do not take up democratic government; it would not lead you reliably to that goal.

But if it seems useful to you to redirect the intellectual and moral energy of human beings toward the necessities of material life and to use it to produce well-being; if reason seems to you more useful to people than genius; if your aim is not to create heroic virtues but peaceful habits; if you would rather see vices than crimes, and prefer to find fewer great actions on the condition of encountering fewer atrocities; if, instead of acting within a brilliant society, it is enough for you to live in the midst of a prosperous one; if, in short, the principal purpose of government is not, in your opinion, to give the nation as a whole the most power or the most glory possible, but to provide each of the individuals who compose it with the greatest well-being and spare him the greatest misery — then equalize conditions and establish democratic government.

But if it is no longer time to choose, and if a force greater than humanity is already carrying you, without consulting your wishes, toward one of these two forms of government, then try at least to draw from it all the good it can do; and understanding its good instincts as well as its bad tendencies, strive to limit the effects of the latter and develop the former.

CHAPTER VII.

THE MAJORITY'S ABSOLUTE POWER IN THE UNITED STATES AND ITS EFFECTS.

The natural strength of the majority in democracies. -- Most American constitutions have artificially increased this natural strength. -- How. -- Binding mandates. -- The majority's moral authority. -- The belief in its infallibility. -- Respect for its rights. -- What increases that respect in the United States.

It is in the very nature of democratic governments that the majority's rule is absolute; for in democracies, outside the majority, there is nothing that can resist.

Most American constitutions have gone further and sought to artificially increase this natural strength of the majority.

As we saw when examining the federal constitution, the framers of the Union made efforts in the opposite direction. The result of those efforts was to make the federal government more independent in its sphere than the state governments. But the federal government deals almost exclusively with foreign affairs: it is the state governments that truly run American society.

The legislature is, of all political powers, the one that most willingly obeys the majority. Americans have made it so that members of the legislature are elected directly by the people, and for very short terms, in order to force them to submit not only to the voters' general views but also to their day-to-day passions.

They have drawn the members of both chambers from the same classes and chosen them in the same way, so that the movements of the legislative body are nearly as rapid and no less irresistible than those of a single assembly.

Having constituted the legislature in this way, they concentrated almost the entire government within it.

At the same time that the law was increasing the strength of powers that were already naturally strong, it was steadily weakening those that were naturally weak. It gave the representatives of executive power neither stability nor independence; and by making them entirely subject to the whims of the legislature, it stripped them of whatever little influence the nature of democratic government might have allowed them to exercise.

In several states, it handed the judiciary over to election by the majority, and in all states it made the judiciary's very existence dependent on the legislature, by leaving it to the representatives to set the judges' salaries each year.

Custom has gone even further than law.

A practice is spreading more and more in the United States that will eventually render the guarantees of representative government meaningless: it is now very common for voters, when electing a representative, to lay out a plan of action for him and impose a certain number of specific obligations from which he cannot deviate. Apart from the commotion, it is as if the majority itself were deliberating in the public square.

Several particular circumstances also tend to make the majority's power in America not merely dominant but irresistible.

The majority's moral authority rests partly on the idea that there is more knowledge and wisdom in a large number of people gathered together than in any one person — that what matters is the number of legislators, not how they are chosen. This is the theory of equality applied to intelligence. This doctrine strikes at human pride in its last refuge, and so the minority accepts it only reluctantly; it gets used to it only with time. Like all powers — and more perhaps than any other — the power of the majority needs to endure before it appears legitimate. When it first establishes itself, it enforces obedience through compulsion; only after living under its laws for a long time do people begin to respect it.

The idea that the majority, by virtue of its collective knowledge, has the right to govern society was brought to American soil by the earliest settlers. This idea, which by itself would be enough to create a free people, has now passed into the culture and can be found in the smallest habits of daily life.

Under the old monarchy, the French held it as a certainty that the king could never be wrong; and when he happened to do something bad, they thought the fault lay with his advisors. This made obedience wonderfully easy. You could grumble about the law without ceasing to love and respect the lawmaker. Americans hold the same opinion of the majority.

The majority's moral authority also rests on the principle that the interests of the greater number should be preferred to those of the few. Now, it is easy to see that the respect people profess for this right of the greater number naturally increases or decreases according to the state of political parties. When a nation is divided among several great irreconcilable interests, the majority's privilege is often disregarded, because submitting to it becomes too painful.

If there existed in America a class of citizens that the legislator were working to strip of certain exclusive advantages held for centuries, and were trying to bring down from an elevated position into the ranks of the multitude, the minority would probably not submit easily to his laws.

But since the United States was settled by people who were equal to one another, there is as yet no natural and permanent conflict among the interests of its various inhabitants.

There are social conditions in which the members of the minority can have no hope of winning the majority over to their side, because doing so would mean abandoning the very thing they are fighting for. An aristocracy, for example, cannot become a majority while keeping its exclusive privileges, and it cannot let go of its privileges without ceasing to be an aristocracy.

In the United States, political questions cannot be posed in such absolute and all-encompassing terms, and all parties are ready to recognize the rights of the majority because they all hope to exercise those rights to their own advantage someday.

The majority therefore possesses in the United States an immense actual power and a moral authority that is nearly as great; and once it has made up its mind on a question, there are virtually no obstacles that can — I will not say stop, but even slow its advance and give it time to hear the complaints of those it crushes as it passes.

The consequences of this state of affairs are dire and dangerous for the future.

HOW THE MAJORITY'S ABSOLUTE POWER INCREASES THE LEGISLATIVE AND ADMINISTRATIVE INSTABILITY NATURAL TO DEMOCRACIES.

How Americans increase the legislative instability natural to democracy by changing the legislator each year and arming him with almost unlimited power. -- The same effect on administration. -- In America, the force applied to social improvements is infinitely greater but less sustained than in Europe.

I have already discussed the flaws that are natural to democratic government; there is not one of them that does not grow as the majority's power increases.

And to begin with the most obvious of all:

Legislative instability is an evil inherent in democratic government, because it is in the nature of democracies to bring new people to power. But this evil is greater or smaller depending on the power and means of action granted to the legislator.

In America, the authority that makes the laws is given sovereign power. It can give in rapidly and irresistibly to each of its whims, and every year it is given new representatives. That is to say, they have adopted precisely the combination that most encourages democratic instability, the one that allows democracy to apply its changing wishes to the most important matters.

America is therefore, in our time, the country in the world where laws last the shortest time. Nearly all American constitutions have been amended within the last thirty years. There is not a single American state that has not modified the basic principles of its laws during that period.

As for the laws themselves, a glance at the archives of any state in the Union is enough to see that in America the legislator never rests. Not that American democracy is by nature more unstable than any other, but it has been given the means to follow, in making laws, the natural instability of its inclinations.

The legislative acts passed in the state of Massachusetts alone, from 1780 to the present, already fill three fat volumes. Note too that the collection I am speaking of was revised in 1823, and many old or obsolete laws were removed from it. Yet Massachusetts, which is no more populous than one of our French departments, can be considered the most stable state in the entire Union, and the one that shows the most consistency and wisdom in its undertakings.

The majority's absolute power and the rapid and total way in which its will is carried out in the United States make not only the law unstable — they exert the same influence on the execution of the law and on public administration.

Since the majority is the only power that matters, people throw themselves eagerly into whatever projects it undertakes; but the moment its attention turns elsewhere, all effort ceases. In the free states of Europe, where the administrative power has an independent existence and a secure position, the will of the legislator continues to be carried out even when he has moved on to other things.

In America, far more zeal and energy are brought to certain improvements than anywhere else.

In Europe, an infinitely smaller but more sustained social force is applied to the same things.

Some years ago, a number of religious men undertook to improve the state of the prisons. The public was stirred by their appeals, and the rehabilitation of criminals became a popular cause.

New prisons were built. For the first time, the idea of reforming the offender entered a cell alongside the idea of punishment. But the happy revolution that the public had embraced so eagerly, and that the citizens' combined efforts made irresistible, could not be accomplished in a day.

Alongside the new penitentiaries, whose development the majority's enthusiasm was accelerating, the old prisons still stood and continued to hold a great number of convicts. These seemed to grow more unhealthy and more corrupting as the new ones became more reformist and more humane. This double effect is easy to understand: the majority, absorbed by the idea of building the new facility, had forgotten the one that already existed. As everyone looked away from what no longer held the master's attention, oversight ceased. First the healthy bonds of discipline loosened, then they broke. And alongside the new prison — a lasting monument to the gentleness and knowledge of our time — stood a dungeon that recalled the barbarism of the Middle Ages.

TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY.

How the principle of popular sovereignty should be understood. -- The impossibility of conceiving a mixed government. -- Sovereign power must be located somewhere. -- Precautions that should be taken to moderate its exercise. -- These precautions have not been taken in the United States. -- What follows.

I consider it an impious and detestable maxim that in matters of government the majority of a people has the right to do anything it pleases, and yet I locate the origin of all powers in the will of the majority. Am I contradicting myself?

There exists a general law that was made, or at least adopted, not merely by the majority of this or that people but by the majority of all humankind. That law is justice.

Justice therefore sets the limit on every people's right.

A nation is like a jury charged with representing universal human society and applying justice, which is its law. Should the jury, which represents society, have more power than the society itself whose laws it applies?

So when I refuse to obey an unjust law, I am not denying the majority the right to command; I am simply appealing from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of the human race.

There are those who have not been afraid to say that a people, in matters concerning itself alone, cannot go entirely beyond the limits of justice and reason, and that there is therefore no need to fear giving total power to the majority that represents it. But that is the language of a slave.

What is a majority, taken collectively, if not an individual with opinions and, more often than not, interests opposed to those of another individual called the minority? Now, if you grant that a single person vested with absolute power can abuse it against his opponents, why would you not grant the same thing about a majority? Have human beings changed their character by banding together? Have they become more patient in the face of obstacles by becoming stronger?

No one would try to argue that a people cannot abuse its strength against another people. Now, political parties are like so many small nations within a larger one; they stand in relation to each other as foreigners. If we agree that a nation can be tyrannical toward another nation, how can we deny that a party can be tyrannical toward another party?

For my part, I cannot believe it; and the power to do anything, which I refuse to grant to any one of my fellow human beings, I will never grant to several of them.

Not that I believe liberty can be preserved by mixing several principles within the same government in order to set them genuinely against one another.

The so-called mixed government has always seemed to me a fantasy. There is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a mixed government (in the sense usually given to that term), because in every society you eventually discover one principle of action that dominates all the others.

Eighteenth-century England, which has been particularly cited as an example of this kind of government, was an essentially aristocratic state, even though it contained powerful elements of democracy; for its laws and customs were so arranged that the aristocracy was bound, in the long run, to prevail and direct public affairs as it wished.

The mistake came from the fact that, seeing the interests of the great constantly in conflict with those of the people, observers focused only on the struggle and not on the outcome — which was the important thing. When a society arrives at a truly mixed government, equally divided between opposing principles, it enters into revolution or it falls apart.

I believe, therefore, that sovereign power must always be placed somewhere; but I believe liberty is in danger when that power encounters no obstacle that can slow its advance and give it time to moderate itself.

Absolute power seems to me a bad and dangerous thing in itself. Its exercise strikes me as beyond the capacity of any human being, and I see only God who can be all-powerful without danger, because his wisdom and justice are always equal to his power. There is no authority on earth so worthy of respect in itself, or invested with so sacred a right, that I would want to let it act without oversight and dominate without opposition. So when I see the right and the ability to do anything granted to any power whatsoever — whether it is called the people or a king, a democracy or an aristocracy, whether it is exercised in a monarchy or a republic — I say: there lies the seed of tyranny, and I will go live under other laws.

What I fault most in democratic government as it has been organized in the United States is not, as many people in Europe claim, its weakness, but on the contrary its irresistible strength. And what repels me most in America is not the extreme liberty that reigns there but the lack of guarantees against tyranny.

When a person or a party suffers an injustice in the United States, whom do you want him to appeal to? Public opinion? That is what forms the majority. The legislature? It represents the majority and obeys it blindly. The executive? It is appointed by the majority and serves as its passive instrument. The police? The police are nothing but the majority under arms. A jury? The jury is the majority vested with the right to hand down verdicts — and in some states the judges themselves are elected by the majority. However unjust or unreasonable the measure that strikes you, you must submit.

A striking example of the excesses that the majority's despotism can produce occurred in Baltimore during the War of 1812. At that time, the war was very popular in Baltimore. A newspaper that was strongly opposed to it provoked the fury of the inhabitants through its stance. The people assembled, destroyed the presses, and attacked the journalists' home. An attempt was made to call up the militia, but it did not respond. In order to save the unfortunate men threatened by public fury, the decision was made to bring them to prison, like criminals. This precaution was useless: during the night, the people assembled again; the magistrates having once more failed to call up the militia, the prison was broken into, one of the journalists was killed on the spot, and the others were left for dead. The guilty parties, brought before a jury, were acquitted.

I said one day to a resident of Pennsylvania: "Explain to me, please, how in a state founded by Quakers and famous for its tolerance, freed Blacks are not allowed to exercise the rights of citizens. They pay taxes; isn't it fair that they should vote?" "Don't insult us," he replied, "by thinking that our legislators committed so gross an act of injustice and intolerance." "So in your state, Blacks have the right to vote?" "Without any doubt." "Then why is it that this morning at the polling station I did not see a single one of them?" "That is not the fault of the law," the American told me. "Blacks do indeed have the right to present themselves at the elections, but they voluntarily choose not to appear." "How very modest of them." "Oh, it's not that they refuse to go, but they are afraid of being mistreated. With us, it sometimes happens that the law lacks force when the majority does not back it. Now, the majority is steeped in the strongest prejudices against Blacks, and the magistrates do not feel they have the strength to guarantee them the rights that the legislator has granted them." "What! The majority, which has the privilege of making the law, also wants the privilege of disobeying the law?"

Now imagine, by contrast, a legislature composed in such a way that it represents the majority without necessarily being the slave of its passions; an executive that has a strength of its own; and a judiciary independent of both other powers. You would still have a democratic government, but there would be almost no chance of tyranny.

I am not saying that at the present time tyranny is frequently practiced in America; I am saying that no guarantee against it can be found there, and that the causes of the government's mildness must be sought in circumstances and in the culture rather than in the laws.

THE EFFECTS OF THE MAJORITY'S ABSOLUTE POWER ON THE ARBITRARY AUTHORITY OF AMERICAN PUBLIC OFFICIALS.

The freedom that American law leaves to public officials within the sphere it has drawn for them. -- Their power.

We must carefully distinguish between arbitrary power and tyranny. Tyranny can be exercised through the law itself, in which case it is not arbitrary; arbitrary power can be exercised in the interest of the governed, in which case it is not tyrannical.

Tyranny ordinarily makes use of arbitrary power, but it can do without it when necessary.

In the United States, the majority's absolute power, at the same time as it encourages the legal despotism of the legislator, also encourages the arbitrary authority of public officials. The majority, being absolute master of making the law and overseeing its enforcement, having equal control over the rulers and the ruled, treats public officials as its passive agents and willingly relies on them to carry out its designs. It does not, therefore, spell out the details of their duties in advance, and it hardly bothers to define their rights. It treats them as a master might treat his servants if, seeing them always acting under his eye, he could direct or correct their conduct at every moment.

In general, the law leaves American officials far freer within the sphere it draws around them than our officials in France. Sometimes the majority even allows them to step outside that sphere. Shielded by the opinion of the greatest number and backed by its support, they dare to do things that astonish even a European accustomed to the sight of arbitrary power. Habits are thus formed in the very bosom of liberty that may one day prove fatal to it.

THE POWER THAT THE MAJORITY EXERCISES IN AMERICA OVER THOUGHT.

In the United States, when the majority has irrevocably made up its mind on a question, all discussion ceases. -- Why. -- The moral power the majority exercises over thought. -- Democratic republics have made despotism immaterial.

When you examine the state of thought in the United States, you see very clearly how far the power of the majority surpasses any power we know in Europe.

Thought is an invisible, almost intangible power that mocks every form of tyranny. In our time, the most absolute sovereigns of Europe cannot prevent certain ideas hostile to their authority from circulating secretly through their states and even within their courts. It is not so in America: as long as the majority remains undecided, people speak; but the moment it has irrevocably pronounced, everyone falls silent, and friends and enemies alike seem to hitch themselves to its chariot. The reason is simple: there is no monarch so absolute that he can gather in his hand all the forces of society and overcome resistance the way a majority can when it is vested with the right to make and enforce the laws.

A king, moreover, has only a material power that acts on behavior but cannot reach the will; the majority, however, is vested with a power that is at once material and moral, that acts on the will as much as on behavior, and that prevents both the deed and the desire to do it.

I know of no country where there is, in general, less independence of mind and less genuine freedom of discussion than in America.

There is no religious or political theory that cannot be freely preached in the constitutional states of Europe and that does not penetrate into the others; for there is no country in Europe so thoroughly subject to a single power that anyone who wants to speak the truth cannot find a refuge to protect him from the consequences of his independence. If he has the misfortune of living under an absolute government, he often has the people on his side; if he lives in a free country, he can shelter, if need be, behind the royal authority. The aristocratic element of society supports him in democratic regions, and democracy supports him elsewhere. But within a democracy organized like that of the United States, you find only a single power, a single source of strength and success, and nothing beyond it.

In America, the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Within those limits, the writer is free; but woe to him if he dares to step outside. It is not that he need fear an auto-da-fe, but he is exposed to every kind of disgust and to daily persecutions. A political career is closed to him: he has offended the only power that can open it. Everything is denied him, even glory. Before publishing his opinions, he believed he had supporters; it seems to him now that he has none, now that he has revealed himself to all — for those who condemn him speak loudly, while those who think as he does, lacking his courage, keep silent and withdraw. He gives in; he bends at last under the pressure of each day, and retreats into silence as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.

Chains and executioners — those were the crude instruments that tyranny once employed; but in our time, civilization has perfected despotism itself, which seemed, however, to have nothing left to learn.

Princes had, so to speak, made violence material; the democratic republics of our day have made it every bit as intellectual as the human will it seeks to constrain. Under the absolute rule of one man, despotism, in order to reach the soul, struck crudely at the body; and the soul, escaping those blows, rose gloriously above him. But in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed this way; it leaves the body alone and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do, or you will die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything remains yours; but from this day forward, you are a stranger among us. You will keep your privileges as a citizen, but they will become useless to you; for if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will not give them to you, and if you ask merely for their esteem, they will pretend to refuse you even that. You will remain among men, but you will lose your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow human beings, they will flee from you as from an impure creature; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, for people would flee from them in turn. Go in peace; I leave you your life, but I leave it to you worse than death.

Absolute monarchies brought dishonor upon despotism; let us take care that democratic republics do not rehabilitate it, and that by making it heavier for a few, they do not strip it, in the eyes of the majority, of its hateful appearance and its degrading character.

In the proudest nations of the Old World, works were published that faithfully depicted the vices and absurdities of contemporaries; La Bruyere lived in the palace of Louis XIV when he wrote his chapter on the great, and Moliere criticized the court in plays performed before the courtiers. But the power that rules in the United States will not tolerate being mocked. The slightest reproach offends it; the mildest pointed truth startles it; and everything must be praised, from its style of speaking to its most solid virtues. No writer, however famous, can escape the obligation of flattering his fellow citizens. The majority therefore lives in perpetual self-worship; only foreigners or experience can make certain truths reach American ears.

If America has not yet produced great writers, we need look no further for the reason: literary genius cannot exist without freedom of mind, and there is no freedom of mind in America.

The Inquisition was never able to prevent books hostile to the religion of the majority from circulating in Spain. The majority's rule does better in the United States: it has removed even the thought of publishing them. You find unbelievers in America, but unbelief finds virtually no outlet there.

You see governments that try to protect public morals by prosecuting the authors of licentious books. In the United States, no one is prosecuted for such works; but no one is tempted to write them. It is not that all citizens have pure morals, but the majority is regular in its own.

Here, the use of power is no doubt good; but I am speaking only of the power itself. This irresistible power is a permanent fact, and its good use is only an accident.

THE EFFECTS OF THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY ON THE NATIONAL CHARACTER OF AMERICANS; THE COURTIER SPIRIT IN THE UNITED STATES.

The effects of the majority's tyranny are felt so far more in social customs than in the conduct of society. -- They arrest the development of great characters. -- Democratic republics organized like those of the United States put the courtier spirit within everyone's reach. -- Evidence of this spirit in the United States. -- Why there is more patriotism in the people than in those who govern in their name.

The influence of all that I have described is still felt only faintly in political life; but its harmful effects on the national character of Americans are already noticeable. I think it is above all to the ever-growing despotism of the majority in the United States that we must attribute the small number of remarkable people who now appear on the political stage.

When the American Revolution broke out, they appeared in droves; public opinion directed people's will at that time but did not tyrannize it. The celebrated figures of that era, freely joining the movement of minds, had a greatness that was their own; they shed their brilliance on the nation and did not borrow it from her.

In absolute governments, the great men who surround the throne flatter the master's passions and willingly bend to his whims. But the mass of the people does not lend itself to servitude; it submits to it often through weakness, habit, or ignorance; sometimes out of love for the monarchy or the monarch. We have seen peoples take a kind of pleasure and pride in sacrificing their will to the prince's, placing a sort of independence of spirit in the very midst of obedience. Among these peoples, you find far less degradation than misery. And there is, moreover, a great difference between doing what you do not approve of and pretending to approve of what you do: the first is the act of a weak person, but the second belongs only to the habits of a lackey.

In free countries where everyone is more or less called to give his opinion on affairs of state; in democratic republics where public life is endlessly mixed with private life, where the sovereign is approachable from all sides, and where you need only raise your voice to reach his ear — you find many more people who seek to exploit his weaknesses and live off his passions than in absolute monarchies. It is not that people are naturally worse there than anywhere else, but the temptation is stronger and available to more people at the same time. The result is a far more widespread degradation of character.

Democratic republics put the courtier spirit within everyone's reach and let it penetrate all classes at once. That is one of the chief criticisms to be made of them.

This is especially true in democratic states organized like the American republics, where the majority possesses such absolute and irresistible power that a person must in some sense renounce his rights as a citizen — and almost his status as a human being — if he wants to stray from the path the majority has laid out.

Among the immense crowd pressing into political life in the United States, I have seen very few who displayed that manly candor, that virile independence of thought, that so often distinguished Americans in earlier times and that, wherever it is found, stands out as the hallmark of great character. At first glance, you would think that in America all minds have been cast from the same mold, so exactly do they follow the same paths. A foreigner does, it is true, sometimes encounter Americans who depart from the strict orthodoxy; these individuals will deplore the flaws of the laws, the fickleness of democracy, and its lack of knowledge; they will even go so far as to point out the defects that are distorting the national character, and suggest ways to correct them. But no one listens to them — except you; and you, to whom they confide these secret thoughts, are only a foreigner, and you are passing through. They freely share with you truths that are useless to you, and when they step into the public square, they speak a different language.

If these lines ever reach America, I am sure of two things: first, that all my readers will raise their voices to condemn me; and second, that many of them will absolve me in the depths of their conscience.

I have heard people speak about their country in the United States. I have found genuine patriotism among the people; I have often looked for it in vain among those who lead them. This is easily understood by analogy: despotism corrupts the person who submits to it far more than the person who imposes it. In absolute monarchies, the king often has great virtues; but the courtiers are always base.

It is true that in America the courtiers do not say "Sire" and "Your Majesty" — a great and crucial difference — but they talk constantly about the natural brilliance of their master; they do not hold competitions to determine which of the prince's virtues most deserves admiration, for they assure you that he possesses all the virtues, without having acquired them and, so to speak, without even wanting to. They do not give him their wives and daughters so that he might deign to raise them to the rank of his mistresses; but by sacrificing their opinions to him, they prostitute themselves.

The moralists and philosophers of America are not forced to wrap their views in the veils of allegory; but before venturing an unpleasant truth, they say: "We know that we are speaking to a people too far above human weaknesses ever to lose its self-control. We would not use such language if we were not addressing men whose virtues and knowledge alone, among all others, make them worthy of remaining free."

How could Louis XIV's flatterers have done better?

For my part, I believe that in all governments, whatever they may be, baseness will attach itself to strength and flattery to power. And I know of only one way to prevent people from degrading themselves: it is to grant no one, along with absolute power, the sovereign power to debase them.

THE GREATEST DANGER TO THE AMERICAN REPUBLICS COMES FROM THE MAJORITY'S ABSOLUTE POWER.

It is through the misuse of their power, not through powerlessness, that democratic republics risk destruction. -- The government of the American republics is more centralized and more energetic than that of the monarchies of Europe. -- The resulting danger. -- The views of Madison and Jefferson on the subject.

Governments ordinarily perish from powerlessness or from tyranny. In the first case, power slips from their hands; in the second, it is torn from them.

Many people, seeing democratic states descend into anarchy, have concluded that government in such states is naturally weak and powerless. The truth is that once war breaks out between the parties, the government loses its hold on society. But I do not believe that a democratic power is by nature lacking in strength and resources; on the contrary, I believe it is almost always the abuse of its strength and the misuse of its resources that destroy it. Anarchy nearly always springs from its tyranny or its incompetence, but not from its powerlessness.

We must not confuse stability with strength, or the size of a thing with its endurance. In democratic republics, the power that runs society is not stable, because it frequently changes hands and objectives. But wherever it is directed, its force is almost irresistible.

Power can be centralized in an assembly: it is then strong, but not stable. It can be centralized in a single person: it is then less strong, but more stable.

The government of the American republics seems to me as centralized and more energetic than that of the absolute monarchies of Europe. I therefore do not believe it will perish from weakness.

It is unnecessary, I think, to remind the reader that here, as throughout the rest of the chapter, I am speaking not of the federal government but of the individual state governments, which the majority rules despotically.

If liberty is ever lost in America, the blame will have to be laid on the majority's absolute power, which will have driven the minorities to despair and forced them to appeal to physical force. Anarchy will follow, but it will come as a consequence of despotism.

President James Madison expressed the same ideas. (See The Federalist, No. 51.)

"It is of great importance in republics," he says, "not only to guard society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of society against the injustice of the other. Justice is the end of government; it is the end that men set for themselves when they come together. Peoples have always striven and will always strive toward this end, until they succeed in reaching it or lose their liberty.

"If there existed a society in which the most powerful faction were in a position to easily unite its forces and oppress the weakest, you could consider that anarchy reigns in such a society just as much as in the state of nature, where the weakest individual has no guarantee against the violence of the strongest; and just as in the state of nature the disadvantages of an uncertain and precarious lot lead the strongest to submit to a government that protects the weak as well as themselves, so in a society in anarchy the same motives will gradually lead the most powerful factions to desire a government that can protect all parties equally, the strong and the weak. If the state of Rhode Island were separated from the Confederation and left to a popular government exercising sovereign power within narrow limits, there can be no doubt that the tyranny of majorities would make the exercise of rights so uncertain that people would end up calling for a power entirely independent of the people. The very factions that had made it necessary would hasten to appeal to it."

Jefferson also said: "The executive power in our government is not the only, and perhaps not even the chief, object of my concern. The tyranny of the legislators is currently, and will be for many years to come, the most formidable danger. That of the executive will come in its turn, but in a more distant future."

Letter from Jefferson to Madison, March 15, 1789.

On this subject, I prefer to cite Jefferson over anyone else, because I consider him the most powerful champion that democracy has ever had.

CHAPTER VIII.

WHAT TEMPERS THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY IN THE UNITED STATES.

THE ABSENCE OF ADMINISTRATIVE CENTRALIZATION.

The national majority has no idea of doing everything. -- It is forced to rely on township and county officials to carry out its sovereign will.

I distinguished earlier between two kinds of centralization; I called one governmental and the other administrative.

Only the first exists in America; the second is virtually unknown there.

If the power directing American society had both of these instruments of government at its disposal, and combined the right to command everything with the ability and the habit of executing everything itself; if, after establishing the general principles of government, it penetrated into the details of their application and, after handling the country's great interests, could reach down to the level of individual interests — liberty would soon be banished from the New World.

But in the United States, the majority, which often has the tastes and instincts of a despot, still lacks the most refined instruments of tyranny.

In none of the American republics has the central government ever concerned itself with more than a small number of matters whose importance drew its attention. It has not undertaken to regulate the secondary affairs of society. There is no sign that it has even conceived the desire to do so. The majority, as it has become more and more absolute, has not expanded the functions of the central power; it has only made it all-powerful within its sphere. Thus despotism can be very oppressive on a single point, but it cannot extend to all of them.

Besides, however carried away the national majority may be by its passions, however fervent in its plans, it cannot make all citizens everywhere bend to its will in the same way and at the same moment. When the central government that represents it issues sovereign commands, it must rely for their execution on agents who often do not depend on it and whom it cannot direct at every turn. The municipal bodies and county administrations therefore act as so many hidden reefs that slow or scatter the tide of popular will. Even if the law were oppressive, liberty would still find shelter in the way the law is carried out; and the majority cannot descend into the details, the petty tyrannies, of administrative control. It does not even imagine that it could, for it is not fully aware of its own power. It knows only its natural strength and has no idea how far the art of administration could extend its reach.

This deserves reflection. If a democratic republic like that of the United States were ever to be founded in a country where the power of a single ruler had already established administrative centralization — in law and in habit alike — I am not afraid to say it: in such a republic, despotism would become more intolerable than in any of the absolute monarchies of Europe. You would have to go to Asia to find anything comparable.

THE LEGAL MIND IN THE UNITED STATES, AND HOW IT SERVES AS A COUNTERWEIGHT TO DEMOCRACY.

The value of studying the natural instincts of the legal mind. -- Lawyers are called to play a great role in the society struggling to be born. -- How their kind of work gives an aristocratic turn to their thinking. -- Incidental causes that may work against this tendency. -- The ease with which aristocracy allies itself with lawyers. -- How a despot could make use of lawyers. -- Lawyers form the only aristocratic element naturally able to combine with the natural elements of democracy. -- Particular causes that tend to give an aristocratic character to the English and American legal mind. -- America's aristocracy sits on the lawyers' bench and the judges' seat. -- The influence lawyers exercise on American society. -- How their mentality penetrates the legislatures, the administration, and eventually gives the people themselves something of the magistrate's instincts.

When you visit the Americans and study their laws, you see that the authority they have given to lawyers, and the influence they have allowed them to acquire in government, form the most powerful barrier against the excesses of democracy today. This effect seems to me to stem from a general cause that is worth investigating, because it can reproduce itself elsewhere.

Lawyers have been involved in every movement of political society in Europe for the last five hundred years. Sometimes they have served as instruments of political power; sometimes they have used political power as their instrument. In the Middle Ages, lawyers made a wonderful contribution to expanding the king's dominion; since then, they have worked mightily to restrict that same power. In England, we have seen them ally themselves closely with the aristocracy; in France, they have proven its most dangerous enemies. Do lawyers, then, yield only to sudden and momentary impulses, or do they obey, more or less depending on circumstances, instincts that are natural to them and that always resurface? I want to clarify this point, for perhaps lawyers are destined to play the leading role in the political society now struggling to be born.

People who have made a special study of law have drawn from this work habits of order, a certain taste for formal procedures, a kind of instinctive love for the orderly progression of ideas — things that make them naturally strongly opposed to the revolutionary spirit and the unreflective passions of democracy.

The specialized knowledge that lawyers acquire from studying the law guarantees them a separate rank in society; they form a kind of privileged class among intellectuals. Every day, the practice of their profession reinforces their sense of this superiority; they are the masters of a necessary science whose knowledge is not widely shared; they serve as arbiters among citizens; and the habit of channeling the blind passions of litigants toward a goal gives them a certain contempt for the judgment of the crowd. Add to this that they naturally form a body. Not that they conspire or move in concert toward a single goal; but the shared nature of their education and the unity of their methods bind their minds together, just as shared interest might unite their wills.

Hidden deep in the souls of lawyers, then, you find some of the tastes and habits of aristocracy. Like the aristocracy, they have an instinctive preference for order, a natural love of formality; like it, they feel a deep distaste for the actions of the multitude and secretly despise popular government.

I do not mean to say that these natural inclinations are strong enough to chain lawyers irresistibly. What dominates in lawyers, as in all people, is private interest, and especially the interest of the moment.

There are societies in which lawyers cannot attain a position in political life comparable to the one they hold in private life; you can be sure that in a society organized this way, lawyers will be very active agents of revolution. But we need to ask whether the cause that drives them to destroy or change springs from a permanent disposition or from an accident. It is true that lawyers played a remarkable role in overthrowing the French monarchy in 1789. The question is whether they acted as they did because they had studied the law, or because they were shut out from making it.

Five hundred years ago, the English aristocracy put itself at the head of the people and spoke in their name; today it props up the throne and serves as the champion of royal authority. Yet the aristocracy has instincts and inclinations all its own.

We must also be careful not to mistake isolated members of the body for the body itself.

In every free government, regardless of its form, you will find lawyers in the front ranks of every party. This observation also applies to aristocracy. Nearly every democratic movement that has shaken the world has been led by nobles.

An elite body can never satisfy all the ambitions it contains; there are always more talents and passions within it than there are positions, and you will always find a large number of people who, unable to rise fast enough by using the body's privileges, seek to do so by attacking those privileges.

I am not claiming, then, that a time will come when all lawyers — or that at all times, most of them — must prove themselves friends of order and enemies of change.

What I am saying is that in a society where lawyers hold without dispute the elevated position that naturally belongs to them, their mentality will be eminently conservative and will show itself to be anti-democratic.

When the aristocracy closes its ranks to lawyers, it finds in them enemies all the more dangerous because, though below it in wealth and power, they are independent of it through their work and feel themselves its equal in knowledge.

But whenever the nobility has been willing to share some of its privileges with lawyers, these two classes have found it remarkably easy to unite and have discovered themselves to be, so to speak, members of the same family.

I am equally inclined to believe that a king will always find it easy to make lawyers the most useful instruments of his power.

There is infinitely more natural affinity between lawyers and executive power than between lawyers and the people, even though lawyers have often helped overthrow the former — just as there is more natural affinity between nobles and the king than between nobles and the people, even though the upper classes have often joined with others to fight the royal power.

What lawyers love above all else is the life of order, and the greatest guarantee of order is authority. We should not forget, moreover, that while they value liberty, they generally place legality far above it; they fear tyranny less than arbitrary power, and provided the legislator himself takes charge of stripping people of their independence, they are more or less content.

I believe, therefore, that a prince who, facing an advancing democracy, sought to destroy the judiciary and diminish the political influence of lawyers in his domains would be making a grave error. He would be letting go of the substance of authority to grasp its shadow.

I have no doubt that it would be far more profitable for him to bring lawyers into the government. Having entrusted them with despotism in the form of violence, he might find it returned to him in their hands under the guise of justice and law.

Democratic government is favorable to the political power of lawyers. When the rich, the noble, and the prince are excluded from government, lawyers arrive there practically as of right; for they then form the only class of educated and capable people that the public can choose from outside its own ranks.

If lawyers are naturally drawn by their tastes toward aristocracy and the prince, they are drawn toward the people by their interests.

Thus lawyers like democratic government without sharing its inclinations or imitating its weaknesses — a double reason for being powerful through it and over it.

The people in a democracy are not suspicious of lawyers, because they know that the lawyers' interest is to serve their cause; they listen to them without anger, because they do not suspect them of hidden motives. And indeed, lawyers do not want to overthrow the government that democracy has given itself, but they constantly strive to steer it in a direction that is not its own, and by means that are foreign to it. The lawyer belongs to the people by his interest and birth, and to the aristocracy by his habits and tastes; he is the natural link between these two worlds, the ring that binds them.

The legal profession forms the only aristocratic element that can effortlessly blend with the natural elements of democracy and combine with them in a happy and lasting way. I am well aware of the defects inherent in the legal mind; yet without this blending of the legal mind with the democratic spirit, I doubt that democracy could long govern society, and I cannot believe that in our time a republic could hope to survive if the influence of lawyers in its affairs did not grow in proportion to the power of the people.

This aristocratic character that I see in the legal mind is far more pronounced in the United States and England than anywhere else. This is not only because of what English and American lawyers study, but because of the very nature of the law itself and the position these practitioners hold in both countries.

The English and the Americans have kept the law of precedent — that is, they continue to draw from the opinions and legal decisions of their forebears the opinions they should hold on matters of law and the decisions they should render.

In an English or American lawyer, the taste and respect for what is old therefore almost always accompanies the love of what is orderly and lawful.

This has a further influence on the legal mind, and consequently on the direction of society.

The English or American lawyer looks for what has been done; the French lawyer looks for what should have been intended. One wants rulings; the other wants reasons.

When you listen to an English or American lawyer, you are struck by how often he cites others' opinions and how rarely he speaks his own, while among us the opposite is true.

There is no case too trivial for a French lawyer to handle without introducing a system of ideas entirely his own, and he will argue all the way back to the fundamental principles of law just to persuade the court to move a property boundary by six feet.

This kind of self-abnegation that the English and American lawyer practices — setting aside his own judgment to defer to that of his predecessors — this sort of intellectual servitude in which he is forced to keep his thinking, necessarily gives the legal mind more timid habits and more conservative tendencies in England and America than in France.

Our written laws are often hard to understand, but anyone can read them; there is nothing, by contrast, more obscure to ordinary people, and less within their reach, than a legal system built on precedent. This dependence on lawyers that you find in England and the United States, this lofty idea people have of their knowledge, separates them more and more from the people and ends up placing them in a class apart. The French lawyer is merely a scholar; but the English or American man of law resembles in some ways the priests of Egypt: like them, he is the sole interpreter of an occult science.

The position that lawyers hold in England and America exercises no less influence on their habits and opinions. The English aristocracy, which has taken care to draw into its ranks everything that had any natural affinity with it, has given lawyers a very large share of consideration and power. In English society, lawyers are not in the first rank, but they are satisfied with their position. They form something like the junior branch of the English aristocracy, and they love and respect their elders without sharing all their privileges. English lawyers therefore blend the aristocratic interests of their profession with the aristocratic ideas and tastes of the society in which they live.

It is above all in England, then, that you can see in sharp relief this legal type that I am trying to describe: the English lawyer values laws not so much because they are good as because they are old; and if he finds himself forced to modify them in some respect to adapt them to changes that time brings to society, he resorts to the most incredible subtleties to persuade himself that in adding something to the work of his forebears, he is only developing their thought and completing their labors. Do not expect him to acknowledge that he is an innovator; he will consent to go to absurd lengths before admitting himself guilty of so great a crime. It is in England that the legal spirit was born — that spirit which seems indifferent to the substance of things, attending only to the letter of the law, and which would sooner depart from reason and humanity than from the law.

English legislation is like an ancient tree onto which lawyers have constantly grafted the strangest shoots, hoping that, though they bear different fruit, they will at least mingle their foliage with the venerable trunk that supports them.

In America, there are no nobles and no literary men, and the people distrust the rich. Lawyers therefore form the superior political class and the most intellectual segment of society. They could therefore only lose by innovating: this adds a conservative interest to the natural taste they have for order.

If you asked me where I locate the American aristocracy, I would answer without hesitation that it is not among the rich, who have no common bond to unite them. The American aristocracy sits on the lawyers' bench and on the judges' seat.

The more you reflect on what happens in the United States, the more convinced you become that the legal profession forms the most powerful, and virtually the only, counterweight to democracy in that country.

It is in the United States that you can easily see how the legal mind, through its qualities and — I would even say — its defects, is naturally suited to neutralize the vices inherent in popular government.

When the American people let themselves be intoxicated by their passions or carried away by their ideas, the lawyers apply an almost invisible brake that slows and stops them. To the people's democratic instincts, they secretly oppose their own aristocratic inclinations; to the love of novelty, their superstitious respect for what is old; to the vastness of popular ambitions, their narrow focus; to the people's contempt for rules, their taste for formality; and to the people's impetuosity, their habit of proceeding slowly.

The courts are the most visible instruments through which the legal profession acts upon democracy.

A judge is a lawyer who, beyond the taste for order and rules acquired through the study of law, draws a love of stability from the permanence of his position. His legal knowledge had already secured him an elevated place among his peers; his political power finishes placing him in a class apart and gives him the instincts of the privileged classes.

Armed with the right to declare laws unconstitutional, the American judge constantly enters the arena of politics.

See in the first volume what I said about the judiciary.

He cannot force the people to make laws, but at least he compels them not to be unfaithful to their own laws and to remain consistent with themselves.

I am well aware that there exists in the United States a secret tendency pushing the people to reduce the judiciary's power; in most individual state constitutions, the government can, at the request of both chambers, remove judges from their seats. Some constitutions require judges to be elected and submit them to frequent reelections. I dare to predict that these innovations will sooner or later have dire consequences, and that people will one day realize that by diminishing the independence of judges, they have not merely attacked the judicial power but the democratic republic itself.

We should not think, moreover, that the legal mind in the United States is confined to the courtroom; it extends far beyond.

Lawyers, forming the only educated class that the people do not distrust, are naturally called to fill most public positions. They fill the legislatures and lead the administrations; they therefore exercise great influence on the making of law and its execution. But lawyers are forced to yield to the current of public opinion that carries them along; still, it is easy to find signs of what they would do if they were free. Americans, who have innovated so much in their political laws, have introduced only slight changes, and with great difficulty, in their civil laws, even though many of those laws are deeply at odds with their social conditions. The reason is that in matters of civil law, the majority is always forced to defer to the lawyers; and American lawyers, left to their own devices, do not innovate.

It is a very odd thing for a Frenchman to hear the complaints that arise in the United States against the lawyers' conservative tendencies and their prejudice in favor of the established order.

The influence of the legal mind extends even further than the precise boundaries I have just outlined.

There is hardly a political question in the United States that does not sooner or later turn into a judicial question. Hence the obligation that all parties feel, in their daily polemics, to borrow the language and ideas of the law. Since most public figures are or have been lawyers, they bring the customs and habits of thought of their profession into the management of affairs. The jury completes the process of familiarizing all classes with legal ways of thinking. Legal language thus becomes, in a way, the common tongue; the legal mind, born inside schools and courtrooms, gradually spreads beyond their walls; it seeps into all of society, it descends into the lowest ranks, and the entire people ends up adopting some of the habits and tastes of the magistrate.

In the United States, lawyers form a power that is little feared and barely noticed, that has no banner of its own, that bends with flexibility to the demands of the times and yields without resistance to every movement of the social body; but it envelops all of society, penetrates into every class that composes it, works upon it secretly, acts upon it constantly and without its knowledge, and ends up molding it to its desires.

THE JURY IN THE UNITED STATES CONSIDERED AS A POLITICAL INSTITUTION.

The jury, as one of the modes of popular sovereignty, must be understood in relation to the other laws that establish that sovereignty. -- The composition of the jury in the United States. -- The effects of the jury on the national character. -- The education it gives the people. -- How it tends to establish the influence of judges and to spread the legal mind.

Since my subject has naturally led me to speak about justice in the United States, I will not leave this topic without discussing the jury.

We must distinguish two things about the jury: a judicial institution and a political institution.

If it were only a question of knowing how well the jury — and especially the civil jury — serves the proper administration of justice, I would admit that its usefulness could be debated.

The jury as an institution was born in a society that was not very advanced, where courts dealt with little more than simple questions of fact; and it is no easy task to adapt it to the needs of a highly civilized people, where the relationships among individuals have multiplied enormously and taken on an educated and complex character.

It would already be a useful and fascinating exercise to consider the jury as a judicial institution, to evaluate the effects it produces in the United States, and to examine how the Americans have adapted it. In this one inquiry alone, you could find the subject for an entire book, and one of great interest for France. One would look, for example, at what portions of American jury practice could be introduced among us, and through what gradual steps. The American state that would shed the most light on this subject would be Louisiana. Louisiana has a mixed population of French and English. There, two legal systems exist side by side, just as two peoples do, and they are gradually blending together. The most useful books to consult would be the collection of Louisiana laws in two volumes, titled Digest of the Laws of Louisiana; and perhaps even more useful, a course in civil procedure written in both languages, titled A Treatise on the Rules of Civil Actions, printed in 1830 in New Orleans by Buisson. This work has a special advantage: it provides the French reader with a reliable and authoritative explanation of English legal terms. The language of law forms, as it were, a separate language among all peoples, and among the English more than any other.

My main goal at the moment is to consider the political side of the jury; any other approach would take me off my subject. As for the jury considered as a judicial instrument, I will say only two things. When the English adopted the institution of the jury, they were a half-barbarous people; since then, they have become one of the most educated nations on the globe, and their attachment to the jury seems to have grown with their knowledge. They spread beyond their borders and scattered across the world: some founded colonies, others independent states; the mother country kept a king; several groups of emigrants established powerful republics. But everywhere, the English have championed the jury system equally. They have established it everywhere, or rushed to reestablish it. A judicial institution that thus wins the approval of a great people over a long succession of centuries, that is reproduced with enthusiasm at every stage of civilization, in every climate, and under every form of government, cannot be contrary to the spirit of justice.

But let us leave that aside. It would be a strangely narrow way of thinking to consider the jury merely as a judicial institution; for while it exerts a great influence on the outcome of trials, it exerts an even greater one on the very destiny of society. The jury is therefore above all a political institution. It is from this perspective that we should always judge it.

By a jury, I mean a certain number of citizens chosen at random and temporarily vested with the right to judge.

Using the jury to punish crimes seems to me to introduce into government an eminently republican institution. Let me explain:

The jury system can be aristocratic or democratic, depending on the class from which jurors are drawn; but it always retains a republican character, because it places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed or a portion of them, and not in those of the rulers.

Force is never more than a passing source of success; the idea of right follows immediately after it. A government reduced to reaching its enemies only on the battlefield would soon be destroyed. The true sanction of political laws is found in criminal laws, and if the sanction is lacking, the law eventually loses its force. The person who judges criminal cases is therefore the real master of society. Now, the jury system places the people themselves, or at least a class of citizens, in the judge's seat. The jury system therefore truly places the direction of society in the hands of the people or of that class.

An important remark must be made, however. The jury system does indeed give the people a general right to oversee the actions of citizens, but it does not give them the means to exercise that oversight in every case or in an invariably tyrannical way. When an absolute prince has the power to have crimes tried by his delegates, the accused's fate is practically decided in advance. But even if the people were determined to convict, the composition of the jury and its freedom from accountability would still offer chances favorable to the innocent.

In England, the jury is recruited from the aristocratic portion of the nation. The aristocracy makes the laws, applies the laws, and judges violations of the laws. Everything is consistent: England is in truth an aristocratic republic. In the United States, the same system is applied to the whole people. Every American citizen is a voter, eligible for office, and a juror. The jury system as understood in America seems to me as direct and as extreme a consequence of the dogma of popular sovereignty as universal suffrage. They are two equally powerful means of making the majority rule.

Every sovereign who has sought to draw power from within himself and to direct society instead of being directed by it has destroyed the jury system or weakened it. The Tudors sent jurors to prison who refused to convict, and Napoleon had them chosen by his own agents.

However obvious most of the truths above may be, they do not strike everyone, and even among us, people often seem to have only a confused idea of the jury system. When they want to know who should be on the jury list, they simply debate what knowledge and ability are required of those called to serve — as if it were merely a judicial institution. In truth, it seems to me that this is to focus on the least important part of the subject. The jury is above all a political institution; it should be considered as one mode of popular sovereignty. It must be rejected entirely when you reject the sovereignty of the people, or else brought into harmony with the other laws that establish that sovereignty. The jury is the part of the nation charged with ensuring the execution of the laws, just as the legislative chambers are the part charged with making them; and for society to be governed in a consistent and uniform way, the jury list must expand or contract along with the voter rolls. This perspective is what should, in my view, always command the legislator's primary attention. Everything else is essentially secondary.

I am so convinced that the jury is above all a political institution that I continue to see it that way even when it is applied to civil matters.

Laws are always shaky as long as they are not supported by the culture; culture is the only resilient and lasting power in any people.

When the jury is reserved for criminal cases, the people see it in action only occasionally and in particular situations; they grow accustomed to getting along without it in the ordinary course of life and regard it as one means, but not the only means, of obtaining justice.

This is even more true when the jury is applied only to certain criminal cases.

When, on the other hand, the jury is extended to civil matters, its application comes up at every moment; it touches every interest; everyone comes to play a part in its workings; it thus penetrates into the habits of daily life; it bends the human mind to its forms, and merges, so to speak, with the very idea of justice.

The jury system, when limited to criminal matters, is therefore always in danger; once introduced into civil matters, it defies time and human effort. If the jury could have been removed from English customs as easily as from English laws, it would have been entirely destroyed under the Tudors. It is therefore the civil jury that truly saved the liberties of England.

However the jury is applied, it inevitably exercises a great influence on the national character; but this influence grows immeasurably the further you extend it into civil matters.

The jury, and especially the civil jury, serves to give all citizens some of the mental habits of the judge; and these habits are precisely the ones that best prepare a people to be free.

It spreads through all classes a respect for settled judgments and the idea of right. Take away those two things, and the love of independence becomes nothing more than a destructive passion.

It teaches people the practice of fairness. Everyone, in judging his neighbor, thinks that he may be judged in turn. This is especially true of the civil jury: almost no one fears becoming the object of a criminal prosecution someday, but everyone can have a lawsuit.

The jury teaches every person not to shrink from responsibility for his own actions — a quality without which there is no political virtue.

It clothes every citizen in a kind of judicial authority; it makes everyone feel that they have duties to fulfill toward society and that they share in its governance. By forcing people to attend to something other than their own affairs, it fights individual selfishness, which is the rust of societies.

The jury is incredibly effective at shaping judgment and at expanding the natural knowledge of the people. That, in my opinion, is its greatest advantage. It should be regarded as a free school, always open, where each juror comes to learn about his rights; where he enters into daily contact with the most educated and most knowledgeable members of the upper classes; where the laws are taught to him in a practical way and brought within reach of his understanding by the efforts of the lawyers, the guidance of the judge, and even the passions of the parties. I think it is mainly to the long use Americans have made of the civil jury that we should attribute the practical intelligence and political good sense of the American people.

I do not know whether the jury is useful to those who have lawsuits, but I am sure it is very useful to those who judge them. I regard it as one of the most effective tools that society can use for the education of the people.

Everything I have said applies to all nations; but here is what is specific to Americans and, in general, to democratic peoples.

I said above that in democracies, lawyers — and judges in particular among them — form the only aristocratic body that can moderate the movements of the people. This aristocracy has no material power; it exerts its conservative influence only on minds. And it is in the civil jury that it finds the principal sources of its power.

In criminal trials, where society struggles against a single individual, the jury tends to see the judge as the passive instrument of social power and distrusts his guidance. Moreover, criminal cases rest entirely on simple facts that common sense can easily evaluate. On this ground, the judge and the juror are equals.

It is not the same in civil cases: the judge appears as a disinterested arbiter between the passions of the parties. The jurors look upon him with trust and listen to him with respect, because here his intelligence entirely dominates theirs. It is he who lays out before them the various arguments that have burdened their memory, and who takes them by the hand to guide them through the maze of procedure; it is he who narrows the question down to the point of fact and teaches them the answer they should give to the point of law. His influence over them is almost without limit.

Must I finally explain why arguments about the incompetence of jurors in civil cases leave me unmoved?

In civil cases, at least whenever it is not a question of fact, the jury has only the appearance of a judicial body.

The jurors pronounce the verdict that the judge has rendered. They lend to that verdict the authority of the society they represent, and he lends it the authority of reason and law.

In England and in America, judges exert an influence over the outcome of criminal trials that no French judge has ever known. It is easy to see why: the English or American judge has established his authority in civil matters; he merely exercises it afterward in a different arena; he does not acquire it there.

There are cases — often the most important ones — where the American judge has the right to rule alone. He then finds himself, on occasion, in the position that a French judge normally occupies; but his moral authority is far greater: the memory of the jury follows him, and his voice carries almost as much weight as that of the society whose jurors were the instrument.

His influence extends well beyond the courtroom: in the leisure of private life as in the work of public life, in the public square as in the legislatures, the American judge constantly finds around him people who have grown accustomed to seeing his intelligence as something superior to their own; and after exercising his power over trials, he makes it felt in all habits of mind and even in the very souls of those who sat beside him in judgment.

The jury, which seems to diminish the rights of the judiciary, actually establishes its authority, and there is no country where judges are as powerful as in those where the people share in their privileges.

It is above all through the civil jury that the American judiciary makes what I have called the legal mind penetrate into the lowest ranks of society.

Thus the jury, which is the most energetic means of making the people rule, is also the most effective means of teaching them to rule.

CHAPTER IX.

THE MAIN CAUSES THAT TEND TO MAINTAIN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC IN THE UNITED STATES.

The democratic republic survives in the United States. The main purpose of this book has been to explain why.

Among the causes of this phenomenon, the flow of my subject has swept me past several despite my best efforts, and I have only gestured at them from a distance in passing. Others I have not been able to address at all; and those I have had the chance to develop at length are buried somewhere behind me, lost under an avalanche of details.

So I decided that before going any further and speaking of the future, I should gather into a tight frame all the reasons that explain the present.

In this sort of summary I will be brief, because I will take care only to remind the reader very quickly of what he already knows, and among the facts I have not yet had the chance to lay out, I will choose only the most important.

I concluded that all the causes tending to maintain the democratic republic in the United States could be reduced to three.

The particular and accidental situation in which Providence placed the Americans is the first;

The second comes from their laws;

The third flows from their habits and their customs and values.

ACCIDENTAL OR PROVIDENTIAL CAUSES CONTRIBUTING TO THE MAINTENANCE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC IN THE UNITED STATES.

The Union has no neighbors. -- No great capital city. -- The Americans had the good fortune of their birth. -- America is an empty country. -- How this circumstance powerfully serves to maintain the democratic republic. -- How the American wilderness is being settled. -- The Anglo-Americans' hunger to claim the open spaces of the New World. -- The influence of material prosperity on the political opinions of Americans.

There are a thousand circumstances independent of human will that make the democratic republic easy in the United States. Some are well known, others are easy to explain: I will limit myself to the main ones.

The Americans have no neighbors, and consequently no major wars, financial crises, devastation, or conquest to fear; they need neither heavy taxes, nor a large army, nor great generals; they have almost nothing to dread from a plague more terrible for republics than all those combined -- military glory.

How can anyone deny the incredible influence that military glory exerts on the minds of the people? General Jackson, whom the Americans twice chose to place at their head, is a man of violent temperament and middling ability; nothing in the entire course of his career ever proved that he had the qualities needed to govern a free people: accordingly, the majority of the educated classes in the Union always opposed him. So who put him in the president's chair and keeps him there? The memory of a victory he won twenty years ago under the walls of New Orleans -- and that victory at New Orleans was a perfectly ordinary feat of arms that would not occupy anyone's attention for long in a country where battles actually take place. The people who let themselves be carried away by the prestige of glory are, rest assured, the coldest, the most calculating, the least military, and -- if I may put it this way -- the most prosaic of all the peoples on earth.

America has no great capital city whose direct or indirect influence is felt across the entire territory, which I consider one of the primary reasons for the maintenance of republican institutions in the United States. In cities, it is almost impossible to prevent people from coming together, stoking each other's passions, and making sudden and heated decisions. Cities are like great assemblies of which all inhabitants are members. The people exercise a prodigious influence over their magistrates there, and often carry out their wishes without any intermediary.

America does not yet have a true capital, but it already has very large cities. Philadelphia had 161,000 inhabitants in 1830, and New York 202,000. The lower classes inhabiting these vast cities form a populace more dangerous even than Europe's. It is composed first of freed Black people, whom law and public opinion condemn to a hereditary state of degradation and misery. One also finds in their midst a multitude of Europeans driven each day to the shores of the New World by misfortune and misconduct; these men bring to the United States our worst vices, and have none of the interests that might counterbalance their influence. Living in the country without being its citizens, they are ready to exploit every passion that stirs it: thus we have recently seen serious riots break out in Philadelphia and New York. Such disorders are unknown in the rest of the country, which does not worry about them, because the urban population has so far exercised no power or influence over the rural population. I nonetheless consider the size of certain American cities, and especially the character of their inhabitants, a genuine danger threatening the future of the democratic republics of the New World, and I do not fear predicting that they will perish through this, unless their government manages to create an armed force that, while remaining subject to the will of the national majority, is nonetheless independent of the urban populace and able to suppress its excesses.

To subject the provinces to the capital is therefore to place the destiny of the entire empire, not merely in the hands of a portion of the people -- which is unjust -- but in the hands of the people acting on their own -- which is very dangerous. The dominance of capital cities thus deals a serious blow to the representative system. It causes modern republics to fall into the same defect as the republics of antiquity, which all perished because they did not know that system.

I could easily list here a great many other secondary causes that have favored the establishment and ensure the maintenance of the democratic republic in the United States. But amid this crowd of fortunate circumstances, I see two main ones, and I hasten to point them out.

I have already said that I saw in the origin of the Americans, in what I have called their point of departure, the first and most effective of all the causes to which one can attribute the current prosperity of the United States. The Americans had the good fortune of birth: their forefathers imported to the soil they inhabit the equality of social conditions and of minds, from which the democratic republic was one day bound to spring as from its natural source. That is not all; along with a republican social order, they bequeathed to their descendants the habits, ideas, and customs and values best suited to making a republic flourish. When I think about what this original fact produced, I feel as though I can see America's entire destiny contained in the first Puritan who set foot on its shores, just as the entire human race was contained in the first man.

Among the fortunate circumstances that have further favored the establishment and ensure the maintenance of the democratic republic in the United States, the most important is the choice of the country itself that the Americans inhabit. Their forefathers gave them the love of equality and liberty, but it was God himself who, by delivering to them a boundless continent, granted them the means to remain equal and free for a long time.

General prosperity favors the stability of all governments, but particularly of democratic government, which depends on the disposition of the greatest number, and above all on the disposition of those most exposed to want. When the people govern, they must be content if the state is not to be overturned. Misery produces in them what ambition does in kings. Now, the material causes independent of laws that can produce prosperity are more numerous in America than they have been in any country in the world, at any time in history.

In the United States, it is not only the laws that are democratic -- nature itself works for the people.

Where in all of human memory can you find anything like what is happening before our eyes in North America?

The celebrated societies of antiquity were all founded in the midst of hostile peoples who had to be conquered before a place could be claimed. Even in modern times, Europeans found in some parts of South America vast territories inhabited by peoples less educated than themselves, but who had already claimed the soil by cultivating it. To found their new states, they had to destroy or enslave large populations, and they made civilization blush at its own triumphs.

But North America was inhabited only by wandering tribes who had no thought of using the natural riches of the soil. North America was still, properly speaking, an empty continent, a deserted land, waiting for inhabitants.

Everything about the Americans is extraordinary -- their social conditions as much as their laws; but what is more extraordinary still is the land that supports them.

When the earth was given to humanity by the Creator, it was young and inexhaustible, but they were weak and ignorant; and by the time they had learned to draw profit from the treasures it held in its depths, they already covered its surface, and soon they had to fight to acquire the right to possess a refuge and to rest there in freedom.

That is when North America is discovered, as if God had held it in reserve and it had only just risen from beneath the waters of the flood.

It presents, as on the first days of creation, rivers whose sources never run dry, green and damp solitudes, boundless fields that no plow has yet turned. In this condition, it offers itself not to the isolated, ignorant, and barbarous man of the earliest ages, but to man already master of nature's most important secrets, united with his fellow beings, and educated by fifty centuries of experience.

At the moment I am speaking, thirteen million civilized Europeans are spreading peacefully across fertile wildernesses whose resources and extent they themselves do not yet fully know. Three or four thousand soldiers drive before them the wandering race of the indigenous peoples; behind the armed men come woodcutters who pierce the forests, drive off the wild beasts, explore the course of the rivers, and prepare the triumphal march of civilization through the wilderness.

Often, in the course of this work, I have alluded to the material well-being that the Americans enjoy; I have pointed to it as one of the great causes of the success of their laws. This explanation had already been given by a thousand others before me: it is the only one that, falling in some way within the comprehension of Europeans, has become popular among us. I will therefore not dwell on a subject so often treated and so well understood; I will merely add a few new facts.

People generally imagine that the American wilderness is being settled by European immigrants who arrive each year on the shores of the New World, while the American population grows and multiplies on the land their forefathers occupied: this is a great error. The European who arrives in the United States comes without friends and often without resources; he is obliged to hire out his labor to survive, and it is rare to see him get past the great industrial zone that stretches along the coast. You cannot clear wilderness without capital or credit; before venturing into the forests, the body must grow accustomed to the rigors of a new climate. So it is Americans who, each day leaving the place of their birth, go off to create vast estates in the distance. Thus the European leaves his cottage to go live on the transatlantic shore, and the American who was born on that same shore plunges in turn into the interior of America. This double movement of emigration never stops: it begins in the depths of Europe, continues across the great ocean, and follows through the wilderness of the New World. Millions of men march toward the same point on the horizon at the same time: their languages, their religions, their customs and values differ, but their goal is the same. They have been told that fortune lies somewhere to the west, and they rush to meet it.

Nothing can compare to this continual displacement of the human race, unless perhaps what happened at the fall of the Roman Empire. Then, as now, men flocked together toward the same point and met tumultuously in the same places; but the designs of Providence were different. Each new arrival then dragged destruction and death in his wake; today each one carries with him a seed of prosperity and life.

The distant consequences of this American migration westward are still hidden from us by the future, but the immediate results are easy to see: since a portion of the old inhabitants leave each year the states where they were born, these states fill up only very slowly even as they age. Thus in Connecticut, which has only fifty-nine inhabitants per square mile, the population has grown by only a quarter in forty years, whereas in England it increased by a third during the same period. The European immigrant therefore always arrives in a half-empty country where labor is scarce; he becomes a comfortable worker; his son goes to seek his fortune in an empty country, and becomes a rich landowner. The first accumulates the capital that the second puts to use, and there is poverty neither among the foreigner nor among the native-born.

Legislation in the United States encourages the division of property as much as possible; but a cause more powerful than legislation prevents property from being divided to excess.

In New England, the land is divided into very small estates, but it is no longer being subdivided further.

This becomes apparent in states that are finally beginning to fill up. Massachusetts is the most densely populated state in the Union; it has eighty inhabitants per square mile, which is infinitely less than in France, where there are one hundred and sixty-two in the same space.

In Massachusetts, however, it is already rare for small estates to be divided: the eldest generally takes the land; the younger children go seek their fortune in the wilderness.

The law has abolished the right of primogeniture; but one might say that Providence has restored it without anyone having grounds to complain, and this time at least it does not offend justice.

A single fact will give some measure of the prodigious number of individuals who thus leave New England to take their households into the wilderness. We were told that in 1830, among the members of Congress, there were thirty-six who had been born in the small state of Connecticut. The population of Connecticut, which constitutes only one forty-third of the Union's total, thus provided one eighth of its representatives.

The state of Connecticut itself, however, sends only five deputies to Congress: the other thirty-one appeared there as representatives of the new states of the West. If those thirty-one individuals had stayed in Connecticut, it is likely that instead of being rich landowners, they would have remained small farmers, living in obscurity with no way to enter a political career -- and far from becoming useful legislators, they would have been dangerous citizens.

These considerations do not escape the Americans any more than they escape us.

"There is no doubt," says Chancellor Kent in his Treatise on American Law (vol. IV, p. 380), "that the division of estates must produce great evils when it is carried to the extreme, so that each piece of land can no longer sustain a family; but these drawbacks have never been felt in the United States, and many generations will pass before they are felt. The extent of our uninhabited territory, the abundance of lands beside us, and the continual stream of emigration that, departing from the Atlantic shores, flows ceaselessly toward the interior of the country, are and will long remain sufficient to prevent the fragmentation of inheritances."

It would be hard to describe the eagerness with which the American throws himself upon this immense prey that fortune offers him. To pursue it, he braves without fear the Indian's arrow and the diseases of the wilderness; the silence of the woods does not startle him, the approach of wild beasts does not move him: a passion stronger than the love of life spurs him on endlessly. Before him stretches a continent almost without limits, and yet you would think that, already fearing there might not be room for him, he hurries for fear of arriving too late. I have spoken of the emigration from the old states; but what shall I say of that from the new ones? It has not been fifty years since Ohio was founded; the majority of its inhabitants were not born there; its capital is not thirty years old, and an immense expanse of empty fields still covers its territory; yet already the population of Ohio has set out again toward the west: most of those who go down to the fertile prairies of Illinois are inhabitants of Ohio. These men left their first homeland to do well; they leave the second to do better still: nearly everywhere they find fortune, but not happiness. In them, the desire for well-being has become a restless and burning passion that grows as it is satisfied. They once broke the ties that bound them to their native soil; since then they have formed no others. For them, emigration began as a necessity; today it has become in their eyes a kind of gamble, whose thrills they love as much as its rewards.

Sometimes the man moves so fast that the wilderness springs back up behind him. The forest merely bent beneath his feet; once he has passed, it rises again. It is not uncommon, traveling through the new states of the West, to encounter abandoned dwellings in the middle of the woods; often one discovers the remains of a cabin deep in the solitude, and one is startled to cross half-finished clearings that testify at once to both human power and human inconstancy. Among these forsaken fields, amid these ruins of a single day, the ancient forest quickly pushes up new shoots; the animals reclaim their domain: nature comes laughing to cover with green branches and flowers the traces of man, and hastens to make his fleeting mark disappear.

I remember that while crossing one of the deserted districts that still cover the state of New York, I came to the shore of a lake entirely surrounded by forest as at the beginning of the world. A small island rose in the middle of the water. The woods covering it spread their foliage around it, completely hiding its shores. On the banks of the lake, nothing suggested the presence of man; only on the horizon could one see a column of smoke that, rising perpendicularly from the treetops to the clouds, seemed to hang from the sky rather than climb toward it.

An Indian canoe was pulled up on the sand; I used it to go visit the island that had first caught my eye, and soon I had reached its shore. The entire island formed one of those delightful solitudes of the New World that almost make civilized man regret the wild life. A vigorous vegetation announced by its wonders the incomparable riches of the soil. There reigned, as in all the wildernesses of North America, a deep silence broken only by the monotonous cooing of wood pigeons or the tapping of the woodpecker against the bark of the trees. I was far from believing this place had ever been inhabited, so completely did nature still seem abandoned to itself; but when I reached the center of the island, I suddenly thought I had stumbled upon traces of man. I then examined carefully all the objects around me, and soon I had no doubt that a European had come to seek refuge in this place. But how his work had changed! The wood he had once hastily cut to make himself a shelter had since put out new shoots; his fences had become living hedges, and his cabin had been transformed into a grove. Among these bushes, one could still see a few stones blackened by fire, scattered around a small heap of ashes; this was no doubt where the hearth had been: the chimney, in collapsing, had covered it with its debris. For some time I admired in silence the resources of nature and the weakness of man; and when at last I had to leave this enchanted place, I repeated again with sadness: What! Already ruins!

In Europe, we are accustomed to regarding the restlessness of the mind, the immoderate desire for wealth, the extreme love of independence, as great social dangers. These are precisely the things that guarantee the American republics a long and peaceful future. Without these restless passions, the population would cluster around certain places and would soon experience, as it does among us, needs that are hard to satisfy. Happy land, the New World, where man's vices are almost as useful to society as his virtues!

This has a great influence on the way human actions are judged in the two hemispheres. Americans often call praiseworthy enterprise what we call the love of money, and they see a certain cowardice of spirit in what we consider moderation of desires.

In France, simplicity of taste, calmness of character, family spirit, and love of one's birthplace are regarded as great guarantees of tranquility and happiness for the state; but in America, nothing seems more harmful to society than such virtues. The French Canadians, who have faithfully preserved the traditions of the old ways, already find it difficult to survive on their territory, and this small people that has only recently come into being will soon be prey to the miseries of old nations. In Canada, the men with the most education, patriotism, and humanity make extraordinary efforts to disgust the people with the simple happiness that still suffices for them. They celebrate the advantages of wealth, much as among us they might perhaps extol the charms of an honest modesty; and they put more effort into stirring up human passions than people elsewhere expend in calming them. To exchange the pure and peaceful pleasures that one's homeland offers even to the poor for the barren satisfactions that material comfort brings under a foreign sky; to flee the family hearth and the fields where one's ancestors rest; to abandon the living and the dead in order to chase after fortune -- there is nothing that, in their eyes, deserves more praise.

In our time, America offers men a resource always vaster than the industry that can exploit it.

In America, therefore, you cannot provide too much knowledge; for all knowledge, even as it may be useful to those who possess it, also benefits those who do not. New needs are not to be feared there, since all needs are easily met: there is no danger in generating too many passions, since every passion finds easy and healthy nourishment; people cannot be made too free, because they are almost never tempted to make bad use of their liberty.

The American republics of our day are like trading companies formed to jointly exploit the empty lands of the New World, occupied with a business that is prospering.

The passions that most deeply stir the Americans are commercial passions, not political ones -- or rather, they carry into politics the habits of commerce. They love order, without which business cannot thrive, and they particularly value steady social habits, which make for solid households; they prefer the common sense that builds great fortunes to the genius that often squanders them; general ideas frighten minds accustomed to practical calculation, and among them, practice is held in higher honor than theory.

It is in America that one must go to understand the power that material well-being exerts over political actions and even over opinions themselves, which ought to answer only to reason. It is mainly among foreigners that one discovers the truth of this. Most European immigrants bring to the New World that wild love of independence and change that is so often born of our miseries. I sometimes encountered in the United States some of these Europeans who had once been forced to flee their country on account of their political opinions. All of them astonished me with their talk; but one struck me more than any other. As I was crossing one of the most remote districts of Pennsylvania, night overtook me, and I went to ask for shelter at the door of a wealthy planter: he was a Frenchman. He sat me down by his fire, and we began to talk freely, as befits people who find themselves deep in the woods two thousand leagues from the country of their birth. I was well aware that my host had been a great leveler forty years ago and a fiery demagogue. His name remained in history.

I was therefore strangely surprised to hear him discuss the right of property the way an economist might have -- I almost said a landowner; he spoke of the necessary hierarchy that wealth establishes among men, of obedience to established law, of the influence of sound social habits in republics, and of the help that religious ideas lend to order and liberty: he even happened to quote, as if by accident, in support of one of his political opinions, the authority of Jesus Christ.

As I listened to him, I marveled at the feebleness of human reason. Is this true or false -- how can you tell amid the uncertainties of science and the varying lessons of experience? Then a new fact comes along and resolves all my doubts. I was poor, now I am rich: if only prosperity, while shaping my conduct, left my judgment free! But no -- my opinions have in fact changed along with my fortune, and in the happy turn of events from which I profit, I have truly discovered the decisive reason that had eluded me until now.

The influence of prosperity operates even more freely on Americans than on foreigners. The American has always seen public order and public prosperity linked together and marching in step; he cannot imagine that they could live apart: he therefore has nothing to unlearn, and need not lose, as so many Europeans must, what he received from his earliest education.

THE INFLUENCE OF LAWS ON THE MAINTENANCE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC IN THE UNITED STATES.

Three main causes of the maintenance of the democratic republic. -- The federal form. -- Township institutions. -- The judiciary.

The main purpose of this book was to explain the laws of the United States; if that purpose has been achieved, the reader has already been able to judge for himself which of those laws really tend to maintain the democratic republic and which put it in danger. If I have not succeeded over the whole course of the book, I would succeed even less in a single chapter.

I do not, then, wish to retrace the ground I have already covered, and a few lines should suffice to summarize.

Three things seem to contribute more than all others to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the New World:

The first is the federal form the Americans adopted, which allows the Union to enjoy the power of a large republic and the security of a small one.

I find the second in the township institutions, which, by moderating the despotism of the majority, give the people at once a taste for liberty and the art of being free.

The third is found in the structure of the judiciary. I have shown how much the courts serve to correct the excesses of democracy, and how, without ever being able to stop the movements of the majority, they manage to slow them down and guide them.

THE INFLUENCE OF CUSTOMS AND VALUES ON THE MAINTENANCE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC IN THE UNITED STATES.

I said earlier that I considered customs and values as one of the great general causes to which one can attribute the maintenance of the democratic republic in the United States.

I use the term customs and values here in the sense the ancients attached to the word mores; I apply it not only to customs properly so called -- what you might call the habits of the heart -- but to the various notions that people possess, the diverse opinions current among them, and the whole body of ideas from which the habits of the mind are formed.

I therefore include under this term the entire moral and intellectual condition of a people. My aim is not to paint a picture of American customs and values; I am confining myself for the moment to searching among them for what is favorable to the maintenance of political institutions.

RELIGION CONSIDERED AS A POLITICAL INSTITUTION, AND HOW IT POWERFULLY SERVES TO MAINTAIN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC AMONG THE AMERICANS.

North America settled by men who professed a democratic and republican Christianity. -- Arrival of Catholics. -- Why, in our day, Catholics form the most democratic and most republican class.

Alongside every religion stands a political opinion that is joined to it by affinity.

Let the human mind follow its natural tendency, and it will regulate political society and the divine city in the same way; it will seek, if I dare say so, to harmonize earth with heaven.

The greater part of English-speaking America was settled by men who, having freed themselves from the authority of the Pope, had submitted to no religious supremacy; they therefore brought to the New World a Christianity that I can best describe by calling it democratic and republican: this was singularly favorable to the establishment of the republic and of democracy in public affairs. From the very beginning, politics and religion found themselves in agreement, and they have never ceased to be so since.

About fifty years ago, Ireland began pouring a Catholic population into the United States. For its part, American Catholicism won converts: today one finds in the Union more than a million Christians who profess the doctrines of the Roman Church.

These Catholics show great faithfulness in the practices of their worship, and are full of ardor and zeal for their beliefs; yet they form the most republican and the most democratic class in the United States. This fact is surprising at first, but reflection easily uncovers its hidden causes.

I think people are wrong to regard the Catholic religion as a natural enemy of democracy. Among the various Christian doctrines, Catholicism seems to me, on the contrary, one of the most favorable to equality of social conditions. Among Catholics, religious society is composed of only two elements: the priest and the people. The priest alone rises above the faithful: below him, all are equal.

In matters of dogma, Catholicism places all minds on the same level; it requires the same detailed beliefs from the learned and the ignorant, from the man of genius and the common man; it imposes the same practices on the rich as on the poor, inflicts the same austerities on the powerful as on the weak; it makes no deals with any mortal, and applying the same measure to every human being, it takes pleasure in mixing all the classes of society together at the foot of the same altar, just as they are mingled in the eyes of God.

If Catholicism disposes the faithful to obedience, it does not therefore prepare them for inequality. I would say the opposite of Protestantism, which in general moves men much less toward equality than toward independence.

Catholicism is like an absolute monarchy. Remove the prince, and conditions there are more equal than in republics.

It has often happened that the Catholic priest has stepped out of the sanctuary to enter society as a power, and has come to take a seat in the midst of the social hierarchy; sometimes he has then used his religious influence to secure the permanence of a political order of which he was a part: at such times Catholics have indeed been seen supporting aristocracy from a spirit of religion.

But once the priests are removed from government or remove themselves -- as they do in the United States -- there are no people whose beliefs make them more disposed than Catholics to carry into the political world the idea of the equality of social conditions.

If, then, the Catholics of the United States are not driven violently by the nature of their beliefs toward democratic and republican opinions, at least they are not naturally opposed to them; and their social position, as well as their small numbers, makes it a matter of necessity for them to embrace those opinions.

Most Catholics are poor, and they need all citizens to govern in order to reach the government themselves. Catholics are a minority, and they need all rights to be respected in order to be sure of the free exercise of their own. These two causes push them, even without their knowing it, toward political doctrines that they would perhaps embrace with less fervor if they were rich and predominant.

The Catholic clergy of the United States has not tried to fight this political tendency; it seeks rather to justify it. American Catholic priests have divided the intellectual world in two: in one part, they have left revealed dogma, and they submit to it without discussion; in the other, they have placed political truth, and they believe that God has left it to the free inquiries of mankind. Thus, the Catholics of the United States are at once the most obedient of believers and the most independent of citizens.

One can therefore say that in the United States there is not a single religious doctrine that shows itself hostile to democratic and republican institutions. All clergy there speak the same language; opinions are in agreement with the laws, and there prevails, so to speak, a single current in the human mind.

I was staying temporarily in one of the largest cities in the Union when I was invited to attend a political meeting whose purpose was to aid the Poles and to send them arms and money.

I found two to three thousand people assembled in a vast hall that had been prepared to receive them. Soon after, a priest, dressed in his ecclesiastical vestments, stepped forward to the edge of the platform reserved for speakers. The audience, having removed their hats, stood in silence, and he spoke in these terms:

"Almighty God! God of hosts! You who sustained the hearts and guided the arms of our fathers when they defended the sacred rights of their national independence; you who made them triumph over a hateful oppression, and granted our people the blessings of peace and liberty -- O Lord! Turn a favorable eye toward the other hemisphere; look with pity on a heroic people who fight today as we once fought and in defense of the same rights! Lord, who created all men in the same image, do not permit despotism to deform your handiwork and maintain inequality upon the earth. Almighty God! Watch over the destinies of the Poles, make them worthy of being free; let your wisdom reign in their councils, your strength be in their arms; spread terror among their enemies, divide the powers that plot their ruin, and do not permit the injustice the world witnessed fifty years ago to be consummated today. Lord, who holds in your mighty hand the hearts of peoples as well as those of individuals, raise up allies for the sacred cause of justice; cause the French nation at last to rise, and emerging from the repose in which its leaders keep it, to come fight once more for the liberty of the world.

"O Lord! Never turn your face from us; permit us always to be the most religious people as well as the most free.

"Almighty God, hear our prayer today; save the Poles. We ask it of you in the name of your beloved son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for the salvation of all mankind. Amen."

The whole assembly repeated amen with devotion.

THE INDIRECT INFLUENCE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS ON POLITICAL SOCIETY IN THE UNITED STATES.

Christian morality found in all the sects. -- Influence of religion on the customs and values of Americans. -- Respect for the marriage bond. -- How religion confines the imagination of Americans within certain limits and moderates in them the passion for innovation. -- The Americans' opinion on the political usefulness of religion. -- Their efforts to extend and secure its hold.

I have just shown what the direct action of religion on politics was in the United States. Its indirect action seems to me far more powerful still, and it is precisely when religion says nothing about liberty that it best teaches Americans the art of being free.

There are countless sects in the United States. They all differ in the worship they believe should be rendered to the Creator, but they all agree on the duties of men toward one another. Each sect therefore worships God in its own way, but all sects preach the same morality in the name of God. If it matters greatly to the individual that his religion be true, it is not so for society. Society has nothing to fear or hope from the next life; and what matters most to it is not so much that all citizens profess the true religion, but that they profess a religion. Besides, all the sects in the United States find themselves within the great Christian unity, and Christian morality is everywhere the same.

One may reasonably think that a certain number of Americans follow, in the worship they render to God, their habits more than their convictions. In the United States, moreover, the sovereign is religious, and consequently hypocrisy must be common; but America is nonetheless still the place in the world where the Christian religion has preserved the most genuine power over souls; and nothing shows better how useful and natural religion is to man, since the country where it exerts the most influence in our day is at the same time the most enlightened and the most free.

I have said that the American clergy generally come out in favor of civil liberty, not excepting even those who do not accept religious liberty; yet they are not seen lending their support to any particular political system. They take care to stay outside of public affairs, and do not get mixed up in party maneuvering. One cannot therefore say that in the United States religion exerts an influence on the laws or on the details of political opinions, but it directs customs and values, and it is by regulating the family that it works to regulate the state.

I do not doubt for an instant that the great strictness of morals observed in the United States has its primary source in religious beliefs. Religion is often powerless there to restrain man amid the countless temptations that fortune presents; it cannot moderate in him the eagerness to get rich that everything spurs on. But it reigns supreme over the soul of woman, and it is woman who shapes the customs and values. America is surely the country in the world where the marriage bond is most respected, and where the highest and most just conception of conjugal happiness has been formed.

In Europe, nearly all the disorders of society originate around the domestic hearth and not far from the marriage bed. It is there that men develop contempt for natural ties and for permitted pleasures, a taste for disorder, restlessness of heart, instability of desires. Agitated by the tumultuous passions that have often troubled his own home, the European submits only with difficulty to the legislative powers of the state. When, coming out of the agitations of the political world, the American returns to the bosom of his family, he immediately finds the image of order and peace. There, all his pleasures are simple and natural, his joys innocent and tranquil; and since he achieves happiness through the regularity of life, he grows accustomed without difficulty to regulating his opinions as well as his tastes.

While the European seeks to escape his domestic sorrows by disturbing society, the American draws from his home a love of order that he then carries into the affairs of state.

In the United States, religion does not merely regulate customs and values; it extends its hold over the intellect as well.

Among the Anglo-Americans, some profess the Christian dogmas because they believe them, others because they are afraid of not appearing to believe them. Christianity therefore reigns unchallenged by universal consent; the result, as I have already said elsewhere, is that everything is certain and settled in the moral world, even though the political world seems given over to discussion and experimentation. Thus the human mind never sees before it a field without limits: however bold it may be, it feels from time to time that it must stop before insurmountable barriers. Before innovating, it is forced to accept certain first premises, and to submit its most daring conceptions to certain forms that slow it down and hold it back.

The imagination of Americans, in its greatest flights, therefore has only a cautious and uncertain stride; its movements are constrained and its works incomplete. These habits of restraint carry over into political society and are singularly favorable to the tranquility of the people and to the durability of the institutions they have given themselves. Nature and circumstances had made the inhabitant of the United States a bold man; it is easy to judge this when one sees the way he pursues fortune. If the American mind were free of all restraint, one would soon find among them the boldest innovators and the most relentless logicians in the world. But the revolutionaries of America are obliged to profess openly a certain respect for Christian morality and equity, which does not permit them to violate its laws easily when these stand in the way of their designs; and even if they could rise above their own scruples, they would still feel checked by those of their followers. Until now, no one in the United States has dared to advance the maxim that everything is permitted in the interest of society. An impious maxim, which seems to have been invented in an age of liberty to legitimize every tyrant to come.

And so, at the same time that the law allows the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them from daring everything.

Religion, which among the Americans never directly involves itself in the government of society, must therefore be considered their foremost political institution; for while it does not give them a taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use of it.

This is also how the inhabitants of the United States themselves regard religious beliefs. I do not know whether all Americans have faith in their religion, for who can read into the depths of hearts? But I am certain that they believe it necessary for the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion belongs not to a single class of citizens or to one party, but to the nation as a whole; one finds it in every rank.

In the United States, when a politician attacks a sect, that is no reason for the very supporters of that sect not to back him; but if he attacks all sects at once, everyone flees him, and he remains alone.

While I was in America, a witness came before the court in Chester County (state of New York) and declared that he did not believe in the existence of God or in the immortality of the soul. The judge refused to accept his oath, on the grounds, he said, that the witness had destroyed in advance all the credibility that could be attached to his words. The newspapers reported the fact without comment.

Here is how the New York Spectator of August 23, 1831 reports the fact: "The court of common pleas of Chester county (New-York) a few days since rejected a witness who declared his disbelief in the existence of God. The presiding judge remarked that he had not before been aware that there was a man living who did not believe in the existence of God; that this belief constituted the sanction of all testimony in a court of justice and that he knew of no cause in a Christian country where a witness had been permitted to testify without such a belief."

Americans so completely blend Christianity and liberty in their minds that it is almost impossible to make them conceive of one without the other; and this is not one of those sterile beliefs that the past bequeaths to the present, and that seems less to live than to vegetate in the depths of the soul.

I have seen Americans form associations to send priests into the new states of the West, and to found schools and churches there; they fear that religion may be lost in the forests, and that the rising people may not be as free as the people from which it sprang. I have met wealthy inhabitants of New England who abandoned the land of their birth in order to go lay, on the banks of the Missouri or in the prairies of Illinois, the foundations of Christianity and liberty. In this way, religious zeal in the United States is constantly kindled at the hearth of patriotism. You may think these men act solely out of concern for the next life, but you would be wrong: eternity is only one of their concerns. If you question these missionaries of Christian civilization, you will be quite surprised to hear them speak so often of the goods of this world, and to find politicians where you expected to see only men of the cloth. "All the American republics are bound together," they will tell you; "if the republics of the West fell into anarchy or submitted to the yoke of despotism, the republican institutions that flourish on the Atlantic coast would be in great peril; we therefore have an interest in the new states being religious, so that they will allow us to remain free."

Such are the Americans' opinions; but their error is plain: for every day people prove to me quite learnedly that everything is fine in America except precisely this religious spirit that I admire; and I learn that all that is missing for the liberty and happiness of the human race, on the other side of the ocean, is to believe with Spinoza in the eternity of the world, and to maintain with Cabanis that the brain secretes thought. To this I truly have nothing to reply, except that those who talk this way have not been to America, and have seen free peoples no more than they have seen religious ones. I therefore await their return.

There are people in France who regard republican institutions as the passing instrument of their own greatness. They measure with their eyes the immense space that separates their vices and their miseries from power and wealth, and they would like to pile up ruins in that abyss in an attempt to fill it. These people are to liberty what the private mercenary companies of the Middle Ages were to kings; they make war on their own account even while wearing its colors: the republic will always last long enough to pull them from their present degradation. It is not to them that I speak; but there are others who see in the republic a permanent and tranquil condition, a necessary goal toward which ideas and customs and values are driving modern societies every day, and who sincerely wish to prepare people to be free. When these people attack religious beliefs, they follow their passions and not their interests. It is despotism that can do without faith, not liberty. Religion is far more necessary in the republic they champion than in the monarchy they attack, and in democratic republics more than in all others. How could society fail to perish if, while the political bond loosens, the moral bond does not tighten? And what can you do with a people that is master of itself, if it is not subject to God?

THE MAIN CAUSES THAT MAKE RELIGION POWERFUL IN AMERICA.

The care Americans have taken to separate Church from State. -- Laws, public opinion, and the efforts of the clergy themselves all contribute to this result. -- It is to this cause that the power religion exercises over souls in the United States must be attributed. -- Why. -- What is the natural state of men in matters of religion today. -- What particular and accidental cause prevents people in certain countries from conforming to this state.

The eighteenth-century philosophers had a perfectly simple explanation for the gradual weakening of religious beliefs. Religious zeal, they said, was bound to die out as liberty and knowledge increased. It is unfortunate that the facts do not agree with this theory.

There are European populations whose disbelief is matched only by their brutishness and ignorance, while in America one sees one of the freest and most enlightened peoples in the world enthusiastically fulfilling all the outward duties of religion.

When I arrived in the United States, it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck me. As my stay lengthened, I began to see the great political consequences that flowed from these new facts.

Among us, I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty marching almost always in opposite directions. Here, I found them intimately united with each other: they reigned together on the same soil.

Every day I felt my desire to understand the cause of this phenomenon growing.

To find out, I questioned believers of every denomination; I sought out especially the company of priests, who are the custodians of the various faiths and who have a personal interest in their survival. The religion I profess drew me particularly close to the Catholic clergy, and I soon developed a kind of intimacy with several of its members. To each of them I expressed my astonishment and laid out my doubts: I found that all these men differed from one another only on details; but all attributed primarily to the complete separation of Church and State the peaceful hold that religion exercises in their country. I am not afraid to affirm that during my time in America, I did not meet a single man, priest or layman, who did not agree on this point.

Unless one gives that name to the roles that many of them fill in schools. The greater part of education is entrusted to the clergy.

This led me to examine more attentively than I had done until then the position that American priests occupy in political society. I recognized with surprise that they hold no public office. I did not see a single one in the administration, and I discovered that they were not even represented in the legislative assemblies.

In several states, the law had closed the political career to them; in all others, public opinion had done so.

See the constitution of New York, art. 7, sec. 4. Same for North Carolina, art. 31. Same for Virginia. Same for South Carolina, art. 1, sec. 23. Same for Kentucky, art. 2, sec. 26. Same for Tennessee, art. 1, sec. 28. Same for Louisiana, art. 2, sec. 22. The article of the New York constitution reads as follows: "Ministers of the Gospel, being by their profession dedicated to the service of God and the care of souls, ought not to be diverted from the great duties of their functions; therefore, no minister of the Gospel or priest, of whatever sect, shall be eligible to or capable of holding any civil or military office."

When at last I came to examine the spirit of the clergy itself, I saw that most of its members seemed to withdraw voluntarily from power, and to take a kind of professional pride in remaining apart from it.

I heard them condemn ambition and dishonesty regardless of the political opinions these vices might cloak themselves in. But I learned, listening to them, that men cannot be condemned in the eyes of God for these same opinions when they are sincere, and that there is no more sin in erring on matters of government than in being mistaken about how to build your house or plow your furrow.

I saw them separate themselves carefully from all parties, and flee contact with them with all the eagerness of personal interest.

These facts confirmed what I had been told. So I wanted to trace from facts back to causes: I asked myself how it could be that by diminishing the apparent power of a religion, one could come to increase its real power, and I believed it was not impossible to find out.

The brief span of sixty years will never contain the whole of man's imagination; the incomplete joys of this world will never suffice for his heart. Alone among all beings, man shows a natural disgust for existence and an immense desire to exist: he despises life and fears nothingness. These different instincts ceaselessly push his soul toward the contemplation of another world, and it is religion that leads him there. Religion is therefore merely a particular form of hope, and it is as natural to the human heart as hope itself. It is through a kind of aberration of the intellect, and with the help of a sort of moral violence done to their own nature, that men distance themselves from religious beliefs; an invincible pull brings them back. Disbelief is an accident; faith alone is the permanent condition of humanity.

Considering religions from a purely human point of view, one can therefore say that all religions draw from man himself an element of strength that can never fail them, because it is rooted in one of the constitutive principles of human nature.

I know there are times when religion can add to the power that is inherently its own the artificial power of laws and the support of the material forces that govern society. We have seen religions intimately bound to earthly governments dominate souls through terror and faith simultaneously; but when a religion forms such an alliance, I am not afraid to say it -- it acts as a man might; it sacrifices the future for the present, and by obtaining a power that is not rightfully its own, it puts its legitimate authority at risk.

When a religion seeks to build its dominion only on the desire for immortality that equally torments the hearts of all men, it can aspire to universality; but when it comes to unite itself with a government, it must adopt maxims that are applicable only to certain peoples. Thus, by allying itself with a political power, religion increases its influence over some, and loses the hope of reigning over all.

As long as a religion relies only on sentiments that are the consolation of all human miseries, it can attract the heart of the entire human race. Mixed with the bitter passions of this world, it is sometimes forced to defend allies that interest rather than love has given it; and it must repulse as adversaries men who still love it even as they fight those to whom it has bound itself. Religion cannot therefore share the material power of rulers without taking on a share of the hatred they inspire.

The political powers that appear most solidly established have as the guarantee of their duration only the opinions of one generation, the interests of one century, often the life of one man. A single law can change the social order that seemed most permanent and most firmly rooted, and with it everything changes.

The powers of society are all more or less fleeting, like our years on earth; they succeed one another rapidly like the various concerns of life; and no government has ever been seen that rested on an unchanging disposition of the human heart, or that could be founded on an immortal interest.

As long as a religion finds its strength in sentiments, instincts, and passions that are reproduced in the same way at every period of history, it defies the effort of time, or at least it cannot be destroyed except by another religion. But when religion seeks to lean on the interests of this world, it becomes almost as fragile as all the earthly powers. Alone, it can hope for immortality; tied to ephemeral powers, it follows their fortune, and often falls with the passions of a day that sustain them.

By uniting itself with the different political powers, religion can therefore enter only into a burdensome alliance. It does not need their help to live, and in serving them it can die.

The danger I have just identified exists at all times, but it is not always equally visible.

There are centuries when governments appear immortal, and others when society's very existence seems more fragile than that of a single person.

Certain constitutions keep citizens in a kind of lethargic slumber, and others give them over to a feverish agitation.

When governments seem so strong and laws so stable, people do not see the danger that religion may run by uniting itself with power.

When governments prove so weak and laws so changeable, the peril strikes every eye, but often by then it is too late to escape it. One must therefore learn to see it from afar.

As a nation takes on a democratic social order, and as societies lean toward the republican form, it becomes increasingly dangerous to unite religion with authority; for the times approach when power will pass from hand to hand, when political theories will succeed one another, when men, laws, constitutions themselves will disappear or be modified daily, and this not for a time, but constantly. Agitation and instability belong to the nature of democratic republics, just as immobility and torpor are the law of absolute monarchies.

If the Americans, who change the head of state every four years, choose new legislators every two years, and replace their provincial administrators every year; if the Americans, who have delivered the political world to the experiments of innovators, had not placed their religion somewhere outside of it, what could it cling to amid the ebb and flow of human opinions? In the midst of the struggle of parties, where would the respect it is owed be found? What would become of its immortality when everything around it was perishing?

American priests saw this truth before all others, and they have acted accordingly. They saw that they had to renounce religious influence if they wanted to acquire political power, and they preferred to lose the support of authority rather than share its vicissitudes.

In America, religion is perhaps less powerful than it has been at certain times and among certain peoples, but its influence is more lasting. It has been reduced to its own forces, which no one can take from it; it acts only within a single sphere, but it covers that sphere entirely and dominates it without effort.

I hear voices rising across Europe; everywhere people deplore the absence of belief, and wonder how to restore to religion some remnant of its former power.

It seems to me that one must first carefully investigate what should be, in our day, the natural state of men in matters of religion. Knowing then what we can hope and what we have to fear, we would clearly see the goal toward which our efforts should tend.

Two great dangers threaten the existence of religions: schisms, and indifference.

In centuries of fervor, it sometimes happens that men abandon their religion, but they escape its yoke only to submit to another. Faith changes its object; it does not die. The old religion then excites in every heart passionate love or implacable hatred; some leave it in anger, others cling to it with renewed ardor: beliefs differ, but irreligion is unknown.

It is not the same, however, when a religious belief is silently undermined by doctrines I would call negative, since in declaring one religion false they do not establish the truth of any other.

Then prodigious revolutions take place in the human mind without man's passions seeming to help, and almost without his knowing it. You see men who let slip, as if by forgetfulness, the object of their dearest hopes. Carried by an imperceptible current against which they lack the courage to fight, and to which they yet yield with regret, they abandon the faith they love to follow the doubt that leads them to despair.

In the centuries I have just described, people desert their beliefs through coldness rather than hatred; they do not reject them -- the beliefs leave them. As the unbeliever ceases to think religion true, he continues to judge it useful. Considering religious beliefs from a human perspective, he acknowledges their hold on hearts, their influence on laws. He understands how they can make people live in peace and prepare them gently for death. He therefore regrets faith after losing it, and deprived of a good whose full value he knows, he fears taking it from those who still possess it.

For his part, the man who continues to believe does not fear exposing his faith to all eyes. In those who do not share his hopes, he sees unfortunate people rather than adversaries; he knows he can win their esteem without following their example; he is therefore at war with no one; and not regarding the society in which he lives as an arena where religion must ceaselessly fight a thousand relentless enemies, he loves his contemporaries while condemning their weaknesses and grieving over their errors.

Those who do not believe hide their disbelief, and those who believe display their faith; a public opinion forms in favor of religion; people love it, support it, honor it, and one must penetrate to the very depths of souls to discover the wounds it has received.

The mass of humanity, whom religious feeling never abandons, sees nothing then to drive it from established beliefs. The instinct of another life leads it easily to the foot of the altar and delivers its heart to the precepts and consolations of faith.

Why does this picture not apply to us?

I see among us men who have ceased to believe in Christianity without attaching themselves to any religion.

I see others who are stuck in doubt, and already pretend not to believe.

Further on, I encounter Christians who still believe and dare not say so.

In the midst of these lukewarm friends and fierce adversaries, I discover at last a small number of the faithful ready to brave every obstacle and despise every danger for their beliefs. These people have done violence to human weakness to rise above the common opinion. Carried away by this very effort, they no longer know exactly where they should stop. Since they have seen that, in their country, the first use man made of his independence was to attack religion, they dread their contemporaries, and recoil in terror from the liberty that others pursue. Disbelief appears to them a new thing, and they wrap in a single hatred everything that is new. They are therefore at war with their century and their country, and in every opinion that prevails there they see a necessary enemy of the faith.

This should not be the natural state of men in matters of religion in our day.

There exists among us, therefore, an accidental and particular cause that prevents the human mind from following its natural inclination, and pushes it beyond the limits where it should naturally stop.

I am deeply convinced that this particular and accidental cause is the intimate union of politics and religion.

The unbelievers of Europe pursue Christians as political enemies rather than as religious adversaries: they hate the faith as a party's opinion, far more than as a mistaken belief; and it is less the representative of God they reject in the priest than the ally of power.

In Europe, Christianity allowed itself to be intimately bound to the powers of the earth. Today those powers are falling, and it is as though buried under their ruins. It is a living thing that someone tried to tie to the dead: cut the bonds that hold it, and it rises again.

I do not know what would need to be done to restore to European Christianity the energy of youth. God alone could do that; but at least it is within the power of men to leave to faith the use of all the forces it still possesses.

HOW THE KNOWLEDGE, HABITS, AND PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE OF AMERICANS CONTRIBUTE TO THE SUCCESS OF DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS.

What should be understood by the knowledge of the American people. -- The human mind has received a less deep cultivation in the United States than in Europe. -- But no one has remained in ignorance. -- Why. -- The speed with which ideas circulate in the half-deserted states of the West. -- How practical experience serves Americans even more than book learning.

In a thousand places in this work, I have pointed out to the reader the influence exercised by the knowledge and habits of Americans on the maintenance of their political institutions. So I now have few new things to say.

America has had until now only a very small number of remarkable writers; it has no great historians and does not count a single poet. Its inhabitants regard literature as such with a kind of disfavor; and there are third-rate European cities that publish more literary works each year than the twenty-four states of the Union combined.

The American mind strays from general ideas; it does not turn toward theoretical discoveries. Politics itself and industry cannot lead it there. In the United States, new laws are constantly being made; but no great writers have yet appeared to investigate the general principles of law.

The Americans have legal scholars and commentators but lack political theorists; and in politics they give the world examples rather than lessons.

The same is true of the mechanical arts.

In America, the inventions of Europe are applied with ingenuity, and after being improved they are marvelously adapted to the needs of the country. The people there are industrious, but they do not cultivate the science of industry. One finds good workers and few inventors. Fulton peddled his genius among foreign nations for a long time before he could devote it to his own country.

Anyone who wants to judge the state of knowledge among the Anglo-Americans is therefore liable to see the same thing from two different angles. If he looks only at the scholars, he will be astonished by how few there are; and if he counts the ignorant, the American people will seem to him the most enlightened on earth.

The entire population is situated between these two extremes: I have already said so elsewhere.

In New England, every citizen receives the elementary foundations of human knowledge; he learns in addition what the doctrines and proofs of his religion are: he is taught the history of his country and the main features of the constitution that governs it. In Connecticut and Massachusetts, it is very rare to find a man who knows all these things only imperfectly, and the person who is completely ignorant of them is in a sense a freak.

When I compare the Greek and Roman republics to these American republics -- the manuscript libraries of the former and their crude populace, versus the thousand newspapers that crisscross the latter and the enlightened people who inhabit them -- when I then consider all the efforts people still make to judge the one by the other, and to predict from what happened two thousand years ago what will happen in our day, I am tempted to burn my books, so that I may bring only new ideas to a social condition so new.

One should not, however, extend indiscriminately to the entire Union what I say of New England. The further one advances west or south, the more the education of the people diminishes. In the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, there are, as among us, a certain number of individuals who are strangers to the rudiments of human knowledge; but one would search in vain, throughout the United States, for a single district that has remained sunk in ignorance. The reason is simple: the peoples of Europe started from darkness and barbarism and advanced toward civilization and knowledge. Their progress has been uneven: some have raced along this course, others have merely walked; several stopped, and they sleep still along the way.

It has not been so in the United States.

The Anglo-Americans arrived already civilized on the soil their descendants occupy; they had nothing to learn -- they only had to avoid forgetting. And it is the children of these same Americans who, every year, carry into the wilderness, along with their households, the knowledge already acquired and an esteem for learning. Education made them feel the usefulness of knowledge, and put them in a position to transmit that same knowledge to their descendants. In the United States, society therefore had no childhood; it was born at the age of manhood.

Americans do not use the word "peasant" at all; they do not use the word because they do not have the concept; the ignorance of the earliest ages, the simplicity of the countryside, the rusticity of the village, have not been preserved among them, and they can conceive neither the virtues, nor the vices, nor the crude habits, nor the naive graces of a civilization in its infancy.

At the extreme limits of the confederated states, on the borders between society and wilderness, stands a population of bold adventurers who, to escape the poverty that was about to overtake them under the paternal roof, have not been afraid to plunge into the solitudes of America and seek a new homeland there. Scarcely arrived at the place that is to serve as his refuge, the pioneer hastily fells a few trees and raises a cabin under the foliage. There is nothing that presents a more wretched sight than these isolated dwellings. The traveler who approaches toward evening sees from a distance the flame of the hearth gleaming through the walls; and at night, if the wind rises, he hears the leafy roof rustling amid the trees of the forest. Who would not think that this poor hut is a shelter for coarseness and ignorance? Yet one should draw no connection between the pioneer and the place that shelters him. Everything around him is primitive and wild, but he himself is, so to speak, the product of eighteen centuries of labor and experience. He wears the clothing of the cities, speaks their language; knows the past, is curious about the future, argues about the present; he is a highly civilized man who, for a time, submits to living in the middle of the woods, and who plunges into the wilderness of the New World with a Bible, an axe, and some newspapers.

It is hard to imagine the incredible speed with which ideas circulate through these wildernesses.

I traveled through part of the American frontier in a kind of open cart called the mail coach. We raced along day and night over barely cleared roads through immense forests of evergreens; when the darkness became impenetrable, my driver would light branches of larch, and we continued our route by their light. From time to time we came upon a cabin in the woods: it was the post office. The mail carrier would toss an enormous bundle of letters at the door of this isolated dwelling, and we would resume our gallop, leaving each neighbor to come claim his share of the treasure.

I do not believe there is as much intellectual activity in the most enlightened and most densely populated districts of France.

In 1832, each inhabitant of Michigan contributed 1 franc 22 centimes to the postal tax, and each inhabitant of Florida 1 franc 5 centimes (see National Calendar, 1833, p. 244). In the same year, each inhabitant of the department of Nord paid to the state, for the same purpose, 1 franc 4 centimes (see General Account of Financial Administration, 1833, p. 623). Now, Michigan still had at that time only seven inhabitants per square league, and Florida five: education was less widespread and activity less vigorous in these two districts than in most of the states of the Union, while the department of Nord, which contains 3,400 individuals per square league, forms one of the most enlightened and most industrious portions of France.

There can be no doubt that the education of the people in the United States powerfully serves the maintenance of the democratic republic. This will be the case, I believe, wherever education that enlightens the mind is not separated from the upbringing that shapes customs and values.

However, I do not exaggerate this advantage, and I am even further from believing, as a great many people in Europe do, that it is enough to teach men to read and write to make them citizens on the spot.

True knowledge comes mainly from experience, and if the Americans had not been gradually accustomed to governing themselves, the book learning they possess would not be of much help to them in succeeding at it.

I have spent a great deal of time among the people of the United States, and I cannot say how much I admired their experience and their common sense.

Do not get the American talking about Europe; he will usually display great presumption and a rather foolish pride. He will content himself with those vague and general ideas that, in every country, are so useful to the ignorant. But ask him about his own country, and you will suddenly see the cloud that enveloped his mind dissipate: his language will become clear, precise, and sharp, like his thought. He will tell you what his rights are and what means he should use to exercise them; he will know the customs by which the political world operates. You will see that the rules of administration are familiar to him, and that he has made himself at home with the machinery of the laws. The inhabitant of the United States did not draw these practical skills and positive ideas from books: his literary education may have prepared him to receive them, but it did not furnish them.

It is by participating in legislation that the American learns to know the laws; it is by governing that he educates himself in the forms of government. The great work of society is accomplished every day before his eyes, and so to speak, in his own hands.

In the United States, the whole of men's education is directed toward politics; in Europe, its main purpose is to prepare them for private life. The participation of citizens in public affairs is too rare an event to be anticipated in advance.

As soon as one looks at the two societies, these differences reveal themselves even in their outward appearance.

In Europe, we often bring the ideas and habits of private life into public life, and since it sometimes happens that we pass suddenly from the intimacy of the family to the government of the state, we are often seen discussing the great interests of society in the same way that we converse with our friends.

Americans, on the contrary, almost always carry the habits of public life into private life. Among them, the idea of the jury shows up in children's games, and parliamentary procedures are found even in the order of a banquet.

THAT LAWS SERVE THE MAINTENANCE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC IN THE UNITED STATES MORE THAN PHYSICAL CAUSES, AND CUSTOMS AND VALUES MORE THAN LAWS.

All the peoples of America have a democratic social order. -- Yet democratic institutions sustain themselves only among the Anglo-Americans. -- The Spanish of South America, just as favored by physical nature as the Anglo-Americans, cannot support the democratic republic. -- Mexico, which adopted the constitution of the United States, cannot either. -- The Anglo-Americans of the West support it with more difficulty than those of the East. -- Reasons for these differences.

I have said that the maintenance of democratic institutions in the United States must be attributed to circumstances, laws, and customs and values.

I remind the reader here of the general sense in which I take the word customs and values; I mean by it the totality of the intellectual and moral dispositions that men bring to the social order.

Most Europeans know only the first of these three causes, and they give it a preponderant importance that it does not have.

It is true that the Anglo-Americans brought to the New World the equality of social conditions. Among them, one never found either commoners or nobles; prejudices of birth were always as unknown there as prejudices of profession. With the social order thus being democratic, democracy had no difficulty establishing its rule.

But this fact is not peculiar to the United States; almost all the colonies in America were founded by men who were equal among themselves or who became so by living there. There is not a single part of the New World where Europeans were able to create an aristocracy.

Yet democratic institutions thrive only in the United States.

The American Union has no enemies to fight. It stands alone in the middle of the wilderness like an island in the middle of the ocean.

But nature had isolated the Spanish of South America in the same way, and that isolation did not stop them from maintaining armies. They made war on each other when foreign enemies were lacking. Only the Anglo-American democracy has managed, until now, to maintain itself in peace.

The territory of the Union offers a boundless field for human activity; it provides an inexhaustible supply for industry and labor. The love of wealth therefore takes the place of ambition, and material well-being extinguishes the passion of parties.

But where in the world does one find more fertile wildernesses, mightier rivers, more untouched and inexhaustible riches than in South America? Yet South America cannot support democracy. If it were enough for a people's happiness to have been placed in a corner of the universe and to be able to spread at will over uninhabited lands, the Spanish of South America would have nothing to complain about. And even if they did not enjoy the same happiness as the inhabitants of the United States, they should at least have made themselves the envy of the peoples of Europe. Yet there are no more miserable nations on earth than those of South America.

Thus, not only can physical causes not produce analogous results among the Americans of the South and those of the North, but they cannot even produce among the former something that is not inferior to what we see in Europe, where they operate in the opposite direction.

Physical causes therefore do not influence the destiny of nations as much as people suppose.

I have met men from New England ready to abandon a homeland where they could have found comfort, in order to go seek their fortune in the wilderness. Nearby, I have seen the French population of Canada crowding into a space too small for it, when the same wilderness was close at hand; and while the emigrant from the United States acquired a great estate for the price of a few days' work, the Canadian paid for land as dearly as if he were still living in France.

Thus nature, in delivering the solitudes of the New World to the Europeans, offers them goods they do not always know how to use.

I see among other peoples of America the same conditions of prosperity as among the Anglo-Americans, minus their laws and their customs and values; and these peoples are miserable. The laws and customs and values of the Anglo-Americans therefore constitute the specific reason for their greatness and the predominant cause I have been looking for.

I am far from claiming that there is any absolute perfection in American laws: I do not believe they are applicable to all democratic peoples; and among them, there are several that, even in the United States, strike me as dangerous.

Yet one cannot deny that American legislation, taken as a whole, is well adapted to the character of the people it must govern and to the nature of the country.

American laws are therefore good, and a large part of the success that democratic government achieves in America must be attributed to them; but I do not think they are the main cause. And while they seem to me to have more influence on the social happiness of Americans than the nature of the country itself, on the other hand I see reasons to believe they exert less influence than customs and values.

The federal laws are certainly the most important part of American legislation.

Mexico, which is as favorably situated as the Anglo-American Union, adopted these very same laws, and it cannot grow accustomed to democratic government.

There is therefore a reason independent of physical causes and laws that allows democracy to govern the United States.

But here is something even more telling. Nearly all the men who inhabit the territory of the Union are descended from the same stock. They speak the same language, pray to God in the same way, are subject to the same material conditions, and obey the same laws.

So where do the differences that must be observed among them come from?

Why, in the east of the Union, does republican government appear strong and orderly, proceeding with maturity and deliberation? What cause gives all its actions a character of wisdom and durability?

Why, on the contrary, do the powers of society in the west seem to operate at random?

Why does there reign in the conduct of affairs something disordered, passionate, one could almost say feverish, that does not promise a long future?

I am no longer comparing the Anglo-Americans to foreign peoples; I am now setting the Anglo-Americans against each other, and I am asking why they are not alike. Here, all the arguments drawn from the nature of the country and the difference in laws fail me at the same time. I must look to some other cause; and where will I find it, if not in customs and values?

It is in the east that the Anglo-Americans have had the longest experience of democratic government, and where they have formed the habits and conceived the ideas most favorable to its maintenance. Democracy has there gradually penetrated into customs, into opinions, into forms; it is found in every detail of social life as well as in the laws. It is in the east that literary education and practical training of the people have been most perfected, and that religion has best intertwined itself with liberty. What are all these habits, these opinions, these customs, these beliefs, if not what I have called customs and values?

In the west, on the contrary, some of these same advantages are still lacking. Many Americans in the western states were born in the woods, and they mix with the civilization of their fathers the ideas and customs of wild life. Among them, passions are more violent, religious morality less powerful, ideas less settled. People there exercise virtually no control over one another, because they barely know each other. The peoples of the West therefore show, up to a point, the inexperience and the unruly habits of nations in their infancy. Yet the societies of the West are formed of old elements; it is only the combination that is new.

It is therefore customs and values above all that make the Americans of the United States, alone among all Americans, capable of sustaining the rule of democracy; and it is customs and values again that make the various Anglo-American democracies more or less orderly and prosperous.

Thus, in Europe, the influence that a country's geographical position exerts on the durability of democratic institutions is exaggerated. Too much importance is attributed to laws, too little to customs and values. These three great causes no doubt all serve to regulate and direct American democracy; but if they had to be ranked, I would say that physical causes contribute less than laws, and laws infinitely less than customs and values.

I am convinced that the most fortunate situation and the best laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of customs and values, while customs and values can still make the most of the most unfavorable situations and the worst laws. The importance of customs and values is a common truth to which study and experience constantly lead back. It seems to me that I find it placed in my mind as a central point; I see it at the end of all my ideas.

I have only one more word to say on this subject.

If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel, over the course of this book, the importance I attribute to the practical experience of Americans, to their habits, to their opinions -- in a word, to their customs and values -- in the maintenance of their laws, I have missed the main goal I set for myself in writing it.

COULD LAWS AND CUSTOMS AND VALUES SUFFICE TO MAINTAIN DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS ELSEWHERE THAN IN AMERICA?

The Anglo-Americans, transported to Europe, would be obliged to modify their laws. -- One must distinguish between democratic institutions and American institutions. -- One can conceive of democratic laws better than, or at least different from, those the American democracy has given itself. -- The example of America proves only that one need not despair of regulating democracy with the help of laws and customs and values.

I have said that the success of democratic institutions in the United States owes more to the laws themselves and to customs and values than to the nature of the country.

But does it follow that these same causes, transported elsewhere, would alone have the same power; and if the country cannot substitute for laws and customs and values, can laws and customs and values, in turn, substitute for the country?

Here one will readily understand that the evidence is lacking: one finds in the New World other peoples besides the Anglo-Americans, and since these peoples are subject to the same material conditions, I have been able to compare them with each other.

But outside of America there are no nations that, lacking the same physical advantages as the Anglo-Americans, have nonetheless adopted their laws and their customs and values.

So we have no basis for comparison in this matter; one can only venture opinions.

It seems to me, first, that one must carefully distinguish the institutions of the United States from democratic institutions in general.

When I think of the state of Europe, of its great peoples, its populous cities, its formidable armies, the complications of its politics, I cannot believe that even the Anglo-Americans themselves, transported with their ideas, their religion, their customs and values, onto our soil, could live there without considerably modifying their laws.

But one can imagine a democratic people organized differently from the American people.

Is it then impossible to conceive of a government founded on the real will of the majority, but where the majority, doing violence to the instincts of equality that are natural to it, in favor of the order and stability of the state, would consent to vest all the powers of the executive in a single family or a single man? Could one not imagine a democratic society where national forces would be more centralized than in the United States, where the people would exercise a less direct and less irresistible influence over public affairs, and where nonetheless every citizen, invested with certain rights, would take part, in his own sphere, in the conduct of government?

What I have seen among the Anglo-Americans leads me to believe that democratic institutions of this kind, introduced prudently into society, gradually mingling with its habits, and slowly blending with the very opinions of the people, could survive in places other than America.

If the laws of the United States were the only democratic laws one could imagine, or the most perfect it was possible to find, I could see how one might conclude that the success of American laws proves nothing for the success of democratic laws in general, in a country less favored by nature.

But if the laws of the Americans seem to me defective on many points, and it is easy for me to conceive of them being different, the special nature of the country does not prove to me that democratic institutions cannot succeed among a people where physical circumstances are less favorable but the laws are better.

If men showed themselves to be different in America from what they are elsewhere; if their social order gave rise in them to habits and opinions contrary to those that the same social order produces in Europe, what happens in American democracies would teach us nothing about what must happen in other democracies.

If the Americans displayed the same tendencies as all other democratic peoples, and their lawmakers had relied on the nature of the country and the favor of circumstances to contain those tendencies within proper limits, the prosperity of the United States, being attributable to purely physical causes, would prove nothing for peoples who wanted to follow their example without having their natural advantages.

But neither of these suppositions is borne out by the facts.

I found in America passions analogous to those we see in Europe: some sprang from the very nature of the human heart; others, from the democratic social order.

Thus I found in the United States that restlessness of the heart that is natural to men when, with conditions being more or less equal, everyone sees the same chances of rising. I encountered the democratic feeling of envy expressed in a thousand different ways. I noticed that the people often showed, in the conduct of affairs, a great mixture of presumption and ignorance; and I concluded that in America, as among us, men are subject to the same imperfections and exposed to the same miseries.

But when I came to examine the state of society closely, I easily discovered that the Americans had made great and successful efforts to combat these weaknesses of the human heart and correct these natural defects of democracy.

Their various municipal laws struck me as so many barriers that held the restless ambition of citizens within a narrow sphere, and turned to the benefit of the township the same democratic passions that might have overturned the state. It seemed to me that the American lawmakers had managed to set, with some success, the idea of rights against the feeling of envy; against the constant motion of the political world, the immobility of religious morality; the experience of the people, against its theoretical ignorance, and its habit of affairs, against the impetuousness of its desires.

The Americans therefore did not rely on the nature of the country to combat the dangers that arise from their constitution and their political laws. To ills they share with all democratic peoples, they applied remedies that they alone, until now, have thought of; and though they were the first to try them, they succeeded.

The customs and values, and the laws, of the Americans are not the only ones that can suit democratic peoples; but the Americans have shown that one need not despair of regulating democracy with the help of laws and customs and values.

If other peoples, borrowing from America this general and fertile idea, without wishing to imitate its inhabitants in the particular application they have made of it, tried to make themselves fit for the social order that Providence imposes on the men of our time, and thus sought to escape the despotism or anarchy that threatens them, what reason do we have to believe they would fail in their efforts?

The organization and establishment of democracy among Christians is the great political problem of our time. The Americans do not, no doubt, solve this problem, but they provide useful guidance to those who wish to solve it.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FOREGOING WITH RESPECT TO EUROPE.

It is easy to see why I undertook the investigations above. The question I have raised concerns not just the United States, but the entire world; not one nation, but all of humanity.

If peoples whose social order is democratic could remain free only while they live in the wilderness, one would have to despair of the future fate of the human race; for men are marching rapidly toward democracy, and the wildernesses are filling up.

If it were true that laws and customs and values were insufficient to maintain democratic institutions, what other refuge would remain for nations but the despotism of a single man?

I know that these days there are many honest people who are hardly frightened by this future, and who, weary of liberty, would like to rest at last far from its storms.

But these people are poorly acquainted with the port toward which they are headed. Preoccupied with their memories, they judge absolute power by what it was in the past, and not by what it could become in our day.

If absolute power were to reestablish itself among the democratic peoples of Europe, I have no doubt that it would take on a new form and show itself with features unknown to our forefathers.

There was a time in Europe when law, as well as the consent of the people, had clothed kings in an almost boundless power. But it almost never occurred to them to use it.

I will not speak of the prerogatives of the nobility, the authority of the sovereign courts, the rights of corporations, the privileges of the provinces, which, while softening the blows of authority, maintained in the nation a spirit of resistance.

Apart from these political institutions, which, though often opposed to the liberty of individuals, nonetheless served to sustain the love of liberty in people's souls -- and whose usefulness in that regard is easy to see -- opinions and customs and values raised around royal power barriers less visible, but no less powerful.

Religion, the love of subjects, the goodness of the prince, honor, family spirit, the prejudices of the provinces, custom, and public opinion all limited the power of kings, and confined their authority within an invisible circle.

The constitution of peoples was then despotic, and their customs and values free. Princes had the right but neither the ability nor the desire to do everything.

Of the barriers that once checked tyranny, what remains to us today?

Religion having lost its hold over souls, the most visible boundary that divided good from evil has been overthrown; everything seems doubtful and uncertain in the moral world; kings and peoples move about at random, and no one can say where the natural limits of despotism lie or where the boundaries of license are.

Long revolutions have forever destroyed the respect that surrounded heads of state. Freed from the weight of public esteem, princes can henceforth give themselves over without fear to the intoxication of power.

When kings see the hearts of the people coming out to meet them, they are merciful, because they feel strong; and they treat the love of their subjects carefully, because the love of subjects is the support of the throne. A reciprocal exchange of sentiments then develops between prince and people, whose sweetness recalls, within society, the intimacy of family. The subjects, even while grumbling against the sovereign, still grieve to displease him, and the sovereign strikes his subjects with a light hand, as a father chastises his children.

But once the prestige of royalty has vanished amid the tumult of revolutions; when kings succeeding one another on the throne have each in turn exposed to the people's gaze the weakness of right and the harshness of fact, no one any longer sees the sovereign as the father of the state, and everyone sees a master. If he is weak, he is despised; if he is strong, he is hated. He himself is full of anger and fear; he sees himself as a stranger in his own country, and he treats his subjects as conquered people.

When the provinces and cities each formed a distinct nation within the common fatherland, each had a particular spirit that opposed the general spirit of servitude; but today, all the parts of a single empire, having lost their freedoms, their customs, their prejudices, and even their memories and their names, have grown accustomed to obeying the same laws -- it is no harder to oppress them all together than it was to oppress each one separately.

While the nobility enjoyed its power, and long after it lost it, aristocratic honor gave extraordinary strength to individual resistance.

One could see then men who, despite their powerlessness, still maintained a high idea of their individual worth, and dared to resist the force of public power in isolation.

But in our day, when all classes are finishing the process of merging into one another, when the individual disappears more and more into the crowd and easily loses himself amid the common obscurity; today, when monarchical honor has almost lost its hold without being replaced by virtue, nothing sustains man above himself anymore -- who can say where the demands of power and the complaisance of weakness would stop?

As long as the spirit of family endured, the man who fought against tyranny was never alone; he found around him clients, hereditary friends, relatives. And even had this support failed him, he still felt sustained by his ancestors and animated by his descendants. But when estates are divided, and when within a few years the bloodlines merge, where can family spirit be found?

What force remains in custom among a people that has entirely changed its face and goes on changing it ceaselessly, where every act of tyranny already has a precedent, where every crime can claim an example, where nothing can be found old enough for people to fear destroying it, and nothing conceived so new that people dare not attempt it?

What resistance can customs and values offer when they have already bent so many times?

What can public opinion itself do when not twenty people are bound by a common tie; when there is not a man, nor a family, nor a group, nor a class, nor a free association that can represent this opinion and make it act?

When every citizen, being equally powerless, equally poor, equally isolated, can oppose to the organized force of the government only his individual weakness?

To imagine something analogous to what would then happen among us, one would have to look not to our own annals. One would perhaps have to consult the monuments of antiquity, and go back to those terrible centuries of Roman tyranny, when customs had been corrupted, memories effaced, habits destroyed, opinions made wavering, and liberty, driven from the laws, no longer knew where to find refuge; when nothing any longer protected the citizens, and the citizens no longer protected one another; when men made sport of human nature, and princes exhausted the mercy of Heaven before they exhausted the patience of their subjects.

Those people seem quite blind to me who think they can recover the monarchy of Henry IV or Louis XIV. As for me, when I consider the point several European nations have already reached and the direction in which all the others are heading, I feel inclined to believe that among them there will soon be room only for democratic liberty or for the tyranny of the Caesars.

Is this not worth thinking about? If men truly arrived at the point where they had to be made either all free or all slaves, all equal in rights or all stripped of rights; if those who govern societies were reduced to the alternative of gradually raising the masses up to their own level or letting all citizens fall below the level of humanity -- would that not be enough to overcome many doubts, reassure many consciences, and prepare everyone to make great sacrifices willingly?

Should one not then regard the gradual development of democratic institutions and customs and values, not as the best thing, but as the only means remaining to us of being free; and without loving democratic government, would one not be inclined to adopt it as the most applicable and the most honest remedy that can be set against the present ills of society?

It is hard to get the people to participate in government; it is harder still to provide them with the experience and the feelings they lack in order to govern well.

The desires of democracy are changeable; its agents, crude; its laws, imperfect; I grant all that. But if it were true that soon there would be no middle ground between the rule of democracy and the yoke of a single man, should we not lean toward the one rather than submit willingly to the other? And if we must finally arrive at complete equality, would it not be better to let ourselves be leveled by liberty than by a despot?

Those who, after reading this book, should judge that in writing it I wished to propose the laws and customs and values of Anglo-America for the imitation of all peoples with a democratic social order -- those people would be making a great mistake; they would be clinging to the form while abandoning the substance of my thought. My goal was to show, through the example of America, that laws and above all customs and values could allow a democratic people to remain free. I am, moreover, very far from believing that we should follow the example that American democracy has set, and imitate the means it has used to achieve the goal of its efforts; for I am well aware of the influence that the nature of a country and prior historical events exert on political constitutions, and I would regard it as a great misfortune for the human race if liberty had to manifest itself everywhere with the same features.

But I do think that if we fail to gradually introduce and ultimately establish democratic institutions among ourselves, and if we give up on providing all citizens with the ideas and sentiments that first prepare them for freedom and then allow them to use it, there will be independence for no one -- not for the bourgeois, not for the noble, not for the poor, not for the rich -- but an equal tyranny for all; and I foresee that if we do not succeed in time in founding among ourselves the peaceful rule of the greatest number, we will arrive sooner or later at the unlimited power of a single man.

CHAPTER X.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CURRENT STATE AND PROBABLE FUTURE OF THE THREE RACES THAT INHABIT THE TERRITORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

The main task I set for myself is now complete. I have shown, at least as well as I could, what the laws of American democracy are and what its customs and values look like. I could stop here, but the reader might feel I have not fully met his expectations.

In America, one finds far more than just a vast and complete democracy; the peoples who inhabit the New World can be examined from more than one angle.

Throughout this book, my subject has often led me to discuss the Indians and the Black population, but I have never had time to stop and show what position these two races occupy within the democratic people I was painting. I explained the spirit and the laws through which the Anglo-American confederation was formed; I could only touch in passing, and very incompletely, on the dangers threatening that confederation, and it was impossible for me to explain in detail what its chances of survival were, independent of its laws and customs. In discussing the united republics, I ventured no conjecture about the permanence of republican forms in the New World, and while I often alluded to the commercial energy that reigns in the Union, I was unable to address the future of the Americans as a trading people.

These subjects touch on my main topic without being part of it; they are American without being democratic, and it was democracy above all that I wanted to portray. So I had to set them aside at first; but I must return to them now as I conclude.

The territory occupied or claimed today by the American Union stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of the Pacific. To the east and west, its boundaries are those of the continent itself; it extends south to the edge of the Tropics and reaches north into the ice.

See the map at the end of the first volume.

The peoples spread across this space do not form, as in Europe, so many branches of a single family. From the very first glance, you can make out three naturally distinct races — I could almost say hostile ones. Education, law, origin, and even the outward appearance of their features had raised between them a nearly insurmountable barrier; fortune brought them together on the same soil, but it mixed them without blending them, and each pursues its destiny apart.

Among these very different peoples, the one who first catches your eye — first in education, in power, in happiness — is the white man, the European, the man par excellence; below him appear the Black man and the Indian.

These two unfortunate races have nothing in common — not birth, not appearance, not language, not customs. Only their misfortunes are alike. Both occupy an equally inferior position in the country they inhabit; both suffer the effects of tyranny; and if their sufferings differ, they can blame the same people for them.

Watching what happens in the world, wouldn't you say that the European is to other races what man himself is to the animals? He puts them to his use, and when he cannot bend them to it, he destroys them.

Oppression has stripped the descendants of the Africans, in a single stroke, of nearly all the privileges of humanity. The Black man in the United States has lost even the memory of his homeland; he no longer understands the language his fathers spoke; he has renounced their religion and forgotten their customs. In ceasing to belong to Africa, he has gained no claim to the goods of Europe; he has stopped between two societies and remained isolated between two peoples — sold by one and rejected by the other, finding in the whole universe only his master's hearth to offer him the incomplete image of a homeland.

The Black man has no family; he cannot see in a woman anything but the passing companion of his pleasures, and his sons, at birth, are his equals.

Should I call it a blessing from God or a final curse of His wrath — this disposition of the soul that makes a person insensible to extreme suffering and even gives him a kind of perverse taste for the cause of his misfortunes?

Plunged into this abyss of suffering, the Black man barely feels his misfortune. Violence placed him in slavery; the habit of servitude has given him the thoughts and ambitions of a slave. He admires his tyrants even more than he hates them and finds his joy and pride in the servile imitation of those who oppress him.

His intelligence has sunk to the level of his soul.

The Black man enters slavery and life at the same time. What am I saying? He is often bought while still in his mother's womb, and he begins, so to speak, to be a slave before he is born.

Without needs and without pleasures, useless to himself, he understands from the first lessons existence teaches him that he is the property of another person whose interest it is to watch over his days. He sees that the care of his own fate is not left to him; the very use of thought seems to him a useless gift from Providence, and he peacefully enjoys all the privileges of his degradation.

If he becomes free, independence often seems to him a heavier chain than slavery itself; for in the course of his life, he has learned to submit to everything except reason, and when reason becomes his only guide, he cannot recognize its voice. A thousand new needs besiege him, and he lacks the knowledge and energy to resist them. Needs are masters that must be fought, and he has learned only to submit and obey. He has reached this peak of misery: servitude brutalizes him and freedom destroys him.

Oppression has had no less influence on the Indian races, but its effects are different.

Before the arrival of whites in the New World, the people who inhabited North America lived peacefully in the forests. Subject to the ordinary ups and downs of life in the wild, they displayed the vices and virtues of uncivilized peoples. After scattering the Indian tribes far into the wilderness, the Europeans condemned them to a wandering, vagabond existence full of unspeakable suffering.

Uncivilized nations are governed only by their beliefs and customs.

By weakening the sense of homeland among the Indians of North America, scattering their families, obscuring their traditions, breaking the chain of memory, changing all their habits, and increasing their needs beyond measure, European tyranny has made them more disorderly and less civilized than they already were. The moral condition and physical state of these peoples have declined together, and they have grown more barbarous as they have become more wretched. Still, the Europeans have not been able to entirely transform the character of the Indians; while possessing the power to destroy them, they have never had the power to civilize or subdue them.

The Black man is placed at the furthest extreme of servitude; the Indian, at the furthest extreme of freedom. Slavery produces effects in the former that are hardly more devastating than independence produces in the latter.

The Black man has lost even the ownership of his own person and cannot dispose of his own existence without committing a kind of theft.

The Indian is left to his own devices the moment he can act. He has scarcely known the authority of family; he has never bent his will before any of his fellows; no one has taught him to tell voluntary obedience from shameful subjection, and he does not even know the word "law." For him, to be free is to escape nearly all the bonds of society. He delights in this savage independence and would rather die than sacrifice the smallest part of it. Civilization has little hold on such a man.

The Black man makes a thousand futile efforts to enter a society that rejects him. He adopts the tastes of his oppressors, embraces their opinions, and by imitating them hopes to merge with them. He has been told from birth that his race is naturally inferior to that of the whites, and he is not far from believing it; so he is ashamed of himself. In each of his features he discovers a trace of slavery, and if he could, he would gladly repudiate himself entirely.

The Indian, on the other hand, has an imagination filled with the supposed nobility of his origin. He lives and dies amid these dreams of pride. Far from wanting to bend his customs to ours, he clings to barbarism as a badge of his race, and he rejects civilization perhaps less out of hatred for it than from the fear of resembling Europeans.

The indigenous people of North America cling to their beliefs and to the smallest details of their habits with an inflexibility unmatched in history. For more than two hundred years, the wandering tribes of North America have had daily contact with the white race, and they have borrowed from it virtually not a single idea or custom. European men have, however, exercised a very great influence on the Indians. They have made the Indian character more disorderly, but they have not made it more European. I found myself in the summer of 1831 at a place called Green Bay, behind Lake Michigan, which serves as the farthest frontier of the United States on the side of the Indians of the Northwest. There I met an American officer, Major H., who one day, after telling me at length about the inflexibility of the Indian character, told me this story: "I once knew a young Indian who had been raised in a college in New England. He had done very well there and had taken on every outward appearance of a civilized man. When war broke out between us and the English in 1810, I saw this young man again; he was then serving in our army, leading the warriors of his tribe. The Americans had only allowed the Indians into their ranks on the condition that they would refrain from the horrible practice of scalping the defeated. On the evening of the battle of **, C... came and sat by our campfire. I asked him what had happened to him during the day; he told me, and as he grew more and more animated by the memory of his exploits, he ended by opening his shirt and saying, 'Don't betray me, but look!' I did indeed see," added Major H., "between his body and his shirt, the scalp of an Englishman, still dripping with blood."

Against the perfection of our arts, he wants to pit nothing but the resources of the wilderness; against our tactics, nothing but his undisciplined courage; against the depth of our designs, nothing but the spontaneous instincts of his wild nature. He falls in this unequal struggle.

The Black man would like to merge with the European but cannot. The Indian could, to a point, succeed — but he disdains to try. The servility of the one delivers him to slavery; the pride of the other, to death.

I remember that while traveling through the forests that still cover the state of Alabama, I came one day to a pioneer's cabin. I did not want to go inside the American's dwelling, but I went to rest for a few minutes by a spring not far away in the woods. While I was there, an Indian woman came by (we were then near the territory occupied by the Creek nation). She was holding by the hand a little girl of five or six, who belonged to the white race and whom I took to be the pioneer's daughter. A Black woman followed them. The Indian woman's clothing had a kind of barbaric luxury: metal rings hung from her nostrils and ears; her hair, interwoven with glass beads, fell freely on her shoulders, and I could see she was not married, for she still wore the shell necklace that virgins traditionally set aside on the marriage bed. The Black woman was dressed in European clothes that were nearly in rags.

The three of them sat down at the edge of the spring, and the young Indian woman, taking the child in her arms, lavished on her caresses that you might have thought came from a mother's heart. For her part, the Black woman tried with a thousand innocent tricks to attract the attention of the little Creole girl. The child displayed in her slightest movements a sense of superiority that contrasted strangely with her weakness and her age; you would have said she was exercising a kind of condescension in receiving the attentions of her companions.

Crouching before her mistress, watching her every wish, the Black woman seemed equally divided between an almost maternal attachment and a servile fear, while in the Indian woman's outpouring of tenderness you could see an air that was free, proud, and almost fierce.

I had come closer and was silently contemplating this scene. My curiosity must have displeased the Indian woman, for she rose abruptly, pushed the child away with a kind of roughness, and, after throwing me an irritated look, disappeared into the forest.

I had often seen individuals belonging to the three races that populate North America gathered together in the same place; I had already recognized, in a thousand different ways, the dominance exercised by the whites. But there was something particularly moving in the scene I have just described: a bond of affection here united the oppressed with the oppressors, and nature, in striving to bring them together, made all the more striking the immense distance that prejudice and law had placed between them.

CURRENT STATE AND PROBABLE FUTURE OF THE INDIAN TRIBES THAT INHABIT THE TERRITORY OF THE UNION.

Gradual disappearance of the indigenous races. -- How it happens. -- Miseries that accompany the forced migrations of the Indians. -- The Indians of North America had only two ways to escape destruction: war or civilization. -- They can no longer wage war. -- Why they refuse to become civilized when they still could, and why they can no longer do so once they finally want to. -- Example of the Creeks and the Cherokees. -- Policy of the individual states toward these Indians. -- Policy of the federal government.

All the Indian tribes that once inhabited the territory of New England — the Narragansetts, the Mohicans, the Pequots — now live only in human memory. The Lenape, who received Penn a hundred and fifty years ago on the banks of the Delaware, have vanished. I met the last of the Iroquois: they were begging for alms. All the nations I have just named once stretched to the shores of the sea; now you must travel more than a hundred leagues into the interior of the continent to find a single Indian. These indigenous peoples have not merely retreated; they have been destroyed.

In the thirteen original states, only 6,373 Indians remain. (See Legislative Documents, 20th Congress, No. 117, p. 20.)

As the native peoples withdraw and die, an immense nation grows ceaselessly in their place. Never before among nations has there been such a prodigious expansion, nor such a rapid destruction.

As for how this destruction happens, it is easy to explain.

When the Indians lived alone in the wilderness from which they are now being exiled, their needs were few. They made their own weapons, river water was their only drink, and animal skins served as both clothing and food.

The Europeans introduced firearms, iron, and liquor to the indigenous peoples of North America. They taught them to replace their crude barbaric garments with our woven fabrics. By acquiring new tastes, the Indians did not learn the skills to satisfy them, and they had to turn to the industry of the whites. In return for these goods — which he could not produce himself — the Indian had nothing to offer but the rich furs still found in his forests. From that moment, hunting had to provide not only for his own needs but also for the frivolous appetites of Europe. He no longer pursued the animals of the forest just to feed himself, but to obtain the only goods he could trade with us.

Messrs. Clark and Cass, in their report to Congress on February 4, 1829, p. 23, said: "The time is already far behind us when the Indians could obtain the items necessary for their food and clothing without resorting to the industry of civilized men. Beyond the Mississippi, in a country where immense herds of buffalo are still found, there live Indian tribes that follow these wild animals in their migrations; the Indians we speak of still find the means to live by conforming to all the customs of their fathers. But the buffalo are retreating ceaselessly. The smaller species of wild animals — bears, deer, beavers, muskrats — which particularly provide Indians with what is necessary to sustain life, can now be reached only with rifles or traps. It is mainly in the northwest that Indians are forced to engage in excessive labor to feed their families. Often the hunter spends several days in a row pursuing game without success; during this time, his family must survive on bark and roots, or perish. Many do starve to death each winter." The Indians refuse to live like Europeans; yet they can no longer do without Europeans, nor live entirely as their fathers did. Here is a single fact, drawn from an equally official source, to illustrate the point: men belonging to an Indian tribe on the shores of Lake Superior killed a European. The American government prohibited trade with the tribe to which the guilty parties belonged, until those men were handed over — which they were.

As the needs of the indigenous people grew, their resources never stopped shrinking. The day a European settlement forms in the neighborhood of Indian territory, the game immediately takes fright.

"Five years ago," says Volney in his Survey of the United States, p. 370, "on the way from Vincennes to Kaskaskia, in territory now part of the state of Illinois, then entirely wild (1797), you could not cross the prairies without seeing herds of four or five hundred buffalo. Today not a single one remains; they have swum across the Mississippi, driven off by the hunters, and above all by the bells of American cattle."

Thousands of nomadic Indians, wandering through the forests without fixed homes, did not alarm it; but the moment the steady noise of European industry is heard in any place, the game begins to flee westward, where instinct tells it that it will still find limitless wilderness. "The herds of buffalo are retreating ceaselessly," say Messrs. Cass and Clark in their report to Congress on February 4, 1829; "a few years ago they still came close to the foot of the Alleghenies; in a few years, it may be difficult to find them even on the immense plains that stretch along the Rocky Mountains." I was told that this effect of the approach of whites was often felt at two hundred leagues from their frontier. Their influence thus reaches tribes whose very names they barely know, and who suffer the evils of dispossession long before they know who is responsible.

One can verify the truth of what I say here by examining the general table of Indian tribes within the limits claimed by the United States. (Legislative Documents, 20th Congress, No. 117, pp. 90-105.) You will see that the tribes in the center of America are declining rapidly, even though the Europeans are still very far from them.

Soon bold adventurers push into Indian country. They advance fifteen or twenty leagues past the outermost frontier of the whites and build the dwelling of civilized man in the very midst of the wilderness. This is easily done: the boundaries of a hunting people's territory are poorly defined. The territory, moreover, belongs to the entire nation and is not precisely the property of anyone; no individual interest therefore defends any part of it.

A few European families, occupying widely scattered points, then finish driving the wild animals permanently from all the land between them. The Indians, who until then had lived in a kind of abundance, now struggle to survive and find it even harder to obtain the trade goods they need. By chasing away their game, it is as if you had struck the fields of our farmers barren. Soon they lose nearly all their means of subsistence. You find these unfortunate people roaming like starving wolves through their empty forests. An instinctive love of homeland attaches them to the soil where they were born,

The Indians, say Messrs. Clark and Cass in their report to Congress, p. 15, are attached to their country by the same feeling of affection that binds us to ours; and in addition, they associate with the idea of selling the lands that the Great Spirit gave to their ancestors certain superstitious beliefs that hold great power over tribes that have not yet ceded anything, or have ceded only a small portion of their territory to Europeans. "We do not sell the place where the ashes of our fathers rest" — that is always the first answer they give to anyone who proposes to buy their land.

yet they find there nothing but misery and death. They finally give in; they leave, and following the elk, the buffalo, and the beaver in their flight, they let these wild animals choose them a new homeland. It is not, strictly speaking, the Europeans who drive the indigenous people of America from their land — it is famine. A happy distinction that escaped the old moralists, and that modern scholars have discovered.

One cannot imagine the terrible suffering that accompanies these forced migrations. By the time the Indians leave their ancestral lands, they are already exhausted and diminished. The region where they go to settle is occupied by tribes that view the newcomers with jealousy. Behind them is hunger, ahead of them is war, everywhere is misery. To escape so many enemies, they scatter. Each one tries to isolate himself, to find by stealth the means of sustaining his life, and lives in the immensity of the wilderness like an outlaw in civilized society. The social bond, long weakened, now breaks entirely. There was already no homeland for them; soon there will be no people left; families will barely survive; the common name is lost, the language forgotten, the traces of origin disappear. The nation has ceased to exist. It lives on barely in the memory of American antiquarians and is known only to a few scholars in Europe.

I would not want the reader to think I am exaggerating here. I saw with my own eyes several of the miseries I have just described; I witnessed suffering that I would find impossible to retrace.

At the end of 1831, I was on the left bank of the Mississippi, at a place the Europeans call Memphis. While I was there, a large group of Choctaws arrived (the French in Louisiana call them Chactas). These Indians were leaving their country and trying to cross to the right bank of the Mississippi, where they hoped to find a refuge the American government had promised them. It was then the dead of winter, and that year the cold was unusually severe. Snow had hardened on the ground, and the river was carrying enormous blocks of ice. The Indians brought their families with them; they dragged along the wounded, the sick, newborn children, and old people about to die. They had neither tents nor wagons, only a few provisions and some weapons. I watched them embark to cross the great river, and this solemn sight will never leave my memory. You heard among this assembled crowd neither sobs nor complaints; they were silent. Their sufferings were old, and they felt them to be beyond remedy. The Indians had all already boarded the vessel that would carry them across; their dogs remained on the shore. When these animals finally saw that their masters were departing forever, they let out terrible howls all together and, plunging at once into the icy waters of the Mississippi, swam after their masters.

The dispossession of the Indians takes place in our day in a regular manner, so to speak, and entirely within the law.

When the European population begins to approach the wilderness occupied by an Indian nation, the United States government usually sends that nation a formal embassy. The whites gather the Indians together on a wide plain and, after eating and drinking with them, say: "What are you doing in the land of your fathers? Soon you will have to dig up their bones just to live here. How is the country you live in better than any other? Aren't there woods, swamps, and prairies elsewhere? Can you only live under your own sun? Beyond those mountains you see on the horizon, past the lake that borders your territory to the west, you will find vast regions where wild animals still roam in abundance. Sell us your lands and go live happily in those places." After this speech, they spread before the Indians' eyes firearms, woolen clothes, barrels of liquor, glass bead necklaces, tin bracelets, earrings, and mirrors.

See the Legislative Documents of Congress, doc. 117, for an account of what happens on these occasions. This curious passage is found in the report already cited, made by Messrs. Clark and Lewis Cass to Congress on February 4, 1829. Mr. Cass is now Secretary of War. "When the Indians arrive at the place where the treaty is to be held," say Messrs. Clark and Cass, "they are poor and nearly naked. There they see and examine a very large number of objects precious to them, which American merchants have been careful to bring. The women and children, who want their needs met, then begin to torment the men with a thousand insistent demands, and use all their influence to get the land sold. The improvidence of the Indians is habitual and invincible. Meeting his immediate needs and satisfying his present desires is the irresistible passion of the Indian; the expectation of future advantages acts only weakly on him; he easily forgets the past and does not concern himself with the future. It would be useless to ask the Indians to cede part of their territory if you were not in a position to satisfy their needs on the spot. When you consider impartially the situation in which these unfortunate people find themselves, you are not surprised at the eagerness with which they seek some relief from their sufferings."

If, at the sight of all these riches, they still hesitate, the Americans hint that they cannot really refuse the consent being asked, and that the government itself will soon be powerless to guarantee their rights. What are they to do? Half persuaded, half coerced, the Indians move on. They go to live in new wildernesses where the whites will not leave them in peace for ten years. This is how the Americans acquire entire provinces at bargain prices — provinces that the richest sovereigns of Europe could not afford.

On May 19, 1830, Mr. Ed. Everett stated before the House of Representatives that the Americans had already acquired by treaty, east and west of the Mississippi, 230,000,000 acres. In 1808, the Osage ceded 48,000,000 acres for an annual rent of $1,000. In 1818, the Quapaw ceded 20,000,000 acres for $4,000; they had reserved a territory of 1,000,000 acres for hunting. It had been solemnly sworn that this would be respected, but it was not long before it too was invaded. "In order to appropriate the vacant lands over which the Indians claim ownership," said Mr. Bell, the chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, on February 24, 1830, "we have adopted the practice of paying Indian tribes for the value of their hunting grounds after the game has fled or been destroyed. It is more advantageous and certainly more in keeping with the rules of justice and more humane to act this way than to seize the territory of the Indians by force of arms." "The practice of buying the Indians' title of ownership is therefore nothing more than a new mode of acquisition that humanity and expediency have substituted for violence, and which must equally make us masters of the lands we claim by right of discovery, and which are in any case assured to us by the right that civilized nations have to settle on territory occupied by savage tribes."

"Up to this point, several causes have continually diminished the value of the land the Indians occupy in their own eyes, and then those same causes have led them to sell it to us without difficulty. The practice of buying the Indians' right of occupancy has therefore never been able to retard, to any perceptible degree, the prosperity of the United States." (Legislative Documents, 21st Congress, No. 227, p. 6.)

I have just described great evils, and I will add that they seem to me beyond remedy. I believe the Indian race of North America is doomed to perish, and I cannot help thinking that on the day the Europeans establish themselves on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, it will have ceased to exist.

This view, moreover, appeared to be held by almost all American statesmen. "If one judges the future by the past," said Mr. Cass to Congress, "one must foresee a progressive reduction in the number of Indians, and expect the eventual extinction of their race. For this not to happen, our frontiers would have to stop expanding, and the Indians would have to settle beyond them — or a complete change would have to take place in our relations with them, which it would be unreasonable to expect."

The Indians of North America had only two paths to survival: war or civilization — in other words, they had to destroy the Europeans or become their equals.

At the birth of the colonies, it might have been possible for them, by uniting their forces, to rid themselves of the small number of foreigners who had just landed on the shores of the continent.

See, among others, the war waged by the Wampanoags and other confederated tribes, under the leadership of Metacom, in 1675, against the colonists of New England; and the war that the English had to fight in 1622 in Virginia.

More than once they tried to do so and came close to succeeding. Today the disparity of resources is too great for them to dream of such an enterprise. Still, among the Indian nations, men of genius arise who foresee the fate reserved for the wild peoples, and try to unite all the tribes in a common hatred of the Europeans. But their efforts are powerless. The tribes nearest to the whites are already too weakened to offer effective resistance; the others, surrendering to the childlike carelessness about tomorrow that characterizes uncivilized nature, wait for the danger to arrive before they worry about it. Some cannot act; others refuse to.

It is easy to foresee that the Indians will never willingly become civilized, or that they will try too late, when they finally decide to.

Civilization is the product of a long social labor that takes place in one location, passed down from one generation to the next. The peoples who find it hardest to achieve civilization are hunting peoples. Pastoral tribes move from place to place, but they always follow a regular pattern in their migrations and continually retrace their steps. The dwellings of hunters shift like the movements of the very animals they pursue.

Several attempts have been made to bring knowledge to the Indians while allowing them to keep their nomadic ways; the Jesuits tried it in Canada, the Puritans in New England.

See the various historians of New England. See also the History of New France by Charlevoix and the Lettres edifiantes.

Neither achieved anything lasting. Civilization was born in the hut and went to die in the forest. The great mistake these legislators of the Indians made was failing to understand that to civilize a people, you must first get them to settle in one place — and they cannot do that without cultivating the soil. The first step, then, was to turn the Indians into farmers.

Not only do the Indians lack this indispensable prerequisite of civilization, but it is extremely difficult for them to acquire it.

Men who have once given themselves over to the idle and adventurous life of the hunter feel an almost insurmountable disgust for the constant, regular labor that farming requires. You can observe this even within our own societies, but it is far more visible among peoples for whom hunting habits have become national customs.

Beyond this general cause, there is another equally powerful one found only among the Indians. I have already pointed it out; I think it is worth returning to.

The indigenous peoples of North America see work not merely as an evil but as a dishonor, and their pride fights against civilization almost as stubbornly as their laziness.

"In all the tribes," says Volney in his Survey of the United States, p. 423, "there still exists a generation of old warriors who, when they see people handling the hoe, never stop crying out against the degradation of the old ways, and who claim that the Indians owe their decline solely to these innovations, and that to recover their glory and power they need only return to their primitive customs."

There is no Indian so destitute that he does not, beneath his bark shelter, maintain a superb sense of his own individual worth. He regards the tasks of industry as degrading occupations; he compares the farmer to the ox that draws a furrow, and in each of our crafts he sees nothing but the work of slaves. It is not that he has failed to form a very high idea of the power of whites and the greatness of their intelligence; but while he admires the results of our efforts, he despises the means by which we obtained them, and even while submitting to our dominance, he still considers himself our superior. Hunting and war seem to him the only pursuits worthy of a man.

In an official document one finds the following account: "Until a young man has fought the enemy and can boast of some exploit, no one has any regard for him — he is looked upon as more or less a woman. At their great war dances, the warriors come one after another to strike the post, as they call it, and recount their exploits. On these occasions, their audience consists of the relatives, friends, and companions of the narrator. The deep impression his words make on them is manifest in the silence with which he is heard, and breaks out noisily in the applause that accompanies the end of his stories. The young man who has nothing to tell at such gatherings considers himself very unfortunate, and it is not unheard of for young warriors, whose passions have been excited in this way, to suddenly leave the dance and set off alone to seek trophies they can display and adventures they can boast about."

The Indian, in the depths of his woodland misery, therefore nourishes the same ideas, the same opinions, as the nobleman of the Middle Ages in his fortified castle, and he lacks only one thing to complete the resemblance: becoming a conqueror. Thus, strangely enough, it is in the forests of the New World, not among the Europeans who populate its shores, that we find today the old prejudices of Europe.

I have tried more than once in the course of this work to show the prodigious influence that social conditions seem to me to exert on men's laws and customs. Allow me to add a single word on this subject.

When I notice the resemblance between the political institutions of our ancestors, the Germanic peoples, and those of the wandering tribes of North America — between the customs described by Tacitus and those I have sometimes witnessed myself — I cannot help thinking that the same cause has produced the same effects in both hemispheres, and that amid the apparent diversity of human affairs, it is possible to find a small number of generative facts from which all others flow. In everything we call Germanic institutions, I am therefore tempted to see nothing but the habits of barbarians, and in what we call feudal ideas, nothing but the opinions of savages.

Whatever the vices and prejudices that prevent the Indians of North America from becoming farmers and civilized, sometimes necessity forces them to it.

Several major nations of the South, among them the Cherokees and the Creeks,

These nations are now encompassed within the states of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. There were formerly four great nations in the South (their remnants survive): the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks, and the Cherokees. The remnants of these four nations still numbered about 75,000 individuals in 1830. It is estimated that there are currently about 300,000 Indians in the territory occupied or claimed by the Anglo-American Union. (See Proceedings of the Indian Board in the City of New York.) Official documents submitted to Congress put this number at 313,130.

found themselves as if enveloped by Europeans who, landing on the shores of the ocean, coming down the Ohio and up the Mississippi, arrived around them from all sides at once. These tribes were not driven from place to place like those of the North; instead, they were gradually compressed into limits too narrow, the way hunters first surround a thicket before pushing simultaneously into the interior. The Indians, caught between civilization and death, were reduced to living shamefully by their own labor like the whites. So they became farmers, and without entirely abandoning their habits and customs, they sacrificed what was absolutely necessary for their survival.

The Cherokees went further. They created a written language, established a reasonably stable form of government, and — since everything moves at a headlong pace in the New World — they had a newspaper

I brought back to France one or two copies of this remarkable publication.

before they all had clothes.

What greatly aided the rapid development of European habits among these Indians was the presence of people of mixed race.

See the report of the Committee on Indian Affairs, 21st Congress, No. 227, p. 23, for what caused the growth of the mixed-race population among the Cherokees. The main cause goes back to the War of Independence. Many Anglo-Americans from Georgia who had taken the British side were forced to take refuge among the Indians and married there.

Sharing in his father's knowledge without entirely abandoning the customs of his mother's race, the person of mixed heritage forms the natural link between civilization and barbarism. Wherever they have multiplied, the indigenous peoples have gradually modified their way of life and changed their customs.

Unfortunately, people of mixed race have been fewer in number and have exercised less influence in North America than anywhere else. Two great European nations populated this part of the American continent: the French and the English. The French were quick to form unions with indigenous women; but unfortunately a secret affinity between the Indian character and their own meant that, instead of giving the Indians a taste for civilized life, they themselves often became passionately attached to the wild life. They became the most dangerous denizens of the wilderness and won the friendship of the Indians by exaggerating their vices and virtues. M. de Senonville, governor of Canada, wrote to Louis XIV in 1685: "We long believed that bringing the Indians closer to us would make them French; we have every reason to recognize we were wrong. Those who came near us did not become French, and the Frenchmen who frequented them became Indians. They make a point of dressing like them, of living like them." (History of New France, by Charlevoix, vol. II, p. 345.) The English, on the other hand, remaining obstinately attached to the opinions, customs, and smallest habits of their fathers, stayed in the midst of the American wilderness what they had been in the heart of European cities. They therefore refused to establish any contact with Indians whom they despised, and carefully avoided mixing their blood with that of the barbarians. Thus, while the French exercised no beneficial influence on the Indians, the English were always strangers to them.

The success of the Cherokees proves that the Indians have the capacity to become civilized, but it in no way proves that they will succeed.

The difficulty the Indians have in submitting to civilization arises from a general cause they can almost never escape.

If you look carefully at history, you will find that, as a general rule, barbarian peoples have risen toward civilization gradually, on their own, through their own efforts.

When they have gone to draw knowledge from a foreign nation, they occupied the rank of conqueror, not the position of the conquered.

When the conquered people are educated and the conquering people are half-savage — as in the invasion of the Roman Empire by the nations of the North, or the Mongol conquest of China — the power that victory gives the barbarian is enough to keep him on a level with the civilized man and to let him walk as his equal until he becomes his rival. One has force on his side, the other intelligence; the first admires the science and arts of the vanquished, the second envies the power of the victor. The barbarians end by inviting the civilized man into their palaces, and the civilized man opens his schools to them in turn. But when the one who possesses material force also enjoys intellectual superiority, it is rare for the vanquished to become civilized; he withdraws or is destroyed.

This is how one can say, in general terms, that savages go seeking knowledge with weapons in hand but never accept it passively.

If the Indian tribes that now inhabit the center of the continent could find within themselves enough energy to undertake to civilize themselves, they might succeed. Superior to the barbarian nations surrounding them, they would gradually gain strength and experience, and when the Europeans finally appeared on their frontiers, they would be in a position, if not to maintain their independence, at least to have their rights to the land recognized and to be incorporated into the conquering nation. But the misfortune of the Indians is to come into contact with the most civilized — and, I will add, the most grasping — people on earth, at a time when they are still half-barbarian themselves; to find in their teachers nothing but masters; and to receive oppression and knowledge at the same time.

Living in the freedom of the woods, the Indian of North America was wretched, but he felt inferior to no one. The moment he tries to enter the social hierarchy of the whites, he can only occupy its lowest rank, for he comes in ignorant and poor to a society where knowledge and wealth rule. After leading a life full of hardships and dangers, but also full of excitement and grandeur,

There is in the adventurous life of hunting peoples an irresistible attraction that seizes the heart and carries it away despite reason and experience. One can be convinced of this truth by reading the Memoirs of Tanner. Tanner is a European who was taken at the age of six by the Indians and remained thirty years in the woods with them. It is impossible to see anything more terrible than the miseries he describes. He shows us tribes without leaders, families without nations, isolated men — the mutilated remains of once-powerful tribes — wandering aimlessly amid the ice and through the desolate wilderness of Canada. Hunger and cold pursue them; every day life seems ready to escape them. Among them, customs have lost their hold, traditions are powerless. Men grow more and more barbarous. Tanner shares all these sufferings; he knows his European origin; he is not held by force far from the whites. On the contrary, he comes each year to trade with them, visits their homes, sees their comfort; he knows that the day he chooses to return to civilized life, he can easily do so — and yet he stays thirty years in the wilderness. When he finally returns to civilized society, he confesses that the existence whose miseries he has described holds secret charms he cannot define; he keeps going back to it after leaving; he tears himself from so much suffering only with a thousand regrets; and when he is finally settled among the whites, several of his children refuse to come share his tranquility and comfort. I myself met Tanner at the entrance to Lake Superior. He seemed to me far more like a savage than a civilized man.

he must submit to a monotonous, obscure, and degraded existence. To earn his bread through painful labor and in the midst of disgrace — that, in his eyes, is the sole reward of this civilization people hold up to him.

And even this result, he is not always sure of obtaining.

When the Indians undertake to imitate their European neighbors and farm like them, they immediately find themselves exposed to a very damaging competition. The white man is a master of the secrets of agriculture. The Indian fumbles at an art he does not know. One produces great harvests with ease; the other wrests fruit from the earth only with a thousand efforts.

The European is situated in the midst of a population whose needs he knows and shares.

The Indian is isolated in the midst of a hostile people whose customs, language, and laws he knows only imperfectly, and on whom he cannot do without. Only by exchanging his products for those of the whites can he find any comfort, for his compatriots can no longer be of much help to him.

So when the Indian wants to sell the fruits of his labor, he does not always find a buyer — something the European farmer discovers without difficulty — and he can only produce at great cost what the other delivers at a low price.

The Indian has thus escaped the evils to which barbarian nations are exposed only to submit to the greater miseries of civilized peoples, and he finds almost as much difficulty living amid our abundance as in the middle of his forests.

Yet the habits of nomadic life have not been destroyed in him. Traditions have not lost their hold; the taste for hunting has not been extinguished. The wild joys he once experienced deep in the woods are painted in ever more vivid colors in his troubled imagination; the hardships he endured there seem less terrible in retrospect, the dangers less great. The independence he enjoyed among his equals contrasts with the servile position he occupies in civilized society.

On the other hand, the wilderness where he lived so long in freedom is still nearby; a few hours of walking can bring him back to it. From the half-cleared field that barely feeds him, the white neighbors offer him what seems a generous price. Perhaps the money the Europeans are offering him would let him live happily and peacefully far from them. He abandons the plow, takes up his weapons, and returns to the wilderness forever.

This destructive influence that highly civilized peoples exert on less civilized ones can be observed even among Europeans themselves. Nearly a century ago, the French had founded in the heart of the wilderness the town of Vincennes on the Wabash. They lived there in great abundance until the arrival of American settlers. These newcomers immediately began to ruin the old inhabitants through competition; they then bought their lands at rock-bottom prices. At the time Volney, from whom I borrow this detail, passed through Vincennes, the number of French had been reduced to about a hundred individuals, most of whom were preparing to move to Louisiana or Canada. These French were honest people, but without education or enterprise; they had contracted some of the habits of the wild. The Americans, who were perhaps inferior to them morally, had an immense intellectual superiority: they were industrious, educated, rich, and accustomed to governing themselves. I myself saw in Canada, where the intellectual difference between the two races is far less pronounced, the English — master of commerce and industry in the land of the Canadian — expanding in every direction and pressing the French into boundaries too narrow. Likewise in Louisiana, nearly all commercial and industrial activity is concentrated in the hands of Anglo-Americans. Something even more striking is happening in the province of Texas. The state of Texas is, as we know, part of Mexico and serves as its frontier on the side of the United States. For some years, Anglo-Americans have been penetrating individually into this still sparsely populated province, buying up land, seizing control of industry, and rapidly replacing the original population. It is easy to predict that if Mexico does not hurry to stop this movement, Texas will not long remain in its hands. If comparatively slight differences in European civilization produce such results, it is easy to understand what must happen when the most refined civilization in Europe comes into contact with Indian barbarism.

You can judge the truth of this bleak picture from what is happening among the Creeks and the Cherokees, whom I have cited.

These Indians have, in the little they have accomplished, shown as much natural genius as the peoples of Europe in their greatest enterprises. But nations, like individuals, need time to learn, whatever their intelligence and their efforts.

While these Indians worked to civilize themselves, the Europeans continued to envelop them on all sides and press them closer and closer. Today the two races have finally met; they are touching. The Indian has already become superior to his father the savage, but he is still far inferior to his white neighbor. With their resources and their knowledge, the Europeans quickly appropriated most of the advantages that possession of the land could give the indigenous people. They settled in their midst, seized or bought the land at rock-bottom prices, and ruined them through a competition the Indians could in no way sustain. Isolated in their own country, the Indians became nothing more than a small colony of troublesome foreigners in the midst of a numerous and dominant people.

See the Legislative Documents, 21st Congress, No. 89, for the excesses of every kind committed by the white population on Indian territory. Sometimes Anglo-Americans settle on part of the territory, as if land were not available elsewhere, and troops from Congress must come to expel them; sometimes they steal livestock, burn houses, cut down the natives' fruit trees, or commit violence against their persons. All these documents prove that the indigenous people are daily the victims of abuses of power. The Union generally maintains among the Indians an agent charged with representing it. The report of the Cherokee agent is among the documents I cite; the language of this official is almost always favorable to the Indians. "The intrusion of whites onto the Cherokee territory," he says, p. 12, "will cause the ruin of those who live there, and who lead a poor and inoffensive existence." Further on, we see that the state of Georgia, wanting to restrict the boundaries of the Cherokees, proceeded with a survey; the federal agent pointed out that the survey, having been done only by the whites and not by both parties, had no legal value.

Washington said in one of his messages to Congress: "We are more educated and more powerful than the Indian nations; it is a matter of honor for us to treat them with kindness and even with generosity."

This noble and virtuous policy has not been followed.

The greed of the settlers is usually joined by the tyranny of the government. Although the Cherokees and the Creeks are established on land they inhabited before the arrival of the Europeans, and although the Americans have often treated with them as with foreign nations, the states in whose midst they live have refused to recognize them as independent peoples and have undertaken to subject these people — barely emerged from the forests — to their magistrates, their customs, and their laws.

In 1829, the state of Alabama divided the Creek territory into counties and placed the Indian population under European magistrates. In 1830, the state of Mississippi assimilated the Choctaws and Chickasaws to whites, and declared that any of them who assumed the title of chief would be punished by a fine of $1,000 and one year in prison. When the state of Mississippi thus extended its laws over the Choctaw Indians living within its boundaries, they assembled; their chief told them what the whites were claiming and read them some of the laws they wanted to impose. The Indians declared with one voice that it would be better to plunge back into the wilderness. (Mississippi papers.)

Misery had driven these unfortunate Indians toward civilization; oppression is now pushing them back toward barbarism. Many of them, abandoning their half-cleared fields, have returned to the wild life.

If you examine the tyrannical measures adopted by the legislatures of the Southern states, the conduct of their governors, and the acts of their courts, you will easily be convinced that the complete expulsion of the Indians is the ultimate goal toward which all their efforts simultaneously converge. The Americans of this part of the Union view with jealousy the lands the indigenous people possess;

The Georgians, who find the presence of Indians so inconvenient, occupy a territory that still has no more than seven inhabitants per square mile. In France, there are a hundred and sixty-two individuals in the same space.

they sense that the Indians have not yet entirely lost the traditions of the wild life, and before civilization has firmly attached them to the soil, they want to reduce them to despair and force them to leave.

Oppressed by the individual states, the Creeks and the Cherokees turned to the central government. It is not indifferent to their sufferings; it would sincerely like to save the remnants of the indigenous people and guarantee them the free possession of the territory it itself has guaranteed them.

In 1818, Congress ordered that the territory of Arkansas be visited by American commissioners, accompanied by a delegation of Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws. This expedition was led by Messrs. Kennerly, McCoy, Wash Hood, and John Bell. See the various reports of the commissioners and their journal in the Congressional papers, No. 87, House of Representatives.

But when it tries to carry out this plan, the individual states oppose it with formidable resistance, and so it readily accepts the loss of a few already half-destroyed Indian tribes rather than put the American Union at risk.

Unable to protect the Indians, the federal government would at least like to soften their fate. To this end, it has undertaken to transport them at its own expense to other regions.

Between the 33rd and 37th degrees of north latitude stretches a vast region that has taken the name Arkansas, from the principal river that waters it. It borders on one side the frontiers of Mexico and on the other the banks of the Mississippi. A multitude of streams and rivers cut through it from every direction; the climate is mild and the soil fertile. Only a few wandering bands of Indians are found there. It is in the part of this country closest to Mexico, at a great distance from American settlements, that the federal government wants to relocate the remnants of the indigenous populations of the South.

At the end of 1831, we were told that 10,000 Indians had already been sent down to the shores of the Arkansas; others were arriving every day. But Congress has not yet been able to create a unanimous will among those whose fate it wants to settle. Some willingly consent to leave the seat of tyranny; the most educated refuse to abandon their growing harvests and their new homes. They believe that if the work of civilization is interrupted, it will never resume; they fear that the settled habits they have barely acquired will be lost forever in lands still wild, where nothing has been prepared for the support of a farming people. They know they will find hostile tribes in these new wildernesses, and they no longer have the energy of barbarism to resist them, nor have they yet acquired the strength of civilization. The Indians, moreover, can easily see how temporary the proposed settlement is. Who will guarantee that they can finally rest in peace in their new refuge? The United States pledges to maintain them there; but the territory they now occupy had once been guaranteed to them by the most solemn oaths.

In the treaty made with the Creeks in 1790, there is this clause: "The United States solemnly guarantee to the Creek nation all the lands it possesses within the territory of the Union." The treaty concluded in July 1791 with the Cherokees contains this: "The United States solemnly guarantee to the Cherokee nation all the lands it has not previously ceded. If any citizen of the United States, or any individual other than an Indian, should settle on Cherokee territory, the United States declares that it withdraws its protection from that citizen and delivers him to the Cherokee nation to be punished as it sees fit." (Art. 8.)

Today the American government is not, it is true, taking away their lands; but it is letting them be overrun. In a few years, no doubt, the same white population now pressing around them will be on their heels again in the wilderness of Arkansas. They will find the same evils without the same remedies, and since the earth will sooner or later run out, they will have no choice but to resign themselves to dying.

To get an accurate idea of the policy followed by the individual states and by the Union toward the Indians, one must consult: (1) the laws of the individual states relating to Indians (this collection can be found in the Legislative Documents, 21st Congress, No. 319); (2) the laws of the Union on the same subject, and in particular the law of March 30, 1802 (these laws are found in Mr. Story's work entitled Laws of the United States); (3) finally, to learn the current state of the Union's relations with all Indian tribes, see the report made by Mr. Cass, Secretary of War, on November 29, 1823.

There is less greed and less violence in the way the Union deals with the Indians than in the policy followed by the states; but the two governments are equally lacking in good faith.

The states, by extending what they call the benefit of their laws to the Indians, expect them to prefer leaving rather than submitting; and the federal government, in promising these unfortunate people a permanent home in the West, knows full well it cannot guarantee it.

Which does not prevent it from promising it in the most formal manner. See the president's letter to the Creeks, March 23, 1829 (Proceedings of the Indian Board in the City of New York, p. 5): "Beyond the great river (the Mississippi), your Father has prepared a vast country to receive you. There, your white brothers will not come to trouble you; they will have no rights to your lands. You will be able to live there, you and your children, in peace and abundance, as long as the grass grows and the streams flow; they will belong to you forever." In a letter written to the Cherokees by the Secretary of War on April 18, 1829, this official tells them they should not expect to keep the enjoyment of the territory they currently occupy, but gives them this same positive assurance for the time when they will be on the other side of the Mississippi (same work, p. 6) — as if the power he lacks now would not be equally lacking then!

Thus the states, through their tyranny, force the Indians to flee; the Union, through its promises and with the help of its resources, makes that flight easier. These are different measures tending toward the same end.

"By the will of our heavenly Father who governs the universe," the Cherokees said in their petition to Congress,

November 19, 1829. This passage is translated verbatim.

"the race of red men of America has grown small; the white race has grown large and famous.

"When your ancestors arrived on our shores, the red man was strong, and although he was ignorant and savage, he received them with kindness and allowed them to rest their frozen feet on dry ground. Our fathers and yours shook hands in friendship and lived in peace.

"Everything the white man asked for to meet his needs, the Indian hastened to grant him. The Indian was then the master, and the white man the supplicant. Today the scene has changed: the strength of the red man has become weakness. As his neighbors grew in number, his power diminished ever more, and now, of so many powerful tribes that once covered the surface of what you call the United States, scarcely any remain that the universal disaster has spared. The tribes of the North, once so renowned among us for their power, have already nearly disappeared. Such has been the fate of the red man of America.

"Here we are, the last of our race — must we die too?

"Since time immemorial, our common Father in heaven gave our ancestors the land we occupy; our ancestors passed it down to us as their inheritance. We have kept it with reverence, for it holds their ashes. This inheritance — have we ever given it up or lost it? Allow us to humbly ask you: what better right can a people have to a country than the right of inheritance and immemorial possession? We know that the state of Georgia and the President of the United States now claim that we have lost this right. But this seems to us a gratuitous assertion. When did we lose it? What crime have we committed that could strip us of our homeland? Are we accused of having fought under the banners of the King of Great Britain during the War of Independence? If that is the crime in question, why, in the first treaty that followed that war, did you not declare that we had lost ownership of our lands? Why did you not insert an article saying: 'The United States is willing to grant peace to the Cherokee nation; but to punish them for having taken part in the war, it is declared that they shall no longer be regarded as anything but tenants of the soil, and that they shall be required to leave whenever the neighboring states ask them to do so'? That was the time to speak, but no one thought of it then, and our fathers would never have agreed to a treaty whose result would have been to strip them of their most sacred rights and take away their country."

That is the language of the Indians: what they say is true; what they foresee seems to me inevitable.

From whatever angle you examine the fate of the indigenous peoples of North America, you see nothing but irremediable suffering. If they remain wild, they are pushed aside as civilization advances; if they try to become civilized, contact with people more civilized than they delivers them to oppression and misery. If they continue to wander from wilderness to wilderness, they perish; if they try to settle in one place, they perish just the same. They can become educated only with the help of Europeans, and the approach of Europeans corrupts them and pushes them back toward barbarism. As long as they are left alone in their wilderness, they refuse to change their ways, and it is too late when they are finally forced to want to.

The Spanish set their dogs on the Indians as on wild beasts; they pillaged the New World like a city taken by storm, without discretion or pity. But you cannot destroy everything; fury has a limit. The surviving Indian populations eventually intermingled with their conquerors and adopted their religion and customs.

This result should not be credited to the Spanish, however. If the Indian tribes had not already been settled on the land by agriculture at the time of the Europeans' arrival, they would no doubt have been destroyed in South America just as they were in North America.

The conduct of the Americans of the United States toward the indigenous people, by contrast, breathes the purest love of legal forms. Provided the Indians remain in a savage state, the Americans do not meddle in their affairs at all and treat them as independent peoples; they do not allow themselves to occupy their lands without having properly acquired them by contract; and if by chance an Indian nation can no longer live on its territory, they take it fraternally by the hand and lead it to die outside the land of its fathers.

The Spanish, through monstrosities without parallel, covering themselves with indelible shame, were unable to exterminate the Indian race or even to prevent it from sharing their rights. The Americans of the United States have achieved this double result with wonderful ease — quietly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, without violating a single one of the great principles of morality

See in particular the report made by Mr. Bell on behalf of the Committee on Indian Affairs, February 24, 1830, in which it is established, p. 5, by very logical reasoning and very learnedly proved that: "The fundamental principle, that the Indians had no right by virtue of their ancient possession either of soil, or sovereignty, has never been abandoned either expressly or by implication." In reading this report, which is the work of an able hand, one is astonished at the ease and assurance with which, from the very first words, the author disposes of arguments based on natural law and reason, which he calls abstract and theoretical principles. The more I think about it, the more I believe that the only difference between the civilized man and the uncivilized one, with respect to justice, is this: the one disputes the rights that the other simply violates.

in the eyes of the world. You could not destroy men while showing greater respect for the laws of humanity.

THE POSITION OF THE BLACK RACE IN THE UNITED STATES: THE DANGERS ITS PRESENCE POSES TO THE WHITES.

Before addressing this subject, I owe the reader a word of warning. In a book I mentioned at the beginning of this work, which is about to appear, my traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont has taken as his principal aim to make known in France the position of Black people within the white population of the United States. Beaumont has treated in depth a question that my own subject has only allowed me to touch upon. His book, whose notes contain a vast number of precious and entirely unknown legislative and historical documents, also presents portraits whose power can only be matched by their truth. Those who want to understand the extremes of tyranny to which men are gradually driven once they have begun to step outside of nature and humanity should read Beaumont's work.

Why it is harder to abolish slavery and erase its traces among modern peoples than among the ancients. -- In the United States, white prejudice against Black people seems to grow stronger as slavery is destroyed. -- The situation of Black people in the Northern and Southern states. -- Why Americans abolish slavery. -- Servitude, which brutalizes the slave, impoverishes the master. -- Differences between the right bank and the left bank of the Ohio. -- What causes them. -- The Black race retreats southward, just as slavery does. -- How this is explained. -- Difficulties the Southern states face in abolishing slavery. -- Dangers for the future. -- The preoccupation of minds. -- Founding of a Black colony in Africa. -- Why white Southerners, even as they grow disgusted with slavery, increase its severity.

The Indians will die in isolation, as they have lived; but the fate of Black people is in some sense intertwined with that of the Europeans. The two races are bound to each other without blending together; it is as difficult for them to separate completely as to unite.

The most fearsome of all the evils threatening the future of the United States is born of the presence of Black people on its soil. When you search for the cause of America's present difficulties and future dangers, you almost always arrive at this single fact, no matter where you start.

Human beings generally need great and sustained efforts to create lasting evils; but there is one evil that creeps into the world stealthily. At first it is barely noticed amid the ordinary abuses of power; it begins with a single individual whose name history does not preserve; it is planted like a cursed seed at some point on the earth; it then feeds on itself, spreads without effort, and grows naturally with the society that received it. This evil is slavery.

Christianity had destroyed servitude; the Christians of the sixteenth century reestablished it. They never accepted it, however, as anything but an exception in their social system, and they took care to restrict it to a single race. They thus inflicted on humanity a narrower wound, but one infinitely harder to heal.

Two things must be carefully distinguished: slavery in itself, and its consequences.

The immediate evils produced by slavery were roughly the same among the ancients as they are among the moderns, but the consequences of those evils were different. Among the ancients, the slave belonged to the same race as his master and was often superior to him in education and knowledge.

It is well known that several of the most famous authors of antiquity were or had been slaves: Aesop and Terence are among them. Slaves were not always taken from barbarian nations; war reduced very civilized men to servitude.

Only freedom separated them; once freedom was granted, they blended together easily.

The ancients therefore had a very simple way of ridding themselves of slavery and its consequences: emancipation. As soon as they applied it broadly, they succeeded.

This is not to say that in antiquity the traces of servitude did not linger for some time after servitude itself was destroyed.

There is a natural prejudice that leads a person to despise someone who was once his inferior, long after that person has become his equal. The real inequality produced by fortune or law always gives way to an imaginary inequality rooted in customs and values. But among the ancients, this secondary effect of slavery had a limit. The freed man resembled freeborn men so closely that it soon became impossible to distinguish him among them.

The greatest difficulty among the ancients was changing the law; among the moderns, it is changing customs and values. For us, the real difficulty begins where antiquity saw it end.

This is because, among the moderns, the immaterial and fleeting fact of slavery combines in the most devastating way with the material and permanent fact of racial difference. The memory of slavery dishonors the race, and the race perpetuates the memory of slavery.

No African ever came freely to the shores of the New World; from which it follows that all those found there today are slaves or the descendants of slaves. Thus, with his very existence, the Black man transmits to all his descendants the outward mark of his disgrace. The law can destroy servitude, but only God can erase its trace.

The modern slave differs from his master not only in freedom but also in origin. You can make the Black man free, but you cannot change the fact that he stands before the European as a stranger.

And there is more still: this man who was born in degradation, this stranger whom servitude introduced among us — we barely recognize in him the general features of humanity. His face strikes us as hideous, his intelligence seems limited, his tastes seem base; we come close to regarding him as a being halfway between the brute and the human.

For whites to abandon the belief they have formed about the intellectual and moral inferiority of their former slaves, Black people would have to change — and they cannot change as long as this belief persists.

The moderns, after abolishing slavery, therefore still have to destroy three prejudices far more elusive and more tenacious than slavery itself: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of race, and finally the prejudice of the white man.

It is very difficult for us — we who had the good fortune to be born among people whom nature made our fellows and the law made our equals — it is very difficult for us, I say, to understand what an unbridgeable gap separates the Black American from the European. But we can get a distant idea of it by reasoning from analogy.

We once saw among ourselves great inequalities that had their roots only in legislation. What is more fictitious than a purely legal inferiority! What is more contrary to human instinct than permanent differences established between people who are obviously alike! Yet these differences lasted for centuries; they persist still in a thousand places; everywhere they have left imaginary traces that time can barely erase. If inequality created only by law is so hard to uproot, how can you destroy one that seems, in addition, to have its immutable foundations in nature itself?

For my part, when I consider how difficult it is for aristocratic bodies, of whatever kind, to merge into the mass of the people, and the extreme care they take to preserve for centuries the ideal barriers separating them from it, I despair of ever seeing disappear an aristocracy founded on visible and imperishable signs.

Those who hope that Europeans and Black people will one day blend together seem to me, therefore, to be cherishing an illusion. My reason does not lead me to believe it, and I see nothing in the facts to suggest it.

Up to now, wherever whites have been the more powerful, they have kept Black people in degradation or slavery. Wherever Black people have been the stronger, they have destroyed the whites. This is the only account that has ever been opened between the two races.

When I look at the United States today, I can see that in certain parts of the country the legal barrier separating the two races is tending to come down — but not the one in customs and values. I see slavery retreating; the prejudice it gave birth to is immovable.

In the part of the Union where Black people are no longer slaves, have they drawn closer to the whites? Everyone who has lived in the United States will have noticed that the opposite has happened.

Racial prejudice seems to me stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where slavery still exists, and nowhere does it show itself as intolerant as in states where servitude has always been unknown.

It is true that in the North of the Union, the law allows Black and white people to enter into lawful marriages; but public opinion declares infamous any white man who would marry a Black woman, and it would be very difficult to cite an example of such a thing.

In almost all the states where slavery has been abolished, Black people have been given voting rights; but if they show up to vote, they risk their lives. When oppressed, they may complain, but they find only whites among their judges. The law opens the jury bench to them, but prejudice drives them away. Their children are excluded from the schools where the descendants of Europeans go to learn. In theaters, they cannot, for any amount of gold, buy the right to sit beside their former master; in hospitals, they lie apart. Black people are allowed to pray to the same God as the whites, but not at the same altar. They have their own priests and their own churches. The gates of heaven are not shut against them — yet inequality barely stops at the edge of the next world. When the Black man dies, his bones are thrown aside, and the difference of social conditions is found even in the equality of death.

Thus the Black man is free, but he can share neither the rights, nor the pleasures, nor the labor, nor the suffering, nor even the tomb of the one whose equal he has been declared. He cannot meet him anywhere — neither in life nor in death.

In the South, where slavery still exists, Black people are kept apart less carefully. They sometimes share in the labor and pleasures of the whites; people are willing, up to a point, to mix with them. The law is harsher toward them there; daily habits are more tolerant and gentler.

In the South, the master is not afraid of raising his slave to his level, because he knows he can always, if he wishes, throw him back into the dust. In the North, the white man no longer clearly sees the barrier that should separate him from a degraded race, and he distances himself from the Black man with all the more care because he fears that one day they might merge.

Among the white Southerner, nature sometimes reasserts her rights and momentarily reestablishes equality between whites and Blacks. In the North, pride silences even man's most imperious passion. The white Northerner would perhaps consent to make a Black woman the passing companion of his pleasures, if the legislators had declared she must not aspire to share his bed; but she can become his wife, and he recoils from her with a kind of horror.

This is how, in the United States, the prejudice that rejects Black people seems to grow in proportion as Black people cease to be slaves, and inequality carves itself into customs and values as it fades from the laws.

But if the relative position of the two races inhabiting the United States is as I have just described it, why have the Americans abolished slavery in the North of the Union, why do they preserve it in the South, and why are they making it harsher?

The answer is easy. It is not in the interest of Black people, but of whites, that slavery is being destroyed in the United States.

The first Black people were imported into Virginia around the year 1621.

See the History of Virginia by Beverley. See also, in Jefferson's Memoirs, interesting details on the introduction of Black people to Virginia, and on the first act prohibiting their importation in 1778.

In America, as everywhere else on earth, servitude was therefore born in the South. From there it spread gradually northward; but as slavery moved north, the number of slaves kept shrinking.

The number of slaves was smaller in the North, but the advantages of slavery were no more contested there than in the South. In 1740, the legislature of the state of New York declared that the direct importation of slaves should be encouraged as much as possible, and that smuggling should be severely punished, as it tended to discourage the honest trader. (Kent's Commentaries, vol. 2, p. 206.) Interesting research by Belknap on slavery in New England can be found in the Massachusetts Historical Collection, vol. 4, p. 193. It shows that as early as 1630 Black people were introduced, but that from the start, both legislation and customs opposed slavery. See also, in the same place, how public opinion and then the law succeeded in destroying servitude.

Very few Black people were ever seen in New England.

The colonies were established; a century had already passed, and an extraordinary fact began to strike every observer. The provinces that had virtually no slaves were growing in population, wealth, and well-being faster than those that did.

In the former, however, the settler was obliged to cultivate the soil himself or hire someone else to do it; in the latter, he had at his disposal workers whose labor cost him nothing. So on one side there was work and expense, on the other leisure and economy — yet the advantage remained with the former.

This result seemed all the harder to explain because the settlers, all belonging to the same European race, had the same habits, the same civilization, the same laws, and differed only in barely perceptible details.

Time continued to march on. Leaving the shores of the Atlantic, the Anglo-Americans pushed ever deeper into the wilderness of the West. There they encountered new terrain and new climates; they had to overcome obstacles of various kinds; their populations mixed — men from the South moved north, men from the North moved south. Amid all these factors, the same fact kept recurring at every step: in general, the colony where no slaves were found became more populous and more prosperous than the one where slavery was in force.

As things progressed, people began to glimpse that servitude, so cruel to the slave, was ruinous to the master.

But this truth received its final demonstration when they reached the banks of the Ohio.

The river that the Indians had called simply the Ohio — the Beautiful River — waters one of the most magnificent valleys that man has ever inhabited. On both banks of the Ohio stretch rolling lands where the soil offers the farmer inexhaustible treasures every day. On both banks, the air is equally healthy and the climate temperate. Each bank forms the extreme frontier of a vast state: the one that follows the thousand twists of the Ohio on its left bank is called Kentucky; the other has borrowed its name from the river itself. The two states differ in only one respect: Kentucky has admitted slaves; the state of Ohio has rejected every last one from its midst.

Not only does Ohio not admit slavery, but it prohibits free Black people from entering its territory and forbids them from acquiring any property there. See the statutes of Ohio.

The traveler who finds himself in the middle of the Ohio, letting the current carry him to the river's junction with the Mississippi, sails, so to speak, between freedom and servitude; he has only to look around him to judge in an instant which is more favorable to humanity.

On the left bank of the river, the population is sparse. From time to time you see a group of slaves idly crossing half-deserted fields; the primeval forest keeps reappearing; you would say that society is asleep. Man seems idle; only nature presents an image of activity and life.

From the right bank, by contrast, rises a confused murmur that proclaims the presence of industry far and wide. Rich harvests cover the fields; elegant homes show the taste and care of the farmer; on every side, comfort is evident. Man appears rich and content: he works.

It is not only individual men who are active in Ohio; the state itself undertakes immense projects. Ohio has built a canal between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, through which the Mississippi valley communicates with the northern river. Thanks to this canal, European goods arriving in New York can travel by water all the way to New Orleans, across more than five hundred leagues of continent.

Kentucky was founded in 1775; Ohio only twelve years later — and twelve years in America is more than half a century in Europe. Today the population of Ohio already exceeds that of Kentucky by 250,000 inhabitants.

Exact figures from the 1830 census: Kentucky, 688,844; Ohio, 937,669.

These contrasting effects of slavery and freedom are easily understood; they are enough to explain many of the differences between ancient civilization and our own.

On the left bank of the Ohio, work is associated with the idea of slavery; on the right bank, with well-being and progress. On one side it is degraded; on the other it is honored. On the left bank of the river, you cannot find white workers — they would be afraid of resembling slaves, so everything must be left to the care of Black laborers. On the right bank, you would search in vain for an idle person; the white man brings his energy and intelligence to every task.

So the men who, in Kentucky, are charged with exploiting the natural riches of the soil have neither enthusiasm nor knowledge, while those who might have both do nothing, or move to Ohio to put their skills to use without shame.

It is true that in Kentucky the masters make the slaves work without having to pay them, but they get little from their efforts, whereas the money they would give to free workers would be repaid with interest through the value of their labor.

The free worker is paid, but he works faster than the slave, and speed of execution is one of the great elements of economy. The white man sells his help, but it is bought only when it is useful; the Black man has nothing to claim for the price of his services, but he must be fed at all times. He must be supported in old age as in his prime, in his barren childhood as during the productive years of his youth, in sickness as in health. In both cases, you pay for the labor of these two men: the free worker receives a wage; the slave receives an upbringing, food, care, clothing. The money the master spends on the slave's maintenance drains away slowly and in small amounts, almost unnoticed; the wage paid to the worker is handed over in a lump sum and seems to enrich only the one who receives it. But in reality, the slave has cost more than the free man, and his labor has been less productive.

Beyond these causes, which everywhere that free workers are abundant make their labor more productive and more economical than that of slaves, there is another cause specific to the United States. In the entire Union, sugar cane has only been successfully cultivated on the banks of the Mississippi, near the river's mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. In Louisiana, sugar cultivation is extremely profitable: nowhere does the farmer earn a greater return for his work. And since there is always a certain relationship between production costs and returns, the price of slaves is very high in Louisiana. Since Louisiana is one of the federated states, slaves can be transported there from all parts of the Union; the price paid for a slave in New Orleans therefore raises the price of slaves in all other markets. The result is that in areas where the land yields little, the cost of farming with slaves remains very high, giving free workers a great competitive advantage.

The influence of slavery reaches even further: it penetrates into the very soul of the master and gives a particular direction to his ideas and tastes.

On both banks of the Ohio, nature has given man an enterprising and energetic character; but on each side of the river, he puts this shared quality to different use.

The white man on the right bank, obliged to live by his own efforts, has made material well-being the principal aim of his existence. And since the country he inhabits offers his industry inexhaustible resources and his energy ever-renewed enticements, his drive to acquire has exceeded the ordinary bounds of human greed. Tormented by the desire for wealth, he boldly enters every path that fortune opens to him. He becomes, indifferently, a sailor, a pioneer, a manufacturer, a farmer — bearing with equal constancy the toil and dangers of each profession. There is something marvelous in the resources of his ingenuity, and a kind of heroism in his greed for profit.

The American on the left bank despises not only work but every enterprise that work makes succeed. Living in idle comfort, he has the tastes of idle men. Money has lost part of its value in his eyes; he pursues not so much fortune as excitement and pleasure, and he channels in that direction the energy his neighbor deploys elsewhere. He is passionately fond of hunting and war; he delights in the most violent physical exercise; the use of weapons is familiar to him, and from childhood he has learned to stake his life in single combat. Slavery therefore not only prevents whites from making money; it turns them away from wanting to.

These same causes, operating continuously for two centuries in opposite directions in the English colonies of North America, have ended by creating a prodigious difference between the commercial capacity of the Southerner and that of the Northerner. Today only the North has ships, factories, railroads, and canals.

This difference is apparent not only when comparing North and South, but also when comparing Southerners with one another. Almost all the men in the most southerly states who engage in commercial enterprises and try to exploit slavery come from the North. Every day, Northerners spread into the parts of American territory where competition is less fierce for them; they discover resources there that the locals do not see, and by adapting to a system they disapprove of, they manage to get more out of it than those who still defend it after having founded it.

If I wanted to push the comparison further, I could easily prove that almost all the differences between the character of Americans in the South and the North have their origin in slavery. But that would take me beyond my subject. What I am looking for right now is not all the effects of servitude, but the effects it produces on the material prosperity of those who have adopted it.

The influence of slavery on wealth production was only very imperfectly understood in antiquity. Servitude existed then throughout the civilized world, and the peoples who did not practice it were barbarians.

So Christianity destroyed slavery by asserting the rights of the slave; today we can attack it in the name of the master. On this point, self-interest and morality are in agreement.

As these truths became apparent in the United States, slavery could be seen retreating step by step before the light of experience.

Servitude had begun in the South and then spread northward; today it is retreating. Freedom, starting from the North, is moving southward without stopping. Among the major states, Pennsylvania now marks the northernmost limit of slavery, but even within those limits it is shaken. Maryland, which lies immediately below Pennsylvania, prepares every day to do without it, and Virginia, which follows Maryland, is already debating its usefulness and its dangers.

There is a particular reason that is finally detaching the last two states I have named from the cause of slavery. The old wealth of this part of the Union was principally based on tobacco cultivation. Slaves are particularly suited to this crop. But it happens that for many years, the market price of tobacco has been falling, while the price of slaves has remained constant. The ratio between production costs and returns has therefore changed. The inhabitants of Maryland and Virginia now feel more inclined than they did thirty years ago either to do without slaves in growing tobacco or to abandon both tobacco and slavery at once.

No great change takes place in human institutions without discovering, among its causes, the law of inheritance.

When unequal distribution of estates prevailed in the South, each family was represented by a wealthy man who felt neither the need nor the inclination for work. Around him, living in the same way like so many parasitic plants, were the members of his family whom the law had excluded from the common inheritance. You could see in every Southern family what you still see today in the noble families of certain European countries, where the younger sons, without possessing the same wealth as the eldest, remain just as idle. This similar effect was produced in America and in Europe by entirely analogous causes. In the South of the United States, the entire white race formed an aristocratic body at whose head stood a certain number of privileged individuals whose wealth was permanent and whose leisure was hereditary. These leaders of the American nobility perpetuated, within the body they represented, the traditional prejudices of the white race and kept idleness in high esteem. Within this aristocracy, you could find poor people, but not workers; poverty was considered preferable to industry. Black and enslaved workers therefore found no competitors, and whatever one might think about the usefulness of their labor, they had to be employed since they were the only ones available.

From the moment the law of inheritance was abolished, all fortunes began to shrink simultaneously. All families moved together toward a condition where work becomes necessary for survival; many disappeared entirely; all could see the moment approaching when everyone would have to provide for himself. Today there are still rich people, but they no longer form a compact, hereditary body; they have been unable to adopt a shared spirit, persist in it, and spread it through every rank. So people began, by common agreement, to abandon the prejudice that stigmatized labor. There were more poor people, and the poor could work to earn their living without shame. Thus one of the first effects of equal inheritance was to create a class of free workers. The moment free labor entered into competition with slave labor, the inferiority of the latter became apparent, and slavery was attacked at its very foundation: the interest of the master.

As slavery retreats, the Black race follows it in its backward march and returns with it toward the tropics, from which it originally came.

This may seem extraordinary at first glance, but it will soon be understood.

When the Americans abolish the principle of servitude, they do not set the slaves free.

What follows might be hard to understand without an example; I will take the state of New York. In 1788, the state of New York prohibited the sale of slaves within its borders. This was, indirectly, to prohibit their importation. From that point on, the number of Black people grew only by the natural increase of the Black population. Eight years later, a more decisive measure was taken: it was declared that beginning July 4, 1799, all children born to enslaved parents would be free. Every avenue of growth was then closed. There were still slaves, but one could say that servitude no longer existed.

Once a Northern state prohibits the importation of slaves in this way, Black people are no longer taken from the South to be transported there.

Once a Northern state forbids the sale of Black people, the slave, who can no longer pass from the hands of his owner, becomes an inconvenient piece of property, and there is an interest in transferring him to the South.

The day a Northern state declares that the son of a slave will be born free, the slave loses a great part of his market value, since his descendants can no longer enter the market, and there is still more incentive to transfer him to the South.

Thus the same law prevents slaves from the South from coming north and pushes those of the North toward the South.

But here is another cause, more powerful than all those I have just described.

As the number of slaves decreases in a state, the need for free workers makes itself felt. As free workers take over industry, slave labor becomes less productive, and the slave becomes a mediocre or useless piece of property — giving owners yet another strong incentive to export him to the South, where competition is not to be feared.

The abolition of slavery therefore does not bring the slave to freedom; it merely makes him change masters. From the North, he passes to the South.

As for freed Black people and those born after slavery has been abolished, they do not leave the North for the South, but they find themselves in a position analogous to that of the indigenous peoples vis-a-vis the Europeans. They remain half-civilized and deprived of rights amid a population that is infinitely superior to them in wealth and knowledge. They are subject to the tyranny of the laws

States where slavery is abolished generally make it unpleasant for free Black people to reside in their territory; and since a kind of competition has developed among the different states on this point, the unfortunate Black people can only choose among various evils.

and the intolerance of customs. More wretched in some respects than the Indians, they have the memory of slavery against them, and they cannot claim possession of a single piece of land. Many succumb to their poverty;

There is a great difference between the mortality rates of whites and Black people in the states where slavery has been abolished. From 1820 to 1831, in Philadelphia, one white person died for every forty-two members of the white race, while one Black person died for every twenty-one members of the Black race. Mortality is not nearly as high among enslaved Black people. (See Emmerson's Medical Statistics, p. 28.)

the others concentrate in the cities, where, taking on the coarsest work, they lead a precarious and wretched existence.

Moreover, even if the number of Black people continued to grow at the same rate as when they did not yet possess freedom, the white population, increasing at double the speed after the abolition of slavery, would soon engulf them in a flood of foreigners.

A country cultivated by slaves is generally less populous than one cultivated by free men. Furthermore, America is a new country; so when a state abolishes slavery, it is still only half full. Hardly has servitude been destroyed and the need for free workers made itself felt than a crowd of bold adventurers rushes in from all parts of the country to take advantage of the new resources opening up to industry. The land is divided among them; on each portion a white family settles and takes possession. It is also toward the free states that European immigration is directed. What would the poor European, coming to seek comfort and happiness in the New World, do if he went to live in a country where work was tainted with disgrace?

Thus the white population grows by its own natural increase and at the same time by immense immigration, while the Black population receives no immigrants and grows weaker. Soon the ratio between the two races is reversed. Black people become nothing more than a wretched remnant, a small, poor, wandering tribe, lost in the midst of an immense people who are masters of the soil; they are noticed only through the injustices and cruelties to which they are subjected.

In many Western states, the Black race has never appeared; in all the Northern states, it is vanishing. The great question of the future is therefore narrowing into a tight circle; it becomes less fearsome in this way, but no easier to resolve.

The further south you go, the harder it is to abolish slavery effectively. This results from several material causes that need to be explained.

The first is climate. It is certain that as Europeans approach the tropics, work becomes harder for them. Many Americans even claim that beyond a certain latitude it becomes fatal to them, while Black people endure it without danger.

This is true in the areas where rice is cultivated. The rice paddies, which are unhealthy in all countries, are particularly dangerous in those struck by the burning sun of the tropics. Europeans would have great difficulty farming in this part of the New World if they insisted on making it produce rice. But can we not do without rice paddies?

But I do not think this idea — so favorable to the laziness of the Southerner — is based on experience. It is no hotter in the South of the Union than in the south of Spain or Italy.

These states are closer to the equator than Italy and Spain, but the American continent is infinitely colder than Europe.

Why shouldn't the European be able to do the same work there? And if slavery was abolished in Italy and Spain without the masters perishing, why should it not happen the same way in the Union? I do not believe, then, that nature has forbidden, on pain of death, the Europeans of Georgia or Florida from drawing their own sustenance from the soil; but this work would certainly be more difficult and less productive for them

Spain once transported a certain number of peasants from the Azores to a district of Louisiana called Attakapas. Slavery was not introduced among them; it was an experiment. Today these men still cultivate the land without slaves, but their industry is so feeble that it barely provides for their needs.

than for the inhabitants of New England. Since the free worker thus loses part of his superiority over the slave in the South, it is less useful to abolish slavery.

All European crops grow in the North of the Union; the South has specialized products.

It has been observed that slavery is an expensive way to grow grain. The farmer who harvests wheat in a country where servitude is unknown usually keeps only a small number of workers in his permanent service; at harvest time and during planting, he brings together many more, but they live in his household only temporarily.

To fill his granaries or sow his fields, the farmer who lives in a slave state must maintain a large number of servants year-round who are needed for only a few days — because, unlike free workers, slaves cannot wait and work for themselves until someone comes to hire their labor. You must buy them in order to use them.

Slavery, apart from its general drawbacks, is therefore naturally less suited to countries where grain is cultivated than to those that produce other crops.

The cultivation of tobacco, cotton, and especially sugar cane, on the other hand, requires continuous labor. Women and children can be employed in it when they could not be used in growing wheat. So slavery is naturally more suited to the regions that produce the crops I have just mentioned.

Tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane grow only in the South. There they form the principal sources of the country's wealth. By destroying slavery, the men of the South would face one of two alternatives: either they would have to change their system of farming, and then they would enter into competition with the men of the North, who are more energetic and more experienced than they; or they would cultivate the same crops without slaves, and then they would have to face the competition of other Southern states that had kept them.

The South therefore has particular reasons for keeping slavery that the North does not have.

But here is another motive more powerful than all the others. The South might, in a pinch, abolish servitude; but how would it rid itself of Black people? In the North, slavery and the slaves are driven out at the same time. In the South, there is no hope of achieving this double result at once.

In showing that servitude was more natural and more advantageous in the South than in the North, I have sufficiently indicated that the number of slaves must be much larger there. It was in the South that the first Africans were brought, and it is there that they have always arrived in the greatest numbers. As you move further south, the prejudice that keeps idleness in high esteem grows stronger. In the states closest to the tropics, there is not a single white man who works. Black people are therefore naturally more numerous in the South than in the North. Each day, as I have said above, they become even more so; for as slavery is destroyed at one end of the Union, Black people accumulate at the other. Thus the number of Black people in the South increases not only by the natural growth of the population, but also by the forced migration of Black people from the North. The African race has, for growing in this part of the Union, causes analogous to those that make the European race grow so fast in the North.

In the state of Maine, there is one Black person for every 300 inhabitants; in Massachusetts, one in 100; in the state of New York, two in 100; in Pennsylvania, three; in Maryland, thirty-four; forty-two in Virginia; and fifty-five at last in South Carolina.

In the American work entitled Letters on the Colonisation Society, by Carey, 1833, one reads: "In South Carolina, for forty years, the Black race has been growing faster than the white. Taking the total population of the five Southern states that first had slaves," Mr. Carey continues, "Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, one finds that from 1790 to 1830 whites increased by 80 percent." In the United States in 1830, members of the two races were distributed as follows: States where slavery is abolished: 6,565,434 whites, 120,520 Black people. States where slavery still exists: 3,960,814 whites, 2,208,102 Black people.

Such was the ratio of Black to white in the year 1830. But this ratio changes ceaselessly: each day it grows smaller in the North and larger in the South.

It is obvious that in the most southerly states of the Union, slavery cannot be abolished as it was in the Northern states without running very great dangers that the Northern states never had to face.

We have seen how the Northern states managed the transition from slavery to freedom. They keep the present generation in chains and emancipate future ones; in this way, Black people are introduced into society only gradually, and while keeping in servitude the man who might make bad use of his independence, they set free the one who, before becoming his own master, can still learn the art of being free.

It would be hard to apply this method in the South. When you declare that from a certain date forward the son of a Black man will be free, you introduce the principle and the idea of liberty into the very heart of servitude. The Black people whom the legislator keeps in slavery, and who see their sons leaving it, are astonished at this unequal fate that destiny has dealt them. They grow restless and angry. From that point on, slavery has lost in their eyes the kind of moral authority that time and custom had given it; it is reduced to being nothing more than a visible abuse of force. The North had nothing to fear from this contrast, because in the North, Black people were few and whites were very numerous. But if this first dawn of freedom were to illuminate two million men at once, the oppressors would have reason to tremble.

After freeing the sons of their slaves, the white Southerners would soon be forced to extend the same benefit to the entire Black race.

In the North, as I said above, from the moment slavery is abolished — or even from the moment it becomes likely that its abolition is approaching — a double movement takes place: slaves leave the region to be transported further south, while whites from the Northern states and immigrants from Europe flood in to take their place.

These two causes cannot operate in the same way in the Deep South. On one hand, the mass of slaves there is too great for anyone to hope to get them out of the region. On the other hand, Europeans and Anglo-Americans from the North are reluctant to come live in a region where work has not yet been rehabilitated. Moreover, they rightly regard states where the proportion of Black people equals or exceeds that of whites as threatened by great misfortunes, and they refrain from bringing their industry there.

So by abolishing slavery, the men of the South would not succeed, as their brothers in the North did, in gradually bringing Black people to freedom. They would not significantly reduce the number of Black people, and they would be left alone to contain them. Within the course of a few years, one would see a great nation of free Black people placed in the midst of a roughly equal nation of whites.

The same abuses of power that currently maintain slavery would then become, in the South, the source of the greatest dangers the whites would have to fear. Today the descendant of Europeans alone possesses the land; he is the absolute master of industry; he alone is wealthy, educated, and armed. The Black man possesses none of these advantages, but he can do without them — he is a slave. Once free, charged with looking after his own fate, can he remain deprived of all these things without dying? What gave the white man his strength when slavery existed now exposes him to a thousand perils after slavery is abolished.

While keeping the Black man in servitude, you can hold him in a condition close to that of a brute; once free, you cannot prevent him from educating himself enough to appreciate the extent of his sufferings and glimpse the remedy. There is, moreover, a remarkable principle of relative justice that runs very deep in the human heart. Men are far more struck by inequality that exists within the same class than by the inequalities between different classes. One can understand slavery; but how can you accept the existence of several million citizens eternally bent under infamy and condemned to hereditary misery? In the North, a population of freed Black people experiences these evils and feels these injustices, but it is weak and small. In the South, it would be numerous and strong.

Once you accept that whites and emancipated Black people are placed on the same soil as two peoples foreign to each other, you will easily understand that only two possibilities remain for the future: Black people and whites must either blend together completely or separate.

I have already expressed above my conviction on the first possibility.

This view, moreover, is supported by authorities far more weighty than my own. Among others, one reads in Jefferson's Memoirs: "Nothing is more clearly written in the book of fate than the emancipation of the Black people, and it is equally certain that the two races, equally free, will never be able to live under the same government. Nature, habit, and opinion have established insurmountable barriers between them." (See Extract from Jefferson's Memoirs, by M. Conseil.)

I do not think that the white race and the Black race will ever come to live on an equal footing anywhere.

But I believe the difficulty will be even greater in the United States than anywhere else. It may happen that an individual rises above the prejudices of religion, country, or race; and if this individual is a king, he can bring about astonishing revolutions in society. But an entire people cannot put itself above itself in the same way.

A despot who forced Americans and their former slaves under the same yoke might perhaps succeed in mixing them. As long as American democracy remains in charge, no one will dare attempt such a thing, and one can predict that the freer the whites of the United States become, the more they will seek to isolate themselves.

If the English of the Antilles had governed themselves, one can be sure they would not have granted the emancipation act that the mother country has just imposed on them.

I said elsewhere that the real link between the European and the Indian was the person of mixed heritage; in the same way, the real transition between white and Black is the mulatto. Wherever there is a very large number of mixed-race people, the blending of the two races is not impossible.

There are parts of the Americas where European and Black populations have so intermingled that it is hard to find a man who is entirely white or entirely Black. When things have reached that point, one can truly say the races have mixed — or rather, a third race has emerged from the other two, belonging entirely to neither.

Of all Europeans, the English are those who have least mixed their blood with that of Black people. More mulattoes are found in the South of the Union than in the North, but infinitely fewer than in any other European colony. Mixed-race people are very few in the United States; they have no strength of their own, and in racial conflicts they generally side with the whites. It is like seeing the servants of great lords in Europe putting on aristocratic airs with the common people.

This pride of origin, natural to the English, is further magnified in the American by the individual pride that democratic liberty produces. The white man of the United States is proud of his race and proud of himself.

Besides, if whites and Black people do not intermarry in the North of the Union, how would they mix in the South? Can you suppose for a moment that the white Southerner, placed as he always will be between the white man in all his physical and moral superiority and the Black man, could ever dream of blending with the latter? The white Southerner has two powerful passions that will always drive him to keep his distance: he fears resembling the Black man, his former slave, and falling below the white man, his neighbor.

If I absolutely had to predict the future, I would say that, following the probable course of events, the abolition of slavery in the South will increase the repugnance that the white population there feels toward Black people. I base this opinion on what I have already observed to be analogous in the North. I said that white Northerners distance themselves from Black people with all the more care as the legislator draws fewer legal lines between them. Why shouldn't the same thing happen in the South? In the North, when whites fear blending with Black people, they dread an imaginary danger. In the South, where the danger would be real, I cannot believe the fear would be any less.

If, on one hand, it is recognized — and the fact is beyond doubt — that in the extreme South, Black people are ceaselessly accumulating and growing faster than whites; and if, on the other hand, it is conceded that it is impossible to foresee when Black and white people will come to mix and derive the same advantages from society, must we not conclude that, in the Southern states, Black people and whites will sooner or later come into conflict?

What will be the final outcome of this conflict?

It is easy to see that on this point one must remain in the realm of conjecture. The human mind can, with difficulty, trace a kind of great circle around the future; but within that circle, chance — which escapes all effort — holds sway. In the picture of the future, chance always forms the dark spot where the eye of the mind cannot penetrate. What can be said is this: in the Caribbean, it is the white race that seems destined to succumb; on the continent, the Black race.

In the Caribbean, whites are isolated amid an immense Black population; on the continent, Black people are placed between the sea and an innumerable people that already extends above them like a solid mass, from the ice of Canada to the borders of Virginia, from the banks of the Missouri to the shores of the Atlantic. If the whites of North America remain united, it is hard to believe that Black people can escape the destruction that threatens them; they will succumb to the sword or to misery. But the Black populations accumulated along the Gulf of Mexico have chances of survival, if the struggle between the two races comes to be established at a time when the American confederation has dissolved. Once the federal bond is broken, the men of the South would be wrong to count on lasting support from their brothers in the North. The latter know the danger can never reach them; if no positive duty compels them to march to the rescue of the South, one can predict that racial sympathies will prove powerless.

Whatever the timing of the struggle, the whites of the South, even if abandoned to their own resources, will enter the arena with an immense superiority in knowledge and means. But Black people will have numbers on their side, and the energy of despair. These are great resources when you have weapons in your hands. Perhaps what happened to the Moors of Spain will happen to the white race of the South. After occupying the country for centuries, it may gradually withdraw toward the land from which its ancestors once came, abandoning to Black people the possession of a country that Providence seems to have destined for them, since they live there without difficulty and work there more easily than whites.

The more or less distant but inevitable danger of a conflict between the Black and white populations of the South haunts the American imagination like a recurring nightmare. The inhabitants of the North discuss these perils every day, though they have nothing directly to fear from them. They search in vain for a way to ward off the misfortunes they foresee.

In the Southern states, people are silent. They do not speak of the future to strangers; they avoid discussing it with their friends; each person hides it, so to speak, from himself. The silence of the South has something more frightening about it than the noisy fears of the North.

This general preoccupation has given rise to an undertaking, still little known, that may change the fate of part of the human race.

Fearing the dangers I have just described, a certain number of American citizens came together in an organization for the purpose of transporting, at their own expense, to the coast of Guinea the free Black people who wished to escape the tyranny that weighs on them.

This society took the name the American Colonization Society. See its annual reports, and particularly the fifteenth. See also the pamphlet already mentioned, entitled Letters on the Colonisation Society and on its Probable Results, by Mr. Carey, Philadelphia, April 1833.

In 1820, the society I am describing managed to found a settlement in Africa, at the seventh degree of north latitude, to which it gave the name Liberia. The latest news reported that two thousand five hundred Black people had already gathered there. Transported to their ancestral homeland, these Black people introduced American institutions there. Liberia has a representative system, Black jurors, Black magistrates, Black priests. You can find churches and newspapers there; and by a remarkable turn of the vicissitudes of this world, whites are forbidden to settle within its walls.

This last rule was drawn up by the founders of the settlement themselves. They feared that something analogous to what is happening on the frontiers of the United States might occur in Africa — that Black people, like the Indians, entering into contact with a more educated race, might be destroyed before they could become civilized.

Here, surely, is a strange trick of fortune! Two centuries have passed since the day when the inhabitants of Europe undertook to kidnap Black people from their families and their country in order to transport them to the shores of North America. Today we find Europeans busy hauling the descendants of those same Black people back across the Atlantic in order to return them to the soil from which their fathers were once torn. Barbarians acquired the light of civilization in the midst of servitude and learned, in slavery, the art of being free.

Until our day, Africa was closed to the arts and sciences of the whites. European knowledge, imported by Africans, may now penetrate there. There is therefore a beautiful and grand idea in the founding of Liberia; but this idea, which could prove so fertile for the Old World, is barren for the New.

In twelve years, the colonization society has transported 2,500 Black people to Africa. During the same period, roughly 700,000 were born in the United States.

Even if the colony of Liberia were in a position to receive thousands of new inhabitants each year, and those inhabitants were able to be usefully settled there; even if the Union took the place of the society and spent its treasury

There would be many other difficulties in such an enterprise. If the Union, in order to transport Black people from America to Africa, undertook to buy them from their owners, the price of slaves, rising in proportion to their scarcity, would soon reach enormous sums, and it is not likely that the Northern states would consent to such an expenditure from which they would reap no benefit. If the Union seized slaves by force or acquired them at a low price set by itself, it would create insurmountable resistance among the states of the South. Either way leads to the impossible.

and its ships each year to export Black people to Africa, it would still not be able to offset the natural growth of the Black population alone; and since it could not take away as many people each year as were being born, it would not even succeed in slowing the development of the evil growing daily in its midst.

In 1830, there were 2,010,327 slaves and 319,439 freed Black people in the United States, for a total of 2,329,766 Black people; this constituted a little more than one-fifth of the total population of the United States at the same time.

The Black race will never again leave the shores of the American continent, where the passions and vices of Europe brought it down. It will disappear from the New World only by ceasing to exist. The inhabitants of the United States may delay the misfortunes they dread, but they can no longer destroy the cause.

I am forced to admit that I do not consider the abolition of servitude a way to delay, in the Southern states, the conflict between the two races.

Black people may remain slaves for a long time without complaining; but once they enter the ranks of free men, they will soon be outraged at being deprived of almost all the rights of citizens; and unable to become the equals of whites, they will not be long in showing themselves their enemies.

In the North, there was everything to gain by freeing the slaves: you got rid of slavery without having anything to fear from free Black people. They were too few to ever claim their rights. It is not the same in the South.

The question of slavery was, for the masters in the North, a commercial and manufacturing question; in the South, it is a question of life or death. Slavery in the North and slavery in the South must therefore not be confused.

God forbid that I should seek, like certain American authors, to justify the principle of enslaving Black people. I say only that all those who adopted this terrible principle in the past are not equally free today to abandon it.

I confess that when I consider the state of the South, I can see only two courses of action for the white race that inhabits those regions: free the Black people and blend with them, or remain isolated from them and keep them in slavery as long as possible. Half-measures seem to me likely to lead in short order to the most horrible of all civil wars, and perhaps to the ruin of one of the two races.

The white Southerners see the question from this perspective, and they act accordingly. Not wanting to blend with Black people, they do not want to set them free.

It is not that all Southerners regard slavery as necessary for the master's wealth; on this point, many of them agree with the men of the North and readily admit that servitude is an evil. But they think they must preserve this evil in order to survive.

As knowledge has grown in the South, the inhabitants of that part of the country have come to see that slavery is harmful to the master; and the same growing knowledge shows them, more clearly than they had seen before, how nearly impossible it is to destroy it. Hence a remarkable contradiction: slavery becomes more firmly established in the laws even as its usefulness is more contested; and while its principle is gradually abolished in the North, in the South that same principle produces ever harsher consequences.

The laws of the Southern states regarding slaves present, in our day, a kind of unheard-of cruelty that reveals some deep disturbance in the laws of humanity. It is enough to read the legislation of the Southern states to judge the desperate position of the two races that inhabit them.

It is not that the Americans of this part of the Union have exactly increased the harshness of servitude; on the contrary, they have softened the material condition of the slaves. The ancients knew only chains and death to maintain slavery; the Americans of the South have found more intellectual guarantees for the duration of their power. They have, if I may put it this way, spiritualized despotism and violence. In antiquity, the aim was to prevent the slave from breaking his chains; today, the aim is to take away his desire to break them.

The ancients chained the body of the slave but left his mind free and allowed him to educate himself. In this they were consistent with themselves: there was then a natural way out of servitude — from one day to the next, the slave could become free and equal to his master.

The Americans of the South, who do not think that Black people can ever blend with them, have forbidden, under severe penalties, teaching them to read and write. Not wanting to raise them to their own level, they keep them as close as possible to the level of brutes.

In every age, the hope of freedom has been placed within slavery to soften its harshness.

The Americans of the South have understood that emancipation always presents dangers when the freed person can never come to be assimilated with the master. To give a man his freedom and leave him in poverty and disgrace — what is that but to provide a future leader for a slave revolt? Moreover, it had long been observed that the presence of a free Black man stirred a vague restlessness deep in the souls of those who were not free, and let the idea of their rights penetrate there like a doubtful gleam of light. The Americans of the South have, in most cases, stripped masters of the power to set their slaves free.

Emancipation is not prohibited but subjected to formalities that make it difficult.

I met in the South an old man who had once lived in an illicit union with one of his enslaved women. He had had several children by her who, upon coming into the world, became their father's slaves. Several times he had thought of at least bequeathing them their freedom, but years had passed before he could overcome the obstacles the legislature had placed in the way of emancipation. During that time, old age had come, and he was about to die. He then imagined his sons being dragged from market to market, passing from paternal authority to a stranger's whip. These horrible images threw his dying imagination into delirium. I saw him in the grip of the agonies of despair, and I understood then how nature knows how to avenge the wounds inflicted on it by the laws.

These evils are terrible, no doubt; but are they not the foreseeable and necessary consequence of the very principle of slavery among the moderns?

From the moment Europeans took their slaves from the midst of a race of men different from their own, a race that many of them considered inferior to the other races of humanity, and with which all of them view the idea of assimilation with horror — they presumed that slavery would be eternal. For between the extreme inequality created by servitude and the complete equality that independence naturally produces among men, there is no durable intermediate state. Europeans vaguely felt this truth without admitting it to themselves. Whenever it has come to the question of Black people, they have been seen to obey sometimes their self-interest or their pride, sometimes their pity. They violated every right of humanity against the Black man, and then taught him the value and inviolability of those rights. They opened their ranks to their slaves, and when the slaves tried to enter, they drove them out in disgrace. Wanting servitude, they let themselves be drawn — despite themselves or without knowing it — toward freedom, without having the courage to be either completely unjust or entirely just.

If it is impossible to foresee a time when the white Southerners will mix their blood with that of Black people, can they, without exposing themselves to destruction, allow Black people to achieve freedom? And if they are obliged, in order to save their own race, to keep them in chains, must they not be excused for using the most effective means to do so?

What is happening in the South of the Union seems to me at once the most horrible and the most natural consequence of slavery. When I see the order of nature reversed, when I hear humanity crying out and struggling in vain under the laws, I confess I can find no indignation to condemn the men of our day who are responsible for these outrages; but I gather all my hatred against those who, after more than a thousand years of equality, reintroduced servitude into the world.

Whatever the efforts of the white Southerners to preserve slavery, they will not always succeed. Slavery, confined to a single point on the globe, attacked by Christianity as unjust, by political economy as ruinous — slavery, amid the democratic freedom and the knowledge of our age, is not an institution that can endure. It will end either by the hand of the slave or by that of the master. In both cases, great misfortunes must be expected.

If Black people in the South are denied freedom, they will end by seizing it violently themselves; if it is granted to them, they will not be slow to abuse it.

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES THAT THE AMERICAN UNION WILL LAST, AND WHAT DANGERS THREATEN IT

The preponderant force resides in the states rather than in the Union. -- The confederation will last only as long as all the states that compose it want to be part of it. -- Causes that should lead them to stay united. -- The usefulness of being united to resist foreigners and to have no foreigners in America. -- Providence has not raised natural barriers between the different states. -- There are no material interests that divide them. -- The North's interest in the prosperity and unity of the South and West; the South's in those of the North and West; the West's in those of the other two. -- Immaterial interests that unite Americans. -- Uniformity of opinions. -- The dangers to the confederation arise from the difference in character among its members, and from their passions. -- Characters of Southerners and Northerners. -- The rapid growth of the Union is one of its greatest dangers. -- The march of population toward the Northwest. -- The gravitation of power in that direction. -- Passions that these rapid shifts of fortune create. -- If the Union survives, is its government tending to grow stronger or weaker? -- Various signs of weakening. -- Internal improvements. -- Unsettled lands. -- Indians. -- The bank affair. -- The tariff affair. -- General Jackson.

The survival of each individual state depends in part on the continued existence of the Union. So we must first examine what the probable fate of the Union is. But before anything else, we should establish one point: if the current confederation were to break apart, it seems beyond doubt to me that the states within it would not return to their original separate existences. In place of one Union, several would form. I do not intend to investigate what basis these new unions might be established on; what I want to show are the causes that could lead to the breakup of the current confederation.

To get there, I will have to retrace some of the paths I have walked before. I will need to bring back into view several subjects that are already familiar. I know that in doing this I expose myself to the reader's reproach; but the importance of the material I have left to treat is my excuse. I would rather repeat myself occasionally than be misunderstood, and I prefer to harm the author than the subject.

The legislators who formed the Constitution of 1789 worked hard to give the federal power a separate existence and a preponderant strength.

But they were constrained by the very conditions of the problem they had to solve. They had not been charged with constituting the government of a single people, but with regulating the association of several peoples; and whatever their desires, they always had to end up dividing the exercise of sovereignty.

To properly understand the consequences of this division, we need to draw a brief distinction among the acts of sovereignty.

There are matters that are national by their nature — that is, they concern only the nation taken as a whole, and can only be entrusted to the person or assembly that most completely represents the entire nation. I would put war and diplomacy in this category.

There are others that are provincial by their nature — they concern only certain localities and can only be properly handled in the locality itself. Township budgets are an example.

Finally, there are matters of a mixed nature: they are national in that they concern all the individuals who make up the nation; they are provincial in that the nation itself does not necessarily have to provide for them. Civil and political rights are an example. There is no social order without civil and political rights. These rights therefore concern all citizens equally; but it is not always necessary for the nation's existence and prosperity that these rights be uniform, and consequently that they be regulated by the central government.

Among the matters that sovereignty deals with, then, there are two necessary categories; you find them in every well-constituted society, regardless of the basis on which the social contract has been established.

Between these two extremes lies a floating mass of matters that are general but not national — what I have called mixed. These matters being neither exclusively national nor entirely provincial, responsibility for them can be assigned to either the national government or the provincial government, depending on the agreement of those who associate, without the purpose of the association ceasing to be met.

Most often, individual people unite to form the sovereign, and their union constitutes a people. Below the general government they have created, you find nothing but individual forces or collective powers, each representing a very small fraction of the sovereign. In that case, it is the general government that is most naturally called upon to regulate not only matters that are national in their essence, but also the greater part of those mixed matters I already mentioned. The localities are reduced to that portion of sovereignty that is indispensable to their well-being.

Sometimes, because of a fact that predates the association, the sovereign is composed of political bodies that are already organized; it then happens that the provincial government takes charge of providing not only for matters that are exclusively provincial by nature, but also for all or part of the mixed matters just discussed. For the confederated nations, which were themselves sovereigns before their union and which continue to represent a very considerable fraction of the sovereign even after uniting, agreed to yield to the general government only the exercise of those rights that were indispensable to the Union.

When the national government, in addition to the prerogatives inherent to its nature, finds itself also vested with the right to regulate the mixed objects of sovereignty, it possesses a preponderant force. Not only does it have many rights, but all the rights it does not have are at its mercy, and there is reason to fear it will eventually strip the provincial governments of their natural and necessary prerogatives.

When, on the contrary, it is the provincial government that finds itself vested with the right to regulate mixed matters, an opposite tendency prevails in society. The preponderant force then resides in the province, not in the nation; and we must fear that the national government will ultimately be stripped of the privileges necessary for its very existence.

Single peoples are therefore naturally drawn toward centralization, and confederations toward breakup.

All that remains is to apply these general ideas to the American Union.

The individual states necessarily retained the right to regulate matters that were purely provincial.

In addition, those same states kept the right to determine the civil and political capacity of citizens, to regulate relations among men, and to render justice — rights that are general in their nature but do not necessarily belong to the national government.

We have seen that the government of the Union was delegated the power to act in the name of the entire nation in cases where the nation would need to act as a single individual. It represented the nation to foreigners; it directed common forces against the common enemy. In a word, it dealt with matters I have called exclusively national.

In this division of sovereign rights, the Union's share appears at first glance larger than that of the states; a somewhat closer examination shows that in fact it is smaller.

The government of the Union carries out grander undertakings, but it is rarely felt in action. The provincial government does smaller things, but it never rests and reveals its existence at every moment.

The government of the Union watches over the general interests of the country; but the general interests of a people have only a debatable influence on individual happiness.

The affairs of the province, by contrast, visibly affect the well-being of those who live in it.

The Union ensures the independence and greatness of the nation — things that do not immediately touch private individuals. The state maintains liberty, regulates rights, guarantees property, secures the life and entire future of each citizen.

The federal government is placed at a great distance from its subjects; the provincial government is within everyone's reach. You need only raise your voice to be heard by it. The central government has on its side the passions of a few superior men who aspire to lead it; on the side of the provincial government lies the interest of men of second rank who can only hope to gain power within their own state — and it is these men who, being placed close to the people, exercise the most power over them.

Americans therefore have much more to expect and to fear from the state than from the Union; and, following the natural course of the human heart, they must be much more strongly attached to the first than to the second.

In this, habits and feelings are in agreement with interests.

When a compact nation fragments its sovereignty and arrives at the status of a confederation, memories, customs, and habits struggle for a long time against the laws and give the central government a strength that the laws deny it. When confederated peoples unite under a single sovereignty, the same causes operate in the opposite direction. I have no doubt that if France became a confederated republic like the United States, the government would at first show itself more energetic than that of the Union; and if the Union were constituted as a monarchy like France, I think the American government would remain for some time weaker than ours. At the moment when national life was created among the Anglo-Americans, provincial existence was already long-established; necessary relationships had been formed between the townships and individuals of the same states; people were accustomed to considering certain matters from a common point of view and to devoting themselves exclusively to certain enterprises as representing a particular interest.

The Union is an immense body that offers patriotism only a vague object to embrace. The state has definite shapes and circumscribed boundaries; it represents a certain number of things known and dear to those who inhabit it. It merges with the very image of the soil, identifies with property, with family, with memories of the past, with the labors of the present, with dreams of the future. Patriotism, which is most often merely an extension of individual self-interest, has therefore remained within the state and has not, so to speak, passed on to the Union.

Thus interests, habits, and feelings all conspire to concentrate real political life within the state, not the Union.

You can easily judge the difference in strength between the two governments by watching each one move within the sphere of its power.

Whenever a state government addresses an individual or an association of individuals, its language is clear and commanding; the same is true of the federal government when it speaks to individuals. But as soon as it finds itself facing a state, it begins to negotiate: it explains its motives, justifies its conduct; it argues, it advises, it rarely commands. When doubts arise about the constitutional limits of each government's powers, the provincial government claims its right boldly and takes prompt, energetic measures to support it. Meanwhile, the government of the Union reasons; it appeals to the nation's good sense, its interests, its glory; it temporizes, it negotiates; only when driven to the last extremity does it finally resolve to act. At first glance, you might think it was the provincial government that was armed with the forces of the whole nation, and that Congress represented a single state.

The federal government, despite the efforts of those who created it, is therefore, as I have said elsewhere, by its very nature a weak government that, more than any other, needs the free cooperation of the governed to survive.

It is easy to see that its purpose is to facilitate the will that the states have to remain united. Once that first condition is met, it is wise, strong, and agile. It was organized so as to habitually encounter only individuals in its path, and to easily overcome any resistance to the common will; but the federal government was not established with the expectation that the states, or several of them, would cease wanting to be united.

If the sovereignty of the Union were to enter into a struggle today with that of the states, one can easily foresee that it would succumb; I even doubt the fight would ever be seriously joined. Every time a stubborn resistance is offered to the federal government, you will see it yield. Experience has proven up to now that when a state obstinately wanted something and demanded it resolutely, it never failed to obtain it; and when it flatly refused to act, it was left free to do so.

See the conduct of the Northern states in the War of 1812. "During this war," said Jefferson in a letter of March 17, 1817, to General Lafayette, "four of the Eastern states were no more attached to the rest of the Union than dead men to living ones." (Jefferson's Correspondence, published by M. Conseil.)

Even if the government of the Union had a force of its own, the material situation of the country would make its use very difficult.

The state of peace in which the Union finds itself gives it no pretext for maintaining a standing army. Without a standing army, a government has nothing prepared in advance to seize the favorable moment, overcome resistance, and take sovereign power by surprise.

The United States covers an immense territory; long distances separate them; the population is scattered across a country still half-empty. If the Union undertook to hold the confederated states to their duty by force of arms, its position would be analogous to the one England occupied during the War of Independence.

Furthermore, however strong a government may be, it can only with difficulty escape the consequences of a principle once it has admitted that principle itself as the foundation of the public law that must govern it. The confederation was formed by the free will of the states; those states, in uniting, did not lose their nationality and did not merge into a single people. If today one of those same states wanted to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be rather difficult to prove that it could not do so. The federal government, to fight such a state, would have no clear claim based on either force or right.

For the federal government to easily triumph over the resistance of some of its members, the particular interest of one or several of them would have to be intimately linked to the existence of the Union, as has often been seen in the history of confederations.

Suppose that among the states gathered together by the federal bond, there are some that enjoy by themselves the principal advantages of the union, or whose prosperity depends entirely on the fact of the union; it is clear that the central power would find in these a very strong support for keeping the others in line. But then it would no longer be drawing its strength from itself; it would be drawing it from a principle contrary to its nature. Peoples do not confederate in order for some to derive unequal advantages from the union, and, in the case just cited, it is because inequality reigns among the united nations that the federal government is powerful.

Suppose again that one of the confederated states has acquired a preponderance great enough to seize the central power for itself alone; it would consider the other states as its subjects and would have its own sovereignty respected under the pretense of the Union's sovereignty. Great things would be done in the name of the federal government, but in truth, that government would no longer exist.

This is how the province of Holland, in the Dutch Republic, and the Emperor, in the Germanic Confederation, sometimes took the place of the Union and exploited federal power for their own particular interests.

In both these cases, the power acting in the name of the confederation becomes stronger precisely to the degree that one departs from the natural state and the recognized principle of confederations.

In America, the current union is useful to all the states, but essential to none of them. Several states could break the federal bond without compromising the fate of the others, even though the sum of their happiness would be diminished. Since there is no state whose existence or prosperity is entirely tied to the current confederation, there is also none that is prepared to make very great personal sacrifices to preserve it.

On the other hand, you cannot at present see any state that has a great interest of ambition in maintaining the confederation as we see it today. They do not all exercise the same influence in federal deliberations, it is true; but you see none that should flatter itself that it dominates there, or that can treat its confederates as inferiors or subjects.

It therefore seems certain to me that if a portion of the Union seriously wanted to separate from the other, not only could it not be prevented, but no one would even try. The current Union will therefore last only as long as all the states that compose it continue to want to be part of it.

With that point established, we are on easier ground: the question is no longer whether the currently confederated states could separate, but whether they will want to remain united.

Among all the reasons that make the current union useful to Americans, there are two principal ones whose evidence easily strikes every eye.

Although Americans are practically alone on their continent, commerce makes neighbors of all the peoples they trade with. Despite their apparent isolation, Americans therefore need to be strong, and they can only be strong by remaining united.

If the states separated, they would not merely diminish their strength against foreigners — they would create foreigners on their own soil. From that point on, they would enter into a system of internal tariffs; they would divide valleys with imaginary lines; they would imprison the course of rivers and obstruct in every way the exploitation of the immense continent that God has given them as their domain.

Today they have no invasion to fear, consequently no armies to maintain, no taxes to levy; if the Union were to break apart, the need for all these things would perhaps not be long in making itself felt.

Americans therefore have an immense interest in remaining united.

On the other hand, it is almost impossible to discover what kind of material interest any portion of the Union would currently have in separating from the others.

When you look at a map of the United States and notice the chain of the Allegheny Mountains, running from northeast to southwest and crossing the country over a distance of four hundred leagues, you are tempted to think that Providence intended to raise between the Mississippi basin and the Atlantic coast one of those natural barriers that, by opposing permanent relations among men, form something like the necessary boundaries of different peoples.

But the average height of the Alleghenies does not exceed 800 meters. Their rounded summits and the spacious valleys within their contours offer easy access at a thousand points. Moreover, the principal rivers that empty into the Atlantic Ocean — the Hudson, the Susquehanna, the Potomac — have their sources beyond the Alleghenies, on an open plateau bordering the Mississippi basin. Starting from that region, they force their way through the rampart that seemed bound to throw them back westward, and trace, through the heart of the mountains, natural routes that are always open to men.

The average height of the Alleghenies, according to Volney (Tableau des Etats-Unis, p. 33), is 700 to 800 meters; 5,000 to 6,000 feet according to Darby; the greatest height of the Vosges is 1,400 meters above sea level.

No barrier therefore rises between the different parts of the country currently occupied by Anglo-Americans. Far from the Alleghenies serving as boundaries between peoples, they do not even form the borders of states. New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia contain them within their territory and extend as far to the west as to the east of those mountains.

The Allegheny chain is no higher than the Vosges and does not present as many obstacles to human industry. The regions on the eastern slope of the Alleghenies are therefore as naturally linked to the Mississippi valley as Franche-Comte, Upper Burgundy, and Alsace are to France.

The territory currently occupied by the twenty-four states of the Union and the three large districts that have not yet been ranked as states, though they already have inhabitants, covers an area of 131,144 square leagues — that is, it already presents a surface area nearly equal to five times that of France. Within these limits you find varied soil, different temperatures, and very diverse products.

1,002,600 square miles. See View of the United States, by Darby, p. 435.

This vast extent of territory occupied by the Anglo-American republics has raised doubts about the maintenance of their union. Here we must make a distinction: conflicting interests sometimes develop in the different provinces of a vast empire and end up clashing; in that case, the very size of the state is what most threatens its durability. But if the people who cover this vast territory have no conflicting interests among them, its very extent should serve their prosperity, since the unity of government singularly favors the exchange of different products of the soil, and by making their distribution easier, increases their value.

Now, I can see different interests in the various parts of the Union, but I cannot discover any that are contrary to one another.

The states of the South are almost exclusively agricultural; those of the North are particularly manufacturing and commercial; those of the West are simultaneously manufacturing and agricultural. In the South they harvest tobacco, rice, cotton, and sugar; in the North and West, corn and wheat. These are diverse sources of wealth; but to tap into them, there is a common and equally beneficial means for all: the union.

The North, which carries the riches of Anglo-Americans to every part of the world and brings the world's riches into the heart of the Union, has an obvious interest in the confederation continuing as it is today, so that the number of American producers and consumers it serves remains as large as possible. The North is the most natural middleman between the South and West of the Union on one hand, and the rest of the world on the other; the North must therefore want the South and West to remain united and prosperous, so that they can supply its manufactures with raw materials and its ships with freight.

The South and West, for their part, have an even more direct interest in preserving the Union and in the prosperity of the North. The products of the South are mostly exported overseas; the South and West therefore need the commercial resources of the North. They must want the Union to have a great maritime power to protect them effectively. The South and West should willingly contribute to the costs of a navy, even though they have no ships of their own; for if the fleets of Europe came to blockade the ports of the South and the delta of the Mississippi, what would become of the rice of the Carolinas, the tobacco of Virginia, the sugar and cotton that grow in the Mississippi valleys? There is therefore not a single item in the federal budget that does not serve to preserve a material interest common to all the confederated states.

Beyond this commercial utility, the South and West of the Union find a great political advantage in remaining united with each other and with the North.

The South harbors within itself an immense enslaved population, a population threatening in the present and still more threatening in the future.

The states of the West occupy the bottom of a single valley. The rivers that water their territory, starting from the Rocky Mountains or the Alleghenies, all mingle their waters with those of the Mississippi and roll with it toward the Gulf of Mexico. The states of the West are entirely isolated, by their position, from the traditions of Europe and the civilization of the Old World.

The inhabitants of the South must therefore wish to preserve the Union so as not to remain alone facing the Black population, and the inhabitants of the West must wish the same so as not to find themselves locked in the heart of central America with no free communication with the wider world.

The North, for its part, must want the Union to remain undivided in order to continue serving as the link that connects this great body to the rest of the world.

There thus exists a tight bond between the material interests of all parts of the Union.

I will say the same about the opinions and feelings that could be called man's immaterial interests.

The inhabitants of the United States talk a great deal about their love of country; I confess that I have little faith in this deliberate patriotism that is founded on interest, and that interest, by changing its object, can destroy.

Nor do I attach great importance to the language Americans use when they express their daily intention to preserve the federal system their fathers adopted.

What keeps a large number of citizens under the same government is much less the reasoned will to remain united than the instinctive and in some ways involuntary harmony that results from similarity of feelings and resemblance of opinions.

I will never concede that men form a society simply because they recognize the same leader and obey the same laws; there is a society only when men view a great number of things in the same light; when, on a great number of subjects, they share the same opinions; when, finally, the same facts give rise in them to the same impressions and the same thoughts.

Anyone who studied the United States from this angle would easily discover that their inhabitants, divided as they are into twenty-four distinct sovereignties, nevertheless constitute a single people; and perhaps they would even conclude that a real social order exists more truly within the Anglo-American Union than among certain European nations that have only a single body of laws and submit to a single ruler.

Although Anglo-Americans have several religions, they all share the same way of looking at religion.

They do not always agree on the best means of governing, and they differ on some of the forms it is appropriate to give to government; but they agree on the general principles that should govern human societies. From Maine to Florida, from Missouri to the Atlantic Ocean, everyone believes that the origin of all legitimate powers lies in the people. Everyone conceives the same ideas about liberty and equality; everyone professes the same opinions about the press, the right of association, the jury, and the accountability of public officials.

If we pass from political and religious ideas to the philosophical and moral opinions that regulate the daily actions of life and direct the whole of one's conduct, we find the same agreement.

I need hardly say, I think, that by these expressions — "the Anglo-Americans" — I mean only the great majority of them. Outside this majority there are always a few isolated individuals.

Anglo-Americans place moral authority in universal reason, just as they place political power in the universality of citizens, and they hold that it is the common sense of all that should be relied on to discern what is permitted or forbidden, what is true or false. Most of them think that a proper understanding of one's self-interest is enough to lead a person toward justice and honesty. They believe that each person is born with the faculty of governing himself, and that no one has the right to force his fellow to be happy. They all have a lively faith in human perfectibility; they judge that the spread of knowledge must necessarily produce useful results, ignorance harmful ones; they all consider society as a body in progress, humanity as a shifting picture in which nothing is or should be permanently fixed, and they accept that what seems good to them today may tomorrow be replaced by something better that is still hidden from view.

I am not saying that all these opinions are correct, but they are American.

At the same time that Anglo-Americans are thus united among themselves by shared ideas, they are separated from all other peoples by a feeling of pride.

For fifty years now, the inhabitants of the United States have been told over and over that they form the only religious, enlightened, and free people. They see that among them, so far, democratic institutions prosper, while they fail everywhere else in the world; they therefore have an immense opinion of themselves, and they are not far from believing they form a species apart within the human race.

Thus the dangers threatening the American Union arise neither from the diversity of opinions nor from that of interests. They must be sought in the variety of characters and in the passions of Americans.

The men who inhabit the immense territory of the United States almost all descend from a common stock; but over time, climate and especially slavery have introduced marked differences between the character of the English of the southern United States and the character of the English of the North.

It is commonly believed among us that slavery gives one portion of the Union interests contrary to those of the other. I have not observed that this is so. Slavery has not created interests in the South contrary to those of the North; but it has modified the character of Southerners and given them different habits.

I have elsewhere described the influence that servitude exercised on the commercial capacity of the Americans of the South; this same influence extends equally to their customs and values.

The slave is a servant who does not argue and submits to everything without complaint. Sometimes he murders his master, but he never resists him. In the South, there are no families so poor as to have no slaves. The Southerner, from birth, finds himself invested with a kind of domestic dictatorship; the first notions of life he receives teach him that he was born to command, and the first habit he forms is that of dominating without effort. His education therefore powerfully tends to make the Southerner a proud, quick-tempered, irascible, violent man, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles — but easy to discourage if he cannot triumph at the first blow.

The Northerner does not see slaves rushing to attend his cradle. He does not even find free servants there, for most often he is reduced to providing for his own needs himself. Scarcely is he in the world when the idea of necessity presses upon his mind from every direction; he therefore learns early to know precisely, by himself, the natural limits of his power. He does not expect to bend by force the wills that oppose his own, and he knows that to win the support of his fellows, he must first gain their favor. He is therefore patient, reflective, tolerant, slow to act, and persevering in his designs.

In the Southern states, a man's most pressing needs are always met. The Southerner is therefore not preoccupied with the material cares of life; another person takes charge of thinking about them for him. Free on this point, his imagination turns toward other objects that are grander and less precisely defined. The Southerner loves grandeur, luxury, glory, excitement, pleasure, and above all idleness; nothing forces him to exert himself in order to live, and since he has no necessary labors, he falls asleep and does not even undertake useful ones.

Since equality of fortunes prevails in the North, and slavery no longer exists there, a man is as if absorbed by those same material cares that the white Southerner disdains. From childhood he devotes himself to fighting poverty, and he learns to place comfort above all the pleasures of the mind and heart. His imagination, concentrated on the small details of life, dims; his ideas are fewer and less sweeping, but they become more practical, clearer, and more precise. Since he directs all the efforts of his intelligence toward the single study of well-being, he soon excels at it; he knows admirably how to draw profit from nature and from men to produce wealth; he understands marvelously the art of making society contribute to the prosperity of each of its members, and of extracting from individual self-interest the happiness of all.

The Northerner has not only experience but knowledge; yet he does not prize learning as a pleasure — he values it as a means, and he seizes eagerly only upon its useful applications.

The Southerner is more spontaneous, more witty, more open, more generous, more intellectual, and more brilliant.

The Northerner is more active, more reasonable, more knowledgeable, and more skillful.

The one has the tastes, the prejudices, the weaknesses, and the grandeur of every aristocracy.

The other has the qualities and the defects that characterize the middle class.

Bring two men together in society, give those two men the same interests and partly the same opinions; if their character, their knowledge, and their civilization differ, there is a strong chance they will not get along. The same observation applies to a society of nations.

Slavery therefore does not attack the American confederation directly through interests, but indirectly through customs and values.

The states that joined the federal pact in 1790 numbered thirteen; the confederation now counts twenty-four. The population, which stood at nearly four million in 1790, had quadrupled in the space of forty years; it rose in 1830 to nearly thirteen million.

Census of 1790: 3,929,328. Census of 1830: 12,856,165.

Such changes cannot take place without danger.

For a society of nations, as for a society of individuals, there are three main conditions for durability: the wisdom of the associates, their individual weakness, and their small number.

The Americans who leave the Atlantic shore to plunge into the West are adventurers impatient with every kind of yoke, greedy for riches, often cast out by the states that saw them born. They arrive in the middle of the wilderness without knowing one another. They find there neither traditions nor family ties nor examples to restrain them. Among them, the authority of the laws is weak, and that of customs and values weaker still. The men who daily populate the Mississippi valleys are therefore inferior in every respect to the Americans who live within the old boundaries of the Union. Yet they already exercise a great influence on its deliberations, and they arrive at the management of common affairs before they have learned to govern themselves.

This is admittedly only a passing danger. I have no doubt that with time society will settle and establish itself in the West as it has already done on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

The weaker the individual members of a society, the more chance it has of lasting, for they then have no security except in remaining united. When, in 1790, the most populous American republic had fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, each one felt its insignificance as an independent people, and this awareness made obedience to the federal authority easier. But when one of the confederated states counts 2,000,000 inhabitants, like New York, and covers a territory whose area equals a quarter of France's, it feels strong on its own, and if it continues to desire the union as useful to its well-being, it no longer regards it as necessary to its existence; it can do without it; and, though consenting to remain, it soon wants to be dominant within it.

Pennsylvania had 431,373 inhabitants in 1790.

Area of the state of New York: 6,213 square leagues (500 square miles.) See View of the United States, by Darby, p. 435.

The mere multiplication of the Union's members would already powerfully tend to break the federal bond. People placed at the same vantage point do not all view the same objects in the same way. This is all the more true when the vantage point is different. As the number of American republics increases, we see the chance of gaining unanimous consent to the same laws diminish.

Today the interests of the Union's different parts are not contrary to one another; but who could predict the various changes that the near future will bring in a country where every day creates new cities and every five years creates new nations?

Since the English colonies were founded, the number of inhabitants has roughly doubled every twenty-two years; I see no reason that this progressive movement of the Anglo-American population should stop within the next century. Before a hundred years have elapsed, I think the territory occupied or claimed by the United States will be covered by more than a hundred million inhabitants and divided into forty states.

If the population continues to double every twenty-two years for another century, as it has for two hundred years, in 1852 the United States will count twenty-four million inhabitants, forty-eight in 1874, and ninety-six in 1896. This would be the case even if on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains one encountered terrain unfit for cultivation. The lands already occupied can easily hold this number. A hundred million people spread over the territory currently occupied by the twenty-four states and three territories that make up the Union would yield only 762 individuals per square league — far from the average population of France, which is 1,006; of England, which is 1,457; and even below that of Switzerland. Switzerland, despite its lakes and mountains, has 783 inhabitants per square league. See Malte-Brun, vol. 6, p. 92.

I grant that these hundred million people have no differing interests; I give them all an equal advantage in remaining united; and I say that by the very fact that they are a hundred million forming forty distinct and unequally powerful nations, the preservation of the federal government is nothing more than a lucky accident.

I am willing to accept human perfectibility; but until men have changed their nature and been completely transformed, I will refuse to believe in the durability of a government whose task is to hold together forty diverse peoples spread across an area equal to half of Europe, to prevent rivalries, ambition, and conflicts among them, and to unite the action of their independent wills toward the accomplishment of the same goals.

The territory of the United States has an area of 295,000 square leagues; that of Europe, according to Malte-Brun, vol. 6, p. 4, is 500,000.

But the greatest danger the Union faces as it grows comes from the continual displacement of power occurring within it.

From the shores of Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico, as the crow flies, the distance is about four hundred French leagues. Along this immense line winds the frontier of the United States; sometimes it curves inward, more often it reaches well beyond into the wilderness. It has been calculated that along this entire vast front, white settlers advance on average seven leagues per year. From time to time an obstacle presents itself: an unproductive district, a lake, an Indian nation unexpectedly encountered along the way. The column halts for a moment; its two ends curve back upon themselves, and once they have joined up again, the advance resumes. There is something providential in this gradual and continuous march of the European race toward the Rocky Mountains: it is like a flood of men that rises ceaselessly, lifted each day by the hand of God.

See Legislative Documents, 20th Congress, No. 117, p. 105.

Behind this front line of conquest, cities are being built and vast states being founded. In 1790, barely a few thousand pioneers were scattered through the Mississippi valleys; today those same valleys contain as many people as the entire Union held in 1790. The population there stands at nearly four million inhabitants. The city of Washington was founded in 1800, at the very center of the American confederation; now it is situated at one of its extremities. The deputies from the most western states, to come take their seats in Congress, already have to travel a distance as great as the journey from Vienna to Paris.

3,672,317, census of 1830.

From Jefferson, capital of the state of Missouri, to Washington, the distance is 1,019 miles, or 420 postal leagues. (American Almanac, 1831, p. 48.)

All the states of the Union are being carried along toward prosperity at the same time; but they cannot all grow and prosper in the same proportion.

In the north of the Union, branches of the Allegheny chain advance into the Atlantic Ocean, forming spacious harbors and ports always open to the largest ships. South of the Potomac, however, following the coast of America to the mouth of the Mississippi, you find nothing but flat, sandy terrain. In this part of the Union, the outlet of almost every river is obstructed, and the ports that open at long intervals among these lagoons do not offer the same depth to ships and provide commerce with much lesser facilities than those of the North.

To this first natural inferiority is joined another that comes from the laws.

We have seen that slavery, which is abolished in the North, still exists in the South, and I have shown the disastrous influence it exercises on the well-being of the master himself.

To judge the difference between the commercial activity of the South and that of the North, one need only glance at the following table: In 1829, the vessels of large and small commerce belonging to Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia (the four great states of the South) weighed only 5,243 tons. In the same year, the vessels of the single state of Massachusetts weighed 17,322 tons. Thus the single state of Massachusetts had three times more shipping than the four states named above. Yet Massachusetts has only 959 square leagues of area (7,335 square miles) and 610,014 inhabitants, while the four states I mention have 27,304 square leagues (210,000 square miles) and 3,047,767 inhabitants. The area of Massachusetts thus forms only a thirtieth of the area of those four states, and its population is five times smaller than theirs. Slavery harms the commercial prosperity of the South in several ways: it diminishes the spirit of enterprise among whites, and it prevents them from finding at their disposal the sailors they would need. Navies generally recruit from the lowest class of the population. But it is slaves who form this class in the South, and it is difficult to put them to use at sea: their service would be inferior to that of whites, and there would always be the fear that they might revolt in the middle of the ocean, or take flight on reaching foreign shores.

The North must therefore be more commercial and more industrious than the South. It is natural that population and wealth should flow there more rapidly.

The states along the Atlantic coast are already half-populated. Most of the land there has an owner; they therefore cannot receive the same number of immigrants as the states of the West, which still offer a boundless field to industry. The Mississippi basin is infinitely more fertile than the Atlantic coast. This reason, added to all the others, energetically pushes Europeans toward the West. This can be rigorously demonstrated with figures.

Looking at the United States as a whole, we find that in forty years the number of inhabitants has roughly tripled. But if we look only at the Mississippi basin, we discover that in the same span of time the population has grown thirty-one times larger.

View of the United States, by Darby, p. 444.

Note that when I speak of the Mississippi basin, I do not include the portions of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia located west of the Alleghenies, which should nonetheless be considered part of it.

Every day, the center of federal power shifts. Forty years ago, the majority of the Union's citizens lived along the seacoast, in the vicinity of where Washington now stands; now it is pushed further inland and further north; there is no doubt that within twenty years it will be on the other side of the Alleghenies. If the Union survives, the Mississippi basin, by its fertility and extent, is necessarily destined to become the permanent center of federal power. Within thirty or forty years, the Mississippi basin will have taken its natural rank. It is easy to calculate that by then its population, compared to that of the states along the Atlantic, will be in approximately the proportion of 40 to 11. Control of the Union will therefore soon escape completely from the states that founded it, and the population of the Mississippi valleys will dominate the federal councils.

This continual gravitation of power and federal influence toward the Northwest reveals itself every ten years, when, after conducting a general census of the population, the number of representatives each state must send to Congress is fixed anew.

One then notices that during the ten years just elapsed, one state has increased its population in the proportion of 5 per 100, like Delaware; another in the proportion of 250 per 100, like the territory of Michigan. Virginia discovers that during the same period it has increased the number of its inhabitants in the ratio of 13 to 100, while the neighboring state of Ohio has increased its in the ratio of 61 to 100. See the general table in the National Calendar; you will be struck by the inequality of fortune among the different states.

In 1790, Virginia had nineteen representatives in Congress. This number continued to grow until 1813, when it reached twenty-three. Since then it has been declining. By 1833 it was down to twenty-one. During that same period, the state of New York followed the opposite trajectory: in 1790 it had ten representatives in Congress; in 1813, twenty-seven; in 1823, thirty-four; in 1833, forty. Ohio had only a single representative in 1803; in 1833 it had nineteen.

We will see below that during the last period, Virginia's population grew in the proportion of 13 per 100. It is necessary to explain how the number of a state's representatives can decline when its population, far from declining, is actually growing. I take Virginia, which I have already cited, as a point of comparison. The number of Virginia's representatives in 1823 was proportional to the total number of Union representatives; the number of Virginia's representatives in 1833 is likewise proportional to the total number of Union representatives in 1833, adjusted for the ratio of its population growth during those ten years. The ratio of the new number of Virginia's representatives to the old will therefore be proportional, on one hand, to the ratio of the new total number of representatives to the old, and on the other, to the ratio of Virginia's growth rate to that of the whole Union. Thus, for the number of Virginia's representatives to remain stable, it would suffice that the ratio of the small state's growth rate to the large one's be the inverse of the ratio of the new total number of representatives to the old; and if Virginia's population growth rate stands in a smaller ratio to the growth rate of the whole Union than the new number of Union representatives does to the old number, Virginia's representative count will decrease.

It is hard to conceive of a durable union between two peoples, one poor and weak, the other rich and strong, even if it could be proven that the strength and wealth of the one are not the cause of the weakness and poverty of the other. The union is even harder to maintain at a time when one is losing strength while the other is in the process of gaining it.

This rapid and disproportionate growth of certain states threatens the independence of the others. If New York, with its two million inhabitants and forty representatives, wanted to dictate terms to Congress, it might well succeed. But even if the most powerful states never sought to oppress the lesser ones, the danger would still exist, because it lies in the possibility of the fact almost as much as in the fact itself.

The weak rarely have confidence in the justice and reason of the strong. States that grow less quickly than the others therefore cast looks of suspicion and envy at those favored by fortune. From this comes the deep unease and vague anxiety one notices in one part of the Union, which contrasts with the well-being and confidence that reign in the other. I believe that the hostile attitude the South has adopted has no other cause.

Southerners are, of all Americans, those who should be most attached to the Union, for they above all would suffer from being left to themselves; yet they are the only ones who threaten to break the bonds of the confederation. Why is this? It is easy to say: the South, which has furnished four presidents to the confederation, which knows that federal power is slipping from its grasp, which sees its number of representatives in Congress diminish each year while those of the North and West grow; the South, populated by ardent and irascible men, grows irritated and anxious. It turns with bitterness to examine itself; interrogating the past, it asks itself each day whether it is being oppressed. Does it discover that a law of the Union is not obviously favorable to it? It cries out that its interests are being abused; it protests passionately, and if its voice is not heard, it grows indignant and threatens to withdraw from a society whose burdens it bears without sharing its profits.

Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.

"The tariff laws," said the inhabitants of Carolina in 1832, "enrich the North and ruin the South; for without this, how could one conceive that the North, with its inhospitable climate and barren soil, should ceaselessly increase its wealth and power, while the South, which is like the garden of America, falls rapidly into decay?"

See the report by its committee to the Convention that proclaimed nullification in South Carolina.

If the changes I have described took place gradually, so that each generation at least had time to pass along with the order of things it had witnessed, the danger would be less; but there is something headlong, I could almost say revolutionary, about the pace of progress in American society. The same citizen has been able to see his state march at the head of the Union and then become powerless in the federal councils. There are Anglo-American republics that have grown as fast as a man, and that were born, grew, and reached maturity in thirty years.

One must not imagine, however, that the states losing power are being depopulated or withering away; their prosperity does not stop — they even grow faster than any kingdom of Europe. But it seems to them that they are growing poor because they are not growing rich as fast as their neighbors, and they believe they are losing power because they suddenly find themselves in contact with a power greater than their own: it is therefore their feelings and their passions that are wounded, more than their interests. But is that not enough to put the confederation in danger? If, since the beginning of the world, peoples and kings had looked only to their real utility, one would scarcely know what war is among men.

The population of a country is surely the first element of its wealth. During the same period of 1820 to 1832, during which Virginia lost two representatives in Congress, its population grew in the proportion of 13.7 per 100; that of the Carolinas in the ratio of 15 per 100; and that of Georgia in the proportion of 51.5 per 100. (See American Almanac, 1832, p. 162.) Now, Russia, the country of Europe where population grows fastest, increases the number of its inhabitants in ten years only in the proportion of 9.5 per 100; France in that of 7 per 100; and Europe as a whole in that of 4.7 per 100. (See Malte-Brun, vol. 6, p. 95.)

It must be admitted, however, that the depreciation in the price of tobacco over the past fifty years has notably diminished the comfort of Southern farmers; but this fact is independent of the will of Northerners as well as their own.

Thus the greatest danger threatening the United States arises from their very prosperity; it tends to create among some of the confederated states the intoxication that accompanies the rapid growth of fortune, and among others the envy, suspicion, and regret that most often follow its loss.

Americans rejoice as they contemplate this extraordinary movement; they should, it seems to me, view it with regret and with fear. The Americans of the United States, whatever they do, will become one of the greatest peoples in the world; they will cover nearly all of North America with their descendants; the continent they inhabit is their domain, and it cannot escape them. What is the rush, then, to seize possession of it today? Wealth, power, and glory cannot fail to be theirs someday, and they rush toward this immense fortune as if they had only a moment to grasp it.

I believe I have demonstrated that the existence of the current confederation depends entirely on the agreement of all the confederated states to remain united; and, starting from this premise, I have investigated the causes that might lead the different states to want to separate. But there are two ways for the Union to perish: one of the confederated states may want to withdraw from the contract and violently sever the common bond — most of the remarks I have made above relate to this case; the federal government may progressively lose its power through a simultaneous tendency of the united republics to reclaim the exercise of their independence. The central power, successively stripped of all its prerogatives, reduced by tacit agreement to impotence, would become unable to fulfill its purpose, and the second Union would perish, like the first, from a kind of senile imbecility.

The gradual weakening of the federal bond, which ultimately leads to the annulment of the Union, is moreover in itself a distinct fact that can bring about many results less extreme than that one before producing it. The confederation could still exist, and yet the weakness of its government could already reduce the nation to impotence, cause anarchy at home, and slow the general prosperity of the country.

After investigating what drives the Anglo-Americans to separate, it is therefore important to examine whether, assuming the Union survives, their government is expanding or contracting its sphere of action, whether it is becoming more energetic or weaker.

Americans are obviously preoccupied by a great fear. They see that among most peoples in the world, the exercise of sovereign rights tends to become concentrated in few hands, and they are frightened by the idea that the same will eventually happen to them. Statesmen themselves feel these terrors — or at least pretend to feel them — for in America, centralization is not popular, and there is no more skillful way to court the majority than by railing against the supposed encroachments of central power. Americans refuse to see that in the countries where this centralizing tendency frightens them, there is only a single people, while the Union is a confederation of different peoples; a fact sufficient to invalidate all predictions based on analogy.

I confess that I regard these fears held by many Americans as entirely imaginary. Far from sharing their dread that sovereignty will be consolidated in the hands of the Union, I believe the federal government is visibly weakening.

To prove what I am asserting, I will not resort to ancient facts, but to those I was able to witness myself, or that took place in our own time.

When you examine carefully what is happening in the United States, you discover without difficulty the existence of two contrary tendencies; they are like two currents flowing through the same channel in opposite directions.

In the forty-five years the Union has existed, time has disposed of a multitude of provincial prejudices that originally militated against it. The patriotic feeling that attached each American to his state has become less exclusive. By coming to know each other better, the various parts of the Union have drawn closer together. The postal service, that great bond of minds, now penetrates to the depths of the wilderness; steamboats connect every point along the coast to every other, day after day. Commerce descends and ascends the interior rivers with unprecedented speed. To these facilities created by nature and industry are added the restlessness of desires, the anxiety of the spirit, the love of riches that constantly push Americans out of their homes and put them in communication with a great number of their fellow citizens. They crisscross their country in every direction; they visit all the populations that inhabit it. There is no province of France whose inhabitants know each other as well as the thirteen million people who cover the surface of the United States.

In 1832, the district of Michigan, which had only 31,639 inhabitants and was still a barely cleared wilderness, already had 940 miles of mail roads. The almost entirely wild territory of Arkansas was already traversed by 1,738 miles of mail roads. See the Report of the Postmaster General, November 30, 1833. The delivery of newspapers alone throughout the Union brought in 254,796 dollars per year.

In the course of ten years, from 1821 to 1831, 271 steamboats were launched on the rivers that water the Mississippi valley alone. In 1829, there were 256 steamboats in the United States. See Legislative Documents, No. 240, p. 274.

At the same time that Americans are mixing with one another, they are assimilating; the differences that climate, origin, and institutions had placed between them are diminishing. They are all converging more and more toward a common type. Every year, thousands of men leave the North and spread into every part of the Union: they bring with them their beliefs, their opinions, their customs and values; and since their education is superior to that of the people among whom they come to live, they do not take long to seize control of affairs and modify society to their advantage. This continual migration from North to South singularly favors the fusion of all provincial characters into a single national character. The civilization of the North therefore seems destined to become the common standard by which everything else will one day be measured.

As American industry advances, the commercial bonds that unite all the confederated states grow tighter, and the union enters into habits after having been in opinions. As time marches on, it finishes eliminating a host of phantom terrors that tormented the imagination of the men of 1789. The federal power has not become oppressive; it has not destroyed the independence of the states; it has not led the confederated states toward monarchy; under the Union, the small states have not fallen into dependence on the large ones. The confederation has continued to grow ceaselessly in population, wealth, and power.

I am therefore convinced that in our time, Americans face fewer natural difficulties in living united than they did in 1789; the Union has fewer enemies than it did then.

And yet, if one studies the history of the United States over the past forty-five years carefully, one will easily become convinced that federal power is declining.

It is not difficult to point to the causes of this phenomenon.

When the Constitution of 1789 was promulgated, everything was perishing in anarchy; the Union that succeeded this disorder aroused much fear and hatred, but it also had ardent friends, because it was the expression of a great need. Although more attacked then than it is today, the federal power therefore quickly reached the maximum of its strength, as generally happens with a government that triumphs after having rallied its forces in the struggle. At that time, constitutional interpretation seemed to expand rather than contract federal sovereignty, and the Union presented in several respects the spectacle of a single people, directed within and without by a single government.

But to reach that point, the people had in a sense risen above themselves.

The Constitution had not destroyed the individuality of the states, and all bodies, whatever they may be, have a secret instinct that drives them toward independence. This instinct is even more pronounced in a country like America, where every village forms a sort of republic accustomed to governing itself.

There was therefore effort on the part of states that submitted to federal preponderance. And all effort, even if crowned with great success, cannot help but weaken along with the cause that gave rise to it.

As the federal government consolidated its power, America regained its rank among nations, peace returned to the borders, public credit revived; order replaced confusion, an order that allowed individual industry to follow its natural course and develop in freedom.

It was this very prosperity that began to make people lose sight of the cause that had produced it; the danger past, Americans no longer found within themselves the energy and patriotism that had helped them avert it. Freed from the fears that preoccupied them, they easily fell back into the current of their habits and gave themselves over without resistance to the ordinary tendency of their inclinations. The moment a strong government no longer seemed necessary, people began to think it was a nuisance. Everything prospered with the Union, and no one turned away from the Union; but they wanted to barely feel the action of the power that represented it. In general, people wanted to remain united, but in each particular case they tended to become independent again. The principle of confederation was each day more easily accepted and less applied; thus the federal government, by creating order and peace, brought about its own decline.

The moment this disposition of minds began to manifest itself, the party men who live off the people's passions set about exploiting it for their own profit.

The federal government then found itself in a very critical situation; its enemies had popular favor, and it was by promising to weaken it that men earned the right to lead it.

From that point on, every time the government of the Union entered the lists against that of the states, it almost never stopped retreating. Whenever there was occasion to interpret the terms of the federal constitution, the interpretation was most often contrary to the Union and favorable to the states.

The Constitution gave the federal government the task of providing for national interests; it had been thought that it was up to the federal government to undertake or encourage, within the country, the great enterprises that were by nature likely to increase the prosperity of the whole Union — internal improvements, such as canals.

The states grew alarmed at the idea of seeing another authority besides their own dispose of a portion of their territory. They feared that the central power, acquiring in this way a formidable patronage within their own borders, would end up exercising an influence there that they wanted to reserve entirely to their own agents.

The Democratic Party, which has always opposed every expansion of federal power, raised its voice; Congress was accused of usurpation; the head of state, of ambition. The central government, intimidated by these outcries, ended up acknowledging its own error and confining itself strictly within the sphere that was drawn for it.

The Constitution gives the Union the privilege of dealing with foreign peoples. The Union had generally considered the Indian tribes bordering its territory from this perspective. As long as these savages consented to flee before civilization, the federal right was not contested; but from the day an Indian tribe undertook to establish itself permanently on a piece of land, the surrounding states claimed a right of possession over those lands and a right of sovereignty over the people who occupied them. The federal government hastened to recognize both, and, after having treated the Indians as independent peoples, it handed them over like subjects to the legislative tyranny of the states.

See in the legislative documents, which I have already cited in the chapter on the Indians, the letter of the president of the United States to the Cherokees, his correspondence on this subject with his agents, and his messages to Congress.

Among the states that had formed along the Atlantic, several extended indefinitely westward into wildernesses where Europeans had not yet penetrated. Those whose boundaries were irrevocably fixed looked with a jealous eye at the boundless future open to their neighbors. The latter, in a spirit of conciliation and to facilitate the act of Union, agreed to draw boundaries for themselves and to cede to the confederation all the territory that might lie beyond them.

The first act of cession was made by the state of New York in 1780; Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, South Carolina, North Carolina followed this example at different times; Georgia was the last; its act of cession dates only from 1803.

Since that time, the federal government has become the owner of all the uncultivated land that lies outside the thirteen originally confederated states. It is charged with dividing and selling it, and the proceeds go exclusively into the Treasury of the Union. With this revenue, the federal government purchases Indian lands, opens roads in the new districts, and uses all its power to facilitate the rapid development of society there.

Now it has happened that in those very wildernesses, once ceded by the inhabitants of the Atlantic shore, new states have formed over time. Congress has continued to sell, for the benefit of the nation as a whole, the uncultivated lands that these states still contain within them. But today these states claim that once constituted, they should have the exclusive right to apply the proceeds of these sales to their own use. As the complaints grew increasingly threatening, Congress thought it best to strip the Union of some of the privileges it had enjoyed up to then, and at the end of 1832 it passed a law by which, without ceding to the new Western republics ownership of their uncultivated lands, it nevertheless applied the greater part of the revenue drawn from them to their benefit alone.

The president refused, it is true, to sign this law, but he fully accepted its principle. See Message of December 8, 1833.

One need only travel through the United States to appreciate the advantages the country derives from the Bank. These advantages are of several kinds; but there is one in particular that strikes the foreigner: the notes of the Bank of the United States are accepted at the edge of the wilderness for the same value as in Philadelphia, where the Bank has its headquarters.

The current Bank of the United States was created in 1816, with a capital of 35,000,000 dollars (185,500,000 francs); its charter expires in 1836. Last year, Congress passed a law to renew it; but the president refused to sign it. The struggle is now engaged on both sides with extreme violence, and it is easy to predict the Bank's imminent fall.

The Bank of the United States is, however, the object of great hatreds. Its directors have come out against the president, and they are accused, not without plausibility, of having abused their influence to obstruct his election. The president therefore attacks the institution they represent with all the ardor of personal enmity. What has encouraged the president to pursue his vengeance in this way is that he feels himself supported by the secret instincts of the majority.

The Bank forms the great monetary bond of the Union just as Congress is its great legislative bond, and the same passions that tend to make the states independent of the central power tend toward the destruction of the Bank.

The Bank of the United States always holds in its hands a large number of notes belonging to the provincial banks; it can at any time force these latter to redeem their notes in specie. For the Bank itself, such a danger is not to be feared; the greatness of its available resources allows it to meet all demands. Threatened thus in their existence, the provincial banks are forced to exercise restraint and to put into circulation only a number of notes proportionate to their capital. The provincial banks suffer this salutary check only with impatience. The newspapers that are in their pocket, and the president whose own interest has made him their mouthpiece, therefore attack the Bank with a kind of fury. They stir up against it the local passions and the blind democratic instinct of the country. According to them, the directors of the Bank form a permanent aristocratic body whose influence is bound to make itself felt in government and must sooner or later alter the principles of equality on which American society rests.

The Bank's struggle against its enemies is merely one incident in the great battle that the provinces are waging in America against the central power — the spirit of independence and democracy against the spirit of hierarchy and subordination. I do not claim that the enemies of the Bank of the United States are precisely the same individuals who attack the federal government on other points; but I do say that the attacks against the Bank of the United States are the product of the same instincts that militate against the federal government, and that the large number of the Bank's enemies is an ominous symptom of the weakening of the latter.

But the Union never showed itself weaker than in the famous tariff affair.

See principally, for the details of this affair, the Legislative Documents, 22nd Congress, 2nd session, No. 30.

The wars of the French Revolution and the War of 1812, by preventing free communication between America and Europe, had created manufactures in the North of the Union. When peace reopened the way to the New World for European products, Americans thought it wise to establish a tariff system that could simultaneously protect their nascent industry and pay off the debts the war had caused them to incur.

The states of the South, which have no manufactures to encourage and are only agricultural, were not long in complaining about this measure.

I do not intend to examine here what may have been imaginary or real about their complaints; I am stating facts.

As early as 1820, South Carolina, in a petition to Congress, declared that the tariff law was unconstitutional, oppressive, and unjust. Since then, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi made more or less energetic protests to the same effect.

Far from heeding these murmurs, Congress in 1824 and 1828 raised the tariff duties still higher and reaffirmed its principle.

Then there was produced, or rather recalled, in the South a famous doctrine that took the name of nullification.

I have shown in the appropriate place that the purpose of the federal constitution was not to establish a league, but to create a national government. The Americans of the United States, in all the cases provided for by their constitution, form but a single people. On all these points, the national will expresses itself, as among all constitutional peoples, by means of a majority. Once the majority has spoken, the minority's duty is to submit.

Such is the legal doctrine, the only one that accords with the text of the Constitution and the known intention of its framers.

The nullifiers of the South claim, on the contrary, that in uniting, Americans did not intend to merge into a single people, but merely to form a league of independent peoples; from which it follows that each state, having preserved its complete sovereignty, if not in practice at least in principle, has the right to interpret the laws of Congress and to suspend within its borders the enforcement of those it considers contrary to the Constitution or to justice.

The entire doctrine of nullification is summed up in a sentence delivered in 1833 before the United States Senate by Mr. Calhoun, the acknowledged leader of the Southern nullifiers.

"The Constitution," he said, "is a contract in which the states appeared as sovereigns. Now, whenever a contract is made between parties who recognize no common arbiter, each party retains the right to judge for itself the extent of its obligation."

It is obvious that such a doctrine destroys the federal bond in principle and in fact brings back the anarchy from which the Constitution of 1789 had delivered the Americans.

When South Carolina saw that Congress turned a deaf ear to its complaints, it threatened to apply the nullifiers' doctrine to the federal tariff law. Congress persisted in its course; finally the storm broke.

In the course of 1832, the people of South Carolina elected a national convention to consider what extraordinary measures remained to be taken; and on November 24 of the same year, this convention published, under the name of an ordinance, a law that declared the federal tariff null and void, forbade the collection of the duties specified in it, and refused to accept appeals to the federal courts. This ordinance was not to take effect until the following February, and it was indicated that if Congress modified the tariff before that time, South Carolina might agree not to pursue its threats further. Later, the desire was expressed, though vaguely and indefinitely, to submit the question to an extraordinary assembly of all the confederated states.

That is to say, a majority of the people; for the opposing party, called the Union Party, always counted a very strong and very active minority in its favor. South Carolina may have had about 47,000 voters; 30,000 were favorable to nullification, and 17,000 against.

This ordinance was preceded by the report of a committee charged with preparing its draft; this report contains the explanation and purpose of the law. In it one reads, p. 34: "When the rights reserved to the different states by the Constitution are deliberately violated, the right and duty of these states is to intervene, in order to stop the progress of evil, to oppose usurpation, and to maintain within their respective limits the powers and privileges that belong to them as independent sovereigns. If the states did not possess this right, in vain would they claim to be sovereign. South Carolina recognizes no tribunal on earth that is placed above her. It is true that she has entered into a solemn contract of union with other states sovereign like herself, but she claims and will exercise the right to explain what that contract means in her eyes, and when this contract is violated by her associates and by the government they have created, she intends to use the evident (unquestionable) right to judge the extent of the infraction and what measures must be taken to obtain justice."

In the meantime, South Carolina armed its militias and prepared for war.

What did Congress do? Congress, which had not listened to its subjects when they were pleading, lent an ear to their complaints the moment it saw them with weapons in hand. It passed a law according to which the tariff duties were to be progressively reduced over ten years until they no longer exceeded the needs of government. Thus Congress completely abandoned the principle of the tariff. It replaced a duty protecting industry with a purely fiscal measure. To disguise its defeat, the government of the Union resorted to an expedient commonly used by weak governments: while yielding on the facts, it stood firm on principles. At the same time that Congress was changing the tariff legislation, it passed another law by which the president was invested with extraordinary power to overcome by force the resistance that was thenceforth no longer to be feared.

What finished persuading Congress to take this step was a demonstration by the powerful state of Virginia, whose legislature offered to serve as arbiter between the Union and South Carolina. Until then, South Carolina had appeared entirely abandoned, even by the states that had protested alongside it.

Law of March 2, 1833.

This law was suggested by Mr. Clay, and passed in four days in both chambers of Congress by an immense majority.

South Carolina did not even consent to leave the Union these feeble appearances of victory; the same national convention that had nullified the tariff law reassembled, accepted the concession that was offered, but at the same time declared that it persisted more firmly than ever in the nullifiers' doctrine, and, to prove it, annulled the law that conferred extraordinary powers on the president, although it was perfectly certain that no use would be made of them.

Nearly all the acts I have just described took place under the presidency of General Jackson. It cannot be denied that, in the tariff affair, Jackson upheld the rights of the Union with skill and vigor. I believe, however, that the very conduct of the man who represents the federal power should be counted among the dangers it faces today.

Some people in Europe have formed an opinion about the influence General Jackson may exercise on the affairs of his country that seems quite extravagant to those who have seen things up close.

People have heard that General Jackson won battles, that he is an energetic man, inclined by character and habit to the use of force, desirous of power, and a despot by taste. All of this may be true, but the conclusions drawn from these truths are great errors.

People have imagined that General Jackson wanted to establish a dictatorship in the United States, that he was going to make the military spirit reign there, and give the central power a dangerous expansion threatening to provincial liberties. In America, the time for such enterprises and the age of such men have not yet arrived: if General Jackson had wanted to dominate in this manner, he would certainly have lost his political position and endangered his life; so he has not been imprudent enough to try.

Far from wanting to extend federal power, the current president represents, on the contrary, the party that wants to restrict this power to the clearest and most precise terms of the Constitution, and that will not accept any interpretation favorable to the government of the Union; far from presenting himself as the champion of centralization, General Jackson is the agent of provincial jealousies. It was decentralizing passions — if I may put it that way — that brought him to supreme power. It is by flattering these passions every day that he maintains himself there and prospers. General Jackson is the slave of the majority: he follows its wishes, its desires, its half-revealed instincts — or rather, he divines them and runs to place himself at its head.

Every time the government of the states enters into a struggle with that of the Union, it is rare that the president is not the first to doubt his own right; he almost always defers to the legislative power; when there is occasion to interpret the extent of federal authority, he sides in a sense against himself; he diminishes himself, he veils himself, he effaces himself. It is not that he is naturally weak or hostile to the Union; when the majority declared itself against the pretensions of the Southern nullifiers, he was seen placing himself at its head, formulating with clarity and energy the doctrines it professed, and being the first to call for the use of force. General Jackson — to borrow a comparison from the vocabulary of American political parties — seems to me federal by taste and republican by calculation.

After thus lowering himself before the majority to win its favor, General Jackson rises again; he then moves toward the goals the majority itself pursues, or those it does not regard with a jealous eye, sweeping away all obstacles before him. Strong with a support his predecessors never enjoyed, he tramples his personal enemies wherever he finds them, with a facility no president has ever known; he takes upon himself measures that no one before him would have dared take; it even happens that he treats the national legislature with a kind of almost insulting disdain; he refuses to sign the laws of Congress, and often neglects to respond to that great body at all. He is a favorite who sometimes rough-handles his master. General Jackson's power therefore constantly increases; but the president's power decreases. In his hands, the federal government is strong; it will pass to his successor enfeebled.

Either I am greatly mistaken, or the federal government of the United States tends to grow weaker each day; it progressively withdraws from affairs, it narrows the circle of its action more and more. Naturally weak, it abandons even the appearances of strength. On the other hand, I believe I have seen that in the United States the feeling of independence is becoming increasingly vivid in the states, the love of provincial government increasingly pronounced.

People want the Union, but reduced to a shadow: they want it strong in certain cases and weak in all others; they expect that in time of war it can gather into its hands the national forces and all the resources of the country, and that in time of peace it should practically cease to exist — as if this alternation between debility and vigor were in the nature of things.

I see nothing at present that can halt this general movement of minds; the causes that produced it continue to operate in the same direction. It will therefore continue, and one can predict that, barring some extraordinary circumstance, the government of the Union will go on weakening day by day.

I believe, however, that we are still far from the time when federal power, incapable of protecting its own existence and giving the country peace, will extinguish itself of its own accord. The Union is in the customs and values of the people; they desire it; its results are obvious, its benefits visible. When people realize that the weakness of the federal government is threatening the Union's very existence, I have no doubt that a movement of reaction in favor of strength will arise.

The government of the United States is, of all the federal governments that have been established to this day, the one most naturally destined to act; as long as it is attacked only indirectly through the interpretation of its laws, as long as its substance is not profoundly altered, a change of opinion, a domestic crisis, a war, could suddenly restore all the vigor it needs.

What I have wanted to establish is simply this: many people among us think that in the United States there is a movement of minds that favors the centralization of power in the hands of the president and Congress. I maintain that one can visibly detect the opposite movement. Far from the federal government growing stronger as it ages and threatening the sovereignty of the states, I say that it tends to weaken each day, and that only the sovereignty of the Union is in peril. That is what the present reveals. What will be the final result of this tendency, what events may halt, slow, or hasten the movement I have described? The future hides them, and I do not claim to be able to lift its veil.

ON REPUBLICAN INSTITUTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES, AND THEIR CHANCES OF LASTING

The Union is only an accident. -- Republican institutions have a more promising future. -- The republic is, at present, the natural state of Anglo-Americans. -- Why. -- To destroy it, one would have to change all the laws and alter all the customs and values at once. -- The difficulties Americans would face in creating an aristocracy.

The breakup of the Union, by introducing war among the presently confederated states, and with it standing armies, dictatorship, and taxes, could over time endanger the survival of republican institutions.

But the future of the republic must not be confused with that of the Union.

The Union is an accident that will last only as long as circumstances favor it, but the republic seems to me the natural state of Americans; and only the continuous action of opposing causes, pushing always in the same direction, could substitute monarchy for it.

The Union exists mainly in the law that created it. A single revolution, a change in public opinion, could shatter it forever. The republic has deeper roots.

What is meant by a republic in the United States is the slow, quiet action of society upon itself. It is an orderly system truly founded on the enlightened will of the people. It is a conciliatory government where decisions ripen at length, are discussed slowly, and are executed with maturity.

Republicans in the United States value customs and values, respect beliefs, and recognize rights. They hold the opinion that a people must be moral, religious, and moderate in proportion to its freedom. What is called the republic in the United States is the tranquil reign of the majority. The majority, after it has had time to recognize itself and confirm its existence, is the common source of all powers. But the majority itself is not all-powerful. Above it, in the moral world, stand humanity, justice, and reason; in the political world, acquired rights. The majority recognizes these two barriers, and if it happens to overstep them, it is because it has passions, like any man, and because, like all men, it can do evil while recognizing the good.

But we in Europe have made some strange discoveries.

The republic, according to some of us, is not the rule of the majority, as people have believed up to now — it is the rule of those who claim to speak for the majority. It is not the people who govern in these kinds of regimes, but those who know best what is good for the people: a happy distinction that allows one to act in the name of nations without consulting them, and to claim their gratitude while trampling them underfoot. Republican government is, moreover, the only one to which the right to do anything must be conceded, and which can disregard everything that men have hitherto respected, from the highest laws of morality to the most basic rules of common sense.

It had been thought, until our time, that despotism was hateful in whatever form it took. But we have discovered in our day that there are legitimate tyrannies and holy injustices in the world, provided they are exercised in the name of the people.

The ideas Americans have formed of the republic make its use singularly easy for them and ensure its longevity. Among them, if the practice of republican government is often bad, at least the theory is good, and the people always end up conforming their actions to it.

It was impossible at the beginning, and it would still be very difficult today, to establish a centralized administration in America. People are dispersed over too great a space and separated by too many natural obstacles for a single authority to undertake directing the details of their existence. America is therefore par excellence the country of provincial and local government.

To this cause, whose effects were felt equally by all the Europeans of the New World, the Anglo-Americans added several others that were peculiar to them.

When the colonies of North America were established, municipal liberty had already penetrated English laws and customs and values; the English emigrants adopted it not only as something necessary, but as a good whose full value they understood.

We have also seen how the colonies were founded. Each province, and almost each district, was populated separately by men who were strangers to one another, or who were associated for different purposes.

The English of the United States therefore found themselves, from the beginning, divided into a great number of small distinct societies that were attached to no common center, and each of these small societies had to manage its own affairs, since nowhere could one see a central authority that would naturally and easily provide for them.

Thus the nature of the country, the very manner in which the English colonies were founded, the habits of the first settlers — everything combined to develop communal and provincial liberties there to an extraordinary degree.

In the United States, then, the entire framework of institutions is essentially republican; to durably destroy the laws that establish the republic, one would have to abolish, in a sense, all the laws at once.

If a party were to undertake today to establish a monarchy in the United States, it would find itself in a position even more difficult than one that wished to proclaim the republic in France right now. The monarchy would find no legislation prepared for it in advance, and it would truly be a case of seeing a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions.

The monarchical principle would penetrate American customs and values with equal difficulty.

In the United States, the dogma of popular sovereignty is not an isolated doctrine unconnected to habits or to the body of dominant ideas; on the contrary, it can be seen as the final link in a chain of opinions that envelops the entire Anglo-American world. Providence has given each individual, whoever they may be, the degree of reason necessary to direct themselves in the things that concern them exclusively. This is the great maxim on which, in the United States, civil and political society rests: the father applies it to his children, the master to his servants, the township to its citizens, the province to its townships, the state to its provinces, the Union to the states. Extended to the nation as a whole, it becomes the dogma of popular sovereignty.

Thus, in the United States, the generative principle of the republic is the same one that governs most human actions. The republic therefore penetrates — if I may put it this way — into the ideas, the opinions, and all the habits of Americans at the same time that it establishes itself in their laws; and to change the laws, they would first have to change themselves entirely, as it were. In the United States, even the religion of the greatest number is itself republican; it submits the truths of the other world to individual reason, just as politics leaves the care of the interests of this world to the common sense of all, and it allows each person to freely take the path that must lead them to heaven, in the same way that the law recognizes every citizen's right to choose their own government.

Obviously, only a long series of events all tending in the same direction could substitute for this body of laws, opinions, and customs and values, a contrary body of customs and values, opinions, and laws.

If republican principles are to perish in America, they will succumb only after a long social process, frequently interrupted, often resumed; several times they will seem to be reborn, and they will disappear for good only when an entirely new people has taken the place of the one that exists today. Nothing foreshadows such a revolution; no sign announces it.

What strikes you most upon your arrival in the United States is the kind of tumultuous movement at the heart of which political society finds itself. Laws change constantly, and at first glance it seems impossible that a people so uncertain of its will should not soon come to substitute an entirely new form of government for the current one. These fears are premature. There are, in matters of political institutions, two kinds of instability that must not be confused: one attaches itself to secondary laws; this kind can prevail for a long time in an otherwise stable society; the other constantly undermines the very foundations of the constitution and attacks the generative principles of the laws; this one is always followed by troubles and revolutions; the nation that suffers it is in a violent and transitional state. Experience shows that these two kinds of legislative instability have no necessary connection between them, for they have been seen existing together or separately depending on times and places. The first is found in the United States, but not the second. Americans frequently change their laws, but the foundation of the constitution is respected.

In our day, the republican principle reigns in America as the monarchical principle dominated in France under Louis XIV. The French of that era were not only friends of the monarchy — they could not even imagine putting anything in its place; they accepted it as one accepts the course of the sun and the turning of the seasons. Among them, royal power had no more advocates than adversaries.

This is how the republic exists in America: without struggle, without opposition, without proof, by tacit agreement, a kind of consensus universalis.

However, I think that by changing their administrative methods as often as they do, the inhabitants of the United States are compromising the future of republican government.

Constantly frustrated in their plans by the continual fickleness of legislation, men may end up viewing the republic as an inconvenient way of living in society; the harm resulting from the instability of secondary laws would then call into question the existence of fundamental laws and indirectly bring about a revolution — but that time is still far from us.

What can already be foreseen is that upon leaving the republic, Americans would pass quickly to despotism, without lingering very long in monarchy. Montesquieu said that nothing is more absolute than the authority of a prince who succeeds a republic, since the undefined powers that had been fearlessly entrusted to an elected magistrate then end up in the hands of a hereditary ruler. This is generally true, but particularly applicable to a democratic republic. In the United States, the magistrates are not elected by a particular class of citizens but by the majority of the nation; they immediately represent the passions of the multitude and depend entirely on its will; they therefore inspire neither hatred nor fear. So, as I have already noted, little care has been taken to limit their power by tracing boundaries for its exercise, and what an immense share has been left to their discretion. This order of things has created habits that would outlive it. The American magistrate would keep his undefined power while ceasing to be accountable, and it is impossible to say where tyranny would stop.

There are people among us who expect to see aristocracy born in America, and who already foresee with precision the time when it must seize power.

I have already said, and I repeat, that the current movement of American society seems to me increasingly democratic.

However, I do not claim that Americans may not someday restrict the circle of political rights among themselves, or confiscate those same rights for the benefit of a single man; but I cannot believe they will ever confide their exclusive use to a particular class of citizens — or in other words, that they will establish an aristocracy.

An aristocratic body is composed of a certain number of citizens who, without being placed very far from the crowd, nonetheless rise permanently above it; whom you can touch but cannot strike; with whom you mingle every day but with whom you cannot be confused.

It is impossible to imagine anything more contrary to the nature and secret instincts of the human heart than a subjection of this kind: left to themselves, men will always prefer the arbitrary power of a king to the orderly administration of nobles.

An aristocracy, to last, needs to establish inequality in principle, legalize it in advance, and introduce it into the family at the same time as it spreads it through society — things so repugnant to natural equity that they can only be obtained from men by constraint.

Since human societies have existed, I do not believe one can cite the example of a single people that, left to itself and by its own efforts, created an aristocracy within itself: all the aristocracies of the Middle Ages were the offspring of conquest. The conqueror was the noble, the vanquished the serf. Force then imposed inequality, which, once it entered into customs and values, maintained itself and passed naturally into laws.

There have been societies that, as a result of events preceding their existence, were so to speak born aristocratic, and that each succeeding century then led back toward democracy. Such was the fate of the Romans, and of the barbarians who established themselves after them. But a people that, starting from civilization and democracy, gradually moved toward inequality of conditions and eventually established in its midst inviolable privileges and exclusive categories — that would be something new in the world.

Nothing indicates that America is destined to provide this spectacle first.

SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON THE CAUSES OF THE COMMERCIAL GREATNESS OF THE UNITED STATES

Americans are called by nature to be a great maritime people. -- The extent of their coastline. -- The depth of their ports. -- The size of their rivers. -- It is, however, much less to physical causes than to intellectual and moral ones that the commercial superiority of the Anglo-Americans should be attributed. -- The reason for this opinion. -- The future of the Anglo-Americans as a commercial people. -- The destruction of the Union would not halt the maritime drive of the peoples that compose it. -- Why. -- The Anglo-Americans are naturally called to serve the needs of the inhabitants of South America. -- They will become, like the English, the agents of a large part of the world.

From the Bay of Fundy to the Sabine River in the Gulf of Mexico, the coast of the United States stretches over a length of roughly nine hundred leagues.

These shores form a single, unbroken line; they are all under the same dominion.

There is no people in the world that can offer commerce deeper, vaster, or safer ports than the Americans.

The inhabitants of the United States compose a great civilized nation that fortune has placed in the midst of wildernesses, twelve hundred leagues from the main center of civilization. America therefore has a daily need for Europe. In time, Americans will no doubt come to produce or manufacture most of the things they need at home, but the two continents will never be able to live entirely independent of each other: there are too many natural bonds between their needs, their ideas, their habits, and their customs and values.

The Union has products that have become necessary to us and that our soil refuses entirely to provide, or can produce only at great cost. Americans consume only a very small portion of these products; they sell us the rest.

Europe is therefore America's market, as America is Europe's market; and maritime commerce is as necessary to the inhabitants of the United States for carrying their raw materials to our ports as for transporting our manufactured goods to theirs.

The United States was therefore destined either to provide a great stimulus to the maritime industry of other nations — if it renounced commerce itself, as the Spaniards of Mexico have done until now — or to become one of the foremost maritime powers of the globe: this alternative was inevitable.

Anglo-Americans have always shown a decided taste for the sea. Independence, by breaking the commercial ties that linked them to England, gave their maritime genius a new and powerful impetus. Since that time, the number of the Union's ships has grown at a pace almost as rapid as the growth of its population. Today it is Americans themselves who carry nine-tenths of European products to their own shores. It is also Americans who bring to European consumers three-quarters of the New World's exports.

The total value of imports for the year ending September 30, 1832, was $101,129,266. Imports carried on foreign ships accounted for only $10,731,039 — roughly one-tenth.

The total value of exports during the same year was $87,176,943; the value exported on foreign vessels was $21,036,183, or roughly one-quarter. (William's Register, 1833, p. 398)

American ships fill the port of Le Havre and that of Liverpool. Only a small number of British or French ships are seen in the port of New York.

During the years 1829, 1830, and 1831, ships entering the ports of the Union weighed a total of 3,307,719 tons. Foreign ships contributed only 544,571 tons to this total. They were therefore in the proportion of about 16 per 100. (National Calendar, 1833, p. 304.) During the years 1820, 1826, and 1831, English ships entering the ports of London, Liverpool, and Hull weighed 443,800 tons. Foreign ships entering the same ports during the same years weighed 159,431 tons. The ratio between them was therefore about 36 to 100. (Companion to the Almanac, 1834, p. 169.) In 1832, the ratio of foreign ships to English ships entering the ports of Great Britain was about 29 to 100.

Thus the American merchant not only braves competition on his own soil, but fights foreigners to advantage on theirs.

This is easily explained: of all the ships in the world, those of the United States cross the seas at the lowest cost. As long as the merchant marine of the United States retains this advantage over others, not only will it keep what it has conquered, but it will add to its conquests every day.

Why Americans sail more cheaply than anyone else is a difficult problem to solve; at first one is tempted to attribute this superiority to some material advantages that nature has placed within their reach alone, but this is not the case.

American ships cost almost as much to build as ours; they are no better constructed, and they generally do not last as long.

Raw materials generally cost less in America than in Europe, but the price of labor is much higher.

The wages of American sailors are higher than those of European sailors; the proof of this is the great number of Europeans found in the American merchant marine.

So why do Americans sail more cheaply than we do?

I think it would be pointless to seek the causes of this superiority in material advantages; it comes from purely intellectual and moral qualities.

Here is a comparison that will clarify my thought:

During the wars of the Revolution, the French introduced into the military art a new tactic that confounded the oldest generals and nearly destroyed the most ancient monarchies of Europe. They were the first to dispense with a host of things that had until then been judged indispensable to war; they demanded of their soldiers new efforts that civilized nations had never asked of theirs; they were seen doing everything on the run, risking men's lives without hesitation for the result to be obtained.

The French were less numerous and less rich than their enemies; they possessed infinitely fewer resources; yet they were constantly victorious, until their enemies took the course of imitating them.

Americans have introduced something analogous into commerce. What the French did for victory, they do for low prices.

The European navigator ventures onto the seas only with caution; he sets out only when the weather invites him; if an unforeseen accident befalls him, he returns to port; at night he takes in part of his sails, and when he sees the ocean whitening as the shore approaches, he slows his course and checks the sun.

The American neglects these precautions and defies these dangers. He sets sail while the storm still rages; night and day he spreads all his sails to the wind; he repairs his storm-battered ship while still underway, and when he finally approaches the end of his voyage, he continues to fly toward the shore as if he could already see the port.

The American often shipwrecks; but no navigator crosses the seas as rapidly as he does. Doing the same things as another in less time, he can do them at less cost.

Before reaching the end of a long voyage, the European navigator thinks it best to put into port several times along the way. He wastes precious time looking for a port of call or waiting for the chance to leave one, and he pays each day for the right to stay there.

The American navigator leaves Boston to buy tea in China. He arrives in Canton, stays a few days, and comes back. In less than two years he has traveled the entire circumference of the globe, and he has seen land only once. During a crossing of eight or ten months, he has drunk brackish water and lived on salted meat; he has struggled ceaselessly against the sea, against sickness, against boredom; but upon his return, he can sell a pound of tea for a penny less than the English merchant: the goal is achieved.

I cannot express my thought better than by saying that Americans bring a kind of heroism to their way of doing business.

It will always be very difficult for the European merchant to follow his American competitor down the same path. The American, in acting as I have described above, is not merely following a calculation — he is above all obeying his nature.

The inhabitant of the United States feels all the needs and desires that an advanced civilization creates, yet he does not find around him, as in Europe, a society skillfully organized to satisfy them; he is therefore often obliged to procure for himself the various objects that his education and his habits have made necessary. In America, it sometimes happens that the same man plows his field, builds his house, makes his tools, cobbles his shoes, and weaves with his own hands the rough cloth that must cover him. This hurts the perfection of industry, but it powerfully serves to develop the intelligence of the worker. There is nothing that tends more to materialize a man and strip from his work every trace of the soul than the extreme division of labor. In a country like America, where specialists are so rare, no one can demand a long apprenticeship from those who take up a profession. Americans therefore find it very easy to change their occupation, and they take advantage of this, according to the needs of the moment. You meet people who have been successively lawyers, farmers, merchants, evangelical ministers, doctors. If the American is less skillful than the European in each particular industry, there is almost none that is entirely foreign to him. His capacity is more general, the circle of his intelligence wider. The inhabitant of the United States is therefore never stopped by any axiom of profession; he escapes all occupational prejudices; he is no more attached to one system of operations than another; he does not feel more bound to an old method than a new one; he has formed no habits for himself, and he easily slips free of the grip that others' habits might exercise on his mind, for he knows that his country resembles no other, and that his situation is new in the world.

The American lives in a land of wonders; around him everything is constantly in motion, and every movement seems like progress. The idea of the new is therefore intimately linked in his mind to the idea of the better. Nowhere does he see the limit that nature may have placed on human effort; in his eyes, what does not exist is simply what has not yet been attempted.

This universal movement that prevails in the United States, these frequent turns of fortune, this sudden displacement of public and private wealth — everything combines to keep the soul in a kind of feverish agitation that admirably prepares it for every effort and maintains it, so to speak, above the common level of humanity. For an American, life itself is like a game of chance, a time of revolution, a day of battle.

These same causes, operating simultaneously on every individual, end up imparting an irresistible impulse to the national character. The average American must therefore be a man ardent in his desires, enterprising, adventurous, above all an innovator. This spirit does indeed show up in all his works; he brings it into his political laws, his religious doctrines, his theories of social economy, his private industry; he carries it everywhere with him, to the depths of the forest as well as the heart of cities. It is this same spirit that, applied to maritime commerce, makes the American navigate faster and more cheaply than all the merchants of the world.

As long as the sailors of the United States retain these intellectual advantages and the practical superiority that derives from them, they will not only continue to provide for the needs of their country's producers and consumers, but they will increasingly tend to become, like the English, the commercial agents of other peoples.

One should not think that English ships are solely occupied with transporting foreign products to England or carrying English products to foreigners; today the merchant marine of England forms something like a great public transport enterprise, ready to serve all the world's producers and to connect all peoples with one another. The maritime genius of the Americans is leading them to build a rival enterprise to that of the English.

This is already beginning to happen before our eyes. We already see American navigators introducing themselves as intermediary agents in the commerce of several European nations; America offers them an even greater future.

Part of the commerce of the Mediterranean is already conducted on American ships.

The Spanish and the Portuguese founded great colonies in South America which have since become empires. Civil war and despotism devastate these vast lands today. The movement of population has stalled there, and the small number of people who inhabit them, absorbed by the task of defending themselves, barely feel the need to improve their condition.

But it cannot always be so. Europe, left to itself, managed through its own efforts to pierce the darkness of the Middle Ages; South America is Christian like us; it has our laws, our customs; it contains all the seeds of civilization that have developed within the European nations and their descendants; South America has, in addition, our example: why should it remain forever barbarous?

It is obviously only a question of time: a more or less distant era will certainly come when the South Americans will form flourishing and enlightened nations.

But when the Spanish and Portuguese of southern America begin to feel the needs of civilized peoples, they will still be far from being able to satisfy those needs themselves; as latecomers to civilization, they will submit to the already acquired superiority of their elders. They will be farmers long before they are manufacturers and merchants, and they will need the intermediary services of foreigners to sell their products overseas and to procure in exchange the goods whose new necessity will make itself felt.

There can be no doubt that the North Americans are destined someday to supply the needs of the South Americans. Nature has placed them nearby. It has thus given them great facilities for knowing and appreciating the needs of those peoples, for establishing permanent relations with them, and for gradually capturing their market. The merchant of the United States could lose these natural advantages only if he were much inferior to the merchant of Europe, and he is in fact superior to him in several respects. The Americans of the United States already exercise a great moral influence over all the peoples of the New World. Enlightenment comes from them. All the nations that inhabit the same continent are already accustomed to regarding them as the most enlightened, most powerful, and richest offspring of the great American family. They therefore constantly turn their gaze toward the Union, and they assimilate themselves, as far as they can, to the peoples who compose it. Every day they come to draw political doctrines from the United States and borrow laws from it.

The Americans of the United States find themselves in precisely the same position relative to the peoples of South America as their fathers the English were to the Italians, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and all those European peoples who, being less advanced in civilization and industry, received from English hands most of their consumer goods.

England is today the natural center of commerce for nearly all the nations that approach it; the American Union is called to play the same role in the other hemisphere. Every people that is born or grows in the New World is therefore born and grows, in a sense, for the benefit of the Anglo-Americans.

If the Union were to dissolve, the commerce of the states that formed it would no doubt be slowed in its development for a time, though less than people think. It is obvious that, whatever happens, the commercial states will remain united. They all border each other; there is perfect identity among them in opinions, interests, and customs and values, and they alone could compose a very great maritime power. Even if the South of the Union became independent of the North, it would not follow that it could do without it. I have said that the South is not commercial; nothing yet indicates that it should become so. The Americans of the southern United States will therefore long be obliged to have recourse to foreigners to export their products and to bring them the goods necessary for their needs. Now, of all the intermediaries they might use, their neighbors to the North are surely those who can serve them most cheaply. And serve them they will, for cheapness is the supreme law of commerce. There is no sovereign will or national prejudice that can resist cheapness for long. There is no hatred more venomous than that which exists between the Americans of the United States and the English. Despite these hostile feelings, the English nevertheless supply the Americans with most of their manufactured goods, for the sole reason that they charge less for them than other peoples. The growing prosperity of America thus turns, despite the wishes of Americans, to the profit of English manufacturing.

Reason indicates and experience proves that there is no commercial greatness that can last if it cannot, when necessary, unite itself with military power.

This truth is as well understood in the United States as anywhere else. Americans are already in a position to make their flag respected; soon they will be able to make it feared.

I am convinced that the breakup of the Union, far from diminishing the naval strength of the Americans, would strongly tend to increase it. Today the commercial states are tied to those that are not, and the latter often only reluctantly agree to increase a maritime power from which they benefit only indirectly.

If, on the contrary, all the commercial states of the Union formed a single people, commerce would become for them a national interest of the first order; they would therefore be willing to make very great sacrifices to protect their ships, and nothing would prevent them from following their desires on this point.

I think that nations, like men, almost always reveal in their youth the principal traits of their destiny. When I see the spirit with which the Anglo-Americans conduct their commerce, the facilities they find for doing it, and the success they achieve, I cannot help believing that they will one day become the foremost maritime power of the globe. They are driven to seize the seas, as the Romans were to conquer the world.

CONCLUSION.

Here I approach the end. Until now, in speaking of the future destiny of the United States, I have tried to divide my subject into distinct parts so I could study each one more carefully.

Now I want to bring them all together into a single view. What I say will be less detailed, but more certain. I will make out each object less distinctly, but I will grasp the general facts with greater confidence. I will be like a traveler who, leaving the walls of a vast city, climbs the nearest hill. As he moves away, the people he just left disappear from view; their houses blur together; he can no longer see the public squares; he can barely trace the streets; but his eye follows the contours of the city more easily, and for the first time he grasps its shape. It seems to me that I can see, in the same way, the entire future of the English-speaking race in the New World spread out before me. The details of this immense picture remain in shadow, but my gaze takes in the whole of it, and I form a clear idea of the complete scene.

The territory now occupied or possessed by the United States of America makes up roughly one-twentieth of the earth's inhabited land.

However vast these boundaries may be, it would be wrong to think that the Anglo-American race will always stay within them — it is already spreading well beyond.

There was a time when we, too, could have created a great French nation in the American wilderness and balanced against the English for mastery of the New World. France once possessed a territory in North America nearly as vast as all of Europe. The continent's three greatest rivers flowed entirely under our sovereignty. The Indian nations living from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi delta heard no language spoken but ours; all the European settlements scattered across that immense space recalled the memory of the motherland — Louisbourg, Montmorency, Duquesne, Saint-Louis, Vincennes, New Orleans — all names dear to France and familiar to our ears.

But a combination of circumstances too numerous to list here stripped us of this magnificent heritage.

Chief among these: peoples accustomed to self-government through local township institutions succeed far more easily than others at building flourishing colonies. The habit of thinking for yourself and governing yourself is indispensable in a new country, where success necessarily depends in large part on the individual efforts of the colonists.

Wherever the French were few in number and poorly established, they disappeared. The rest clustered together in a small space and passed under other laws. The four hundred thousand French Canadians today are like the remnants of an ancient people lost amid the flood of a new nation. Around them, the foreign population grows without pause; it spreads in every direction; it penetrates even into the ranks of the old masters of the land, dominates their cities, and corrupts their language. This population is identical to that of the United States. I am therefore right to say that the English-speaking race does not stop at the borders of the Union but pushes well beyond them toward the northeast.

To the northwest, one encounters only a few insignificant Russian settlements; but to the southwest, Mexico stands in the path of the Anglo-Americans like a barrier.

So, in truth, there are now only two rival races dividing the New World between them: the Spanish and the English.

The boundaries separating these two races were fixed by treaty. But however favorable that treaty may be to the Anglo-Americans, I have no doubt they will soon violate it.

Beyond the frontiers of the Union, on the Mexican side, stretch vast provinces still lacking inhabitants. Americans from the United States will penetrate these empty lands before those who actually have the right to occupy them. They will claim the soil, establish settlements, and when the rightful owner finally shows up, he will find the wilderness cultivated and strangers calmly sitting on his inheritance.

In the New World, the land belongs to whoever gets there first, and empire is the prize of the race.

Even the already-populated regions will struggle to protect themselves from this invasion.

I have already discussed what is happening in the province of Texas. Every day, people from the United States are steadily moving into Texas; they acquire land there, and while submitting to the country's laws, they establish the dominance of their language and their customs. Texas is still under Mexican rule, but soon there will be virtually no Mexicans left there. The same thing is happening everywhere the Anglo-Americans come into contact with populations of different origin.

There is no denying that the English-speaking race has gained an immense dominance over all the other European races in the New World. It is far superior to them in civilization, industry, and power. As long as it has before it only empty or thinly inhabited lands, as long as it does not encounter densely settled populations through which it cannot cut a path, it will keep expanding. It will not stop at lines drawn in treaties but will overflow in every direction beyond these imaginary barriers.

What further marvelously facilitates this rapid expansion of the English-speaking race in the New World is its geographical position.

When you go north above its northern borders, you encounter the polar ice, and when you descend a few degrees below its southern limits, you enter the fires of the equator. The English-speaking Americans are therefore situated in the most temperate zone and the most habitable portion of the continent.

People imagine that the extraordinary population growth observed in the United States dates only from independence — this is an error. The population was growing just as fast under colonial rule as it is today; it was doubling roughly every twenty-two years. But back then we were talking about thousands of inhabitants; now we are talking about millions. The same fact that went unnoticed a century ago now strikes every mind.

The English in Canada, who obey a king, increase in number and spread almost as quickly as the English in the United States, who live under a republican government.

During the eight years of the War of Independence, the population never stopped growing at the previously indicated rate.

Although there were then great Indian nations on the western frontiers allied with the British, the movement of emigration westward practically never slowed. While the enemy was ravaging the Atlantic coast, Kentucky, the western districts of Pennsylvania, and the states of Vermont and Maine were filling up with settlers. The disorder that followed the war did not prevent the population from growing or halt its progressive march into the wilderness. Thus the different types of laws, the state of peace or the state of war, order or anarchy, have had only an imperceptible effect on the steady expansion of the Anglo-Americans.

This is easy to understand: no cause is general enough to make itself felt simultaneously across every point of such an immense territory. There is always a large portion of the country where one can find shelter from the calamities striking another part, and however great the hardships, the available remedy is always greater still.

We should not imagine, then, that it is possible to halt the momentum of the English-speaking race in the New World. The breakup of the Union, by bringing war to the continent, or the abolition of the republic, by introducing tyranny, could slow its progress — but not prevent it from reaching the necessary fulfillment of its destiny. There is no power on earth that could close off to emigrants these fertile wildernesses, open on every side to human enterprise, offering refuge to every form of suffering. Whatever future events may come, Americans will not lose their climate, their inland seas, their great rivers, or the fertility of their soil. Bad laws, revolutions, and anarchy will never destroy among them the taste for well-being and the spirit of enterprise that seems to be the distinctive character of their race, nor will they entirely extinguish the knowledge that lights their way.

So, amid all the uncertainty of the future, there is at least one event that is certain. At a time we can call near — since we are speaking here of the life of nations — the Anglo-Americans will alone cover the entire immense space between the polar ice and the tropics; they will spread from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to the beaches of the Pacific.

I believe that the territory over which the Anglo-American race will one day extend equals three-quarters of Europe.

The United States alone already cover a space equal to half of Europe. The surface area of Europe is 500,000 square leagues; its population 205 million inhabitants. (Malte-Brun, Book CXIV, vol. 6, p. 4.)

The climate of the Union is, all things considered, preferable to Europe's; its natural advantages are just as great; it is obvious that its population cannot fail one day to be proportional to ours.

Europe, divided among so many different peoples; Europe, through endlessly recurring wars and the barbarism of the Middle Ages, has managed to reach four hundred and ten inhabitants per square league.

See Malte-Brun, Book CXVI, vol. 6, p. 92.

What cause could be powerful enough to prevent the United States from reaching the same level one day?

Many centuries will pass before the various offshoots of the English-speaking race in America cease to share a common character. No one can foresee the time when permanent inequality of conditions could be established in the New World.

Whatever differences peace or war, liberty or tyranny, prosperity or misery may one day create in the destinies of the various branches of the great Anglo-American family, they will all at least maintain a similar social order, and they will share the customs and ideas that flow from that social order.

In the Middle Ages, the bond of religion alone was enough to unite the diverse races that populated Europe in a single civilization. The English-speaking peoples of the New World have a thousand other ties between them, and they live in a century when everything among humanity tends toward equality.

The Middle Ages were an era of fragmentation. Every people, every province, every city, every family tended strongly toward individuation. In our time, the opposite movement is at work: peoples seem to be marching toward unity. Intellectual ties connect the most distant parts of the earth, and people cannot remain strangers to one another for a single day, or ignorant of what is happening in any corner of the world. So today we see less difference between Europeans and their descendants in the New World, despite the ocean that divides them, than there was between certain towns in the thirteenth century separated only by a river.

If this movement of assimilation draws foreign peoples together, it stands to reason even more powerfully that the offshoots of a single people will not become strangers to one another.

A time will come, then, when one hundred and fifty million people will live in North America,

This is the population proportional to that of Europe, taking the average of 410 persons per square league.

equal to one another, all belonging to the same family, sharing the same origins, the same civilization, the same language, the same religion, the same habits, the same customs — and through whom thought will circulate in the same forms and be colored by the same hues. Everything else is uncertain, but this is sure. And here we have a fact entirely new in the world, one whose significance the imagination itself can scarcely grasp.

There are today on earth two great peoples who, starting from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Anglo-Americans.

Both grew up in obscurity; and while the eyes of humanity were occupied elsewhere, they suddenly placed themselves in the front rank of nations, and the world learned of their birth and their greatness almost at the same moment.

All other peoples seem to have nearly reached the limits nature set for them, with nothing left to do but maintain what they have; but these two are still growing. All the others have stopped or advance only with a thousand efforts; these two alone march with an easy and rapid stride down a path whose end the eye cannot yet see.

The American struggles against the obstacles that nature puts in his way; the Russian grapples with men. One fights the wilderness and barbarism; the other fights civilization armed to the teeth. And so the American's conquests are made with the farmer's plow; the Russian's with the soldier's sword.

To reach his goal, the first relies on personal interest and lets the strength and reason of individuals act freely, without directing them.

The second concentrates, in a sense, all of society's power in a single man.

One has freedom as his principal means of action; the other, servitude.

Their starting points are different; their paths are divergent. And yet each of them seems called by some secret design of Providence to hold in his hands, one day, the destinies of half the world.

PREFACE.

Americans have a democratic social order that has naturally suggested to them certain laws and certain political customs.

That same social order has also given rise among them to a multitude of feelings and opinions that were unknown in the old aristocratic societies of Europe. It has destroyed or transformed relationships that once existed, and established new ones. The face of civil society has been no less changed than the character of the political world.

I addressed the first subject in the work I published five years ago on American Democracy. The second is the subject of the present book. These two parts complete one another and form a single work.

I must immediately warn the reader against a misunderstanding that would do me great harm.

Seeing me attribute so many different effects to equality, some might conclude that I consider equality the sole cause of everything happening in our time. That would be crediting me with a very narrow view.

In our era, there are plenty of opinions, feelings, and instincts that owe their existence to facts unrelated to — or even contrary to — equality. If I took the United States as an example, I could easily show that the nature of the country, the origins of its inhabitants, the religion of its earliest founders, their acquired knowledge, their prior habits, have all exerted, and continue to exert, an immense influence on their ways of thinking and feeling — entirely independent of Democracy. Different causes, equally distinct from the fact of equality, can be found in Europe and would explain a great deal of what is happening there.

I recognize the existence of all these different causes and their power, but they are not my subject. I have not set out to explain the reason for all our inclinations and all our ideas; I have only wanted to show in what ways equality has reshaped both.

Some may find it surprising that, given my firm conviction that the democratic revolution we are witnessing is an irresistible force against which it would be neither desirable nor wise to struggle, I have often addressed such stern words to the democratic societies this revolution has created.

My answer is simple: it is precisely because I was not an enemy of Democracy that I wanted to be honest with it.

People do not accept truth from their enemies, and their friends rarely offer it to them. That is why I have spoken it.

I believed that many others would take it upon themselves to announce the new benefits that equality promises to humanity, but that few would dare to point out, from a distance, the dangers it poses. It was therefore mainly toward these dangers that I directed my attention, and having believed I saw them clearly, I was not cowardly enough to keep silent about them.

I hope that readers will find in this second work the same impartiality that people seemed to notice in the first. Placed in the midst of the contradictory opinions that divide us, I have tried to temporarily destroy in my own heart whatever favorable sympathies or hostile instincts each of them inspires in me. If those who read my book find in it a single sentence designed to flatter one of the great parties that have agitated our country, or one of the petty factions that today pester and exhaust it, let those readers raise their voices and accuse me.

The subject I have tried to embrace is immense, for it encompasses most of the feelings and ideas that the new state of the world produces. Such a subject surely exceeds my powers; in treating it, I have not managed to satisfy myself.

But if I have not been able to reach the goal I aimed for, readers will at least grant me this justice: that I conceived and pursued my enterprise in a spirit that could make me worthy of succeeding.

CHAPTER I.

The Philosophical Method of the Americans.

I believe there is no country in the civilized world where people care less about philosophy than in the United States.

The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they pay very little attention to all the schools that divide Europe. They barely even know their names.

Yet it is easy to see that nearly all the inhabitants of the United States direct their minds in the same way and follow the same rules — which is to say, they possess, without ever having bothered to define the rules, a certain philosophical method that is common to all of them.

To escape the grip of systematic thinking, the yoke of habit, family maxims, class opinions, and, to a certain extent, national prejudices; to treat tradition as nothing more than information and present facts as merely a useful study for doing things differently and better; to seek the reason for things by yourself and within yourself alone; to aim for results without being chained to methods, and to look past form to get at substance — these are the principal traits of what I will call the philosophical method of the Americans.

If I push further still and look among these various traits for the central one, the one that more or less sums up all the others, I find this: in most operations of the mind, each American relies only on the individual effort of his own reason.

America is therefore one of the countries in the world where people study Descartes the least and follow his principles the best. That should not surprise anyone.

Americans do not read the works of Descartes because their social conditions steer them away from speculative studies, and they follow his maxims because those same social conditions naturally dispose their minds to adopt them.

In the ceaseless movement that prevails within a democratic society, the bond that links generations to one another loosens or breaks; people easily lose track of the ideas of their ancestors and care little about them.

People living in such a society also cannot draw their beliefs from the opinions of the class to which they belong, because there are, so to speak, no classes anymore — and the ones that still exist are made up of such shifting elements that the group can never exercise real power over its members.

As for the influence that one person's intelligence can have over another's, it is necessarily quite limited in a country where citizens have become more or less alike, see each other up close, and, perceiving in none of their neighbors the signs of unquestionable greatness or superiority, are constantly drawn back to their own reason as the most visible and accessible source of truth. At that point, it is not just confidence in this or that particular person that is destroyed, but the very taste for taking anyone at their word.

And so each person withdraws tightly into himself and presumes to judge the world from there.

The American habit of looking only to themselves for the rules of their judgment leads their minds to other habits as well.

Because they find that they can solve all the small difficulties of practical life without help, they easily conclude that everything in the world is explicable and that nothing lies beyond the reach of human intelligence.

And so they cheerfully deny whatever they cannot understand — which gives them little faith in the extraordinary and an almost invincible distaste for the supernatural.

Because they are accustomed to relying on their own testimony, they like to see the object of their attention very clearly. They strip it, as much as they can, of its wrapping; they push aside everything that separates them from it and remove everything that hides it from view, so they can see it up close and in full daylight. This disposition of mind soon leads them to scorn forms, which they regard as useless and cumbersome veils placed between them and the truth.

The Americans, then, did not need to draw their philosophical method from books — they found it in themselves. And I would say the same of what happened in Europe.

This same method only established itself and became widespread in Europe as social conditions there became more equal and people became more alike.

Let us consider the sequence of history:

In the sixteenth century, the Reformers submitted some of the dogmas of the old faith to individual reason, but they continued to shield all the others from scrutiny. In the seventeenth century, Bacon, in the natural sciences, and Descartes, in philosophy proper, abolished accepted formulas, destroyed the empire of tradition, and overthrew the authority of the master.

The philosophers of the eighteenth century, finally generalizing the same principle, undertook to submit the object of all human beliefs to the individual examination of each person.

Who cannot see that Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire all used the same method, and that they differed only in how far they claimed it should be applied?

Why did the Reformers confine themselves so strictly to the sphere of religious ideas? Why did Descartes, who chose to employ his method only in certain matters — even though he had made it fit for all — declare that one should judge for oneself only in philosophy, not in politics? How did it happen that in the eighteenth century, suddenly, general applications were drawn from this same method that Descartes and his predecessors had either not seen or had refused to discover? And why, finally, did this method suddenly leave the schools at that moment to penetrate society and become the common rule of thought — and, after becoming popular among the French, was it openly adopted or secretly followed by every nation in Europe?

The philosophical method in question could be born in the sixteenth century, refined and generalized in the seventeenth, but it could not be commonly adopted in either. The political laws, the social conditions, the habits of mind that flow from these primary causes all stood in the way.

It was discovered at a time when people were beginning to grow equal and alike. It could only be widely followed in eras when conditions had finally become roughly equal and people nearly the same.

The philosophical method of the eighteenth century is therefore not merely French but democratic — which explains why it was so easily accepted throughout Europe, to which it contributed so greatly in changing the face. It was not because the French changed their old beliefs and modified their old customs that they turned the world upside down; it was because they were the first to generalize and bring to light a philosophical method with which one could easily attack everything old and open the way for everything new.

Now, if someone asks me why, in our own time, this same method is more rigorously followed and more frequently applied among the French than among the Americans — even though equality is equally complete and of longer standing among the latter — I would answer that this is partly due to two circumstances that must first be clearly understood.

It was religion that gave birth to the Anglo-American societies — that must never be forgotten. In the United States, then, religion is intertwined with all the habits of national life and all the feelings that patriotism inspires; this gives it a particular strength.

To this powerful reason, add another equally strong one: In America, religion has, so to speak, set its own limits. The religious order has remained entirely distinct from the political order, so that it has been easy to change old laws without shaking old beliefs.

Christianity has therefore maintained a great hold on the minds of Americans, and — what I especially want to emphasize — it reigns not merely as a philosophy adopted after examination, but as a religion believed without discussion.

In the United States, Christian denominations vary endlessly and are constantly changing, but Christianity itself is an established and irresistible fact that no one attempts to attack or defend.

Because the Americans have accepted the principal dogmas of the Christian religion without examination, they are obliged to receive in the same way a great number of moral truths that flow from and are connected to them. This confines the scope of individual analysis within narrow limits, and removes from its reach several of humanity's most important beliefs.

The other circumstance I mentioned is this:

The Americans have a democratic social order and a democratic constitution, but they have not had a democratic revolution. They arrived more or less as we see them now on the soil they occupy. That is enormously significant.

Every revolution shakes old beliefs, weakens authority, and clouds shared ideas. Every revolution therefore has the effect, to some degree, of leaving people to their own devices and opening before each person's mind a vast and nearly boundless empty space.

When conditions become equal after a prolonged struggle between the different classes of the old society, envy, hatred, contempt for one's neighbor, and an exaggerated pride and self-confidence invade the human heart and, for a time, take it over. This, quite apart from equality itself, does much to divide people, to make them distrust each other's judgment, and to make them look for light only within themselves.

Everyone then tries to be self-sufficient and takes pride in forming beliefs entirely their own. People are linked only by interests, not by ideas, and it seems as though human opinions have become nothing more than a kind of intellectual dust, swirling in every direction, unable to settle or cohere.

Thus the independence of mind that equality implies is never so great, never appears so excessive, as at the very moment when equality is first being established and during the painful labor that founds it. One must therefore carefully distinguish between the kind of intellectual freedom that equality can produce and the anarchy that revolution brings. Each of these two things must be considered separately, so that we do not form exaggerated hopes or fears about the future.

I believe that people living in the new societies will often make use of their individual reason; but I am far from believing they will often abuse it.

This is due to a cause that applies more generally to all democratic countries and that, over time, must hold the individual independence of thought within fixed and sometimes narrow limits.

I will explain in the chapter that follows.

CHAPTER II.

The Main Source of Beliefs Among Democratic Peoples.

Dogmatic beliefs are more or less numerous depending on the era. They arise in different ways and can change in form and subject, but you cannot make it so that dogmatic beliefs do not exist — that is, opinions that people accept on faith without questioning them. If every individual undertook to form all his opinions by himself and to pursue truth in isolation, along paths he alone had forged, it is unlikely that a large number of people would ever come together around any common belief.

Now, it is easy to see that no society can prosper without shared beliefs — or rather, that none can survive this way. For without shared ideas there is no shared action, and without shared action there are still human beings, but no social body. For society to exist, and still more for it to thrive, the minds of all citizens must be gathered and held together by certain central ideas; and this cannot happen unless each person sometimes draws his opinions from a common source and agrees to accept a certain number of ready-made beliefs.

If I now consider the individual in isolation, I find that dogmatic beliefs are no less indispensable for living alone than for acting together with one's fellows.

If a person were forced to prove to himself every truth he uses each day, he would never finish. He would exhaust himself in preliminary demonstrations without making any progress. Since he lacks the time — given the brevity of life — and the capacity — given the limits of his mind — to do this, he is reduced to taking as proven a great many facts and opinions that he has had neither the leisure nor the ability to examine and verify for himself, but that more capable minds have discovered or that the crowd has adopted. It is on this first foundation that he builds the edifice of his own thoughts. It is not his will that leads him to proceed this way; the inflexible law of his condition compels it.

There is no philosopher in the world, however great, who does not believe a million things on the faith of others and who does not assume far more truths than he establishes.

This is not only necessary but desirable. A person who undertook to examine everything by himself could devote only a little time and attention to each thing; this effort would keep his mind in a perpetual agitation that would prevent him from penetrating deeply into any truth or anchoring himself firmly in any certainty. His intellect would be at once independent and feeble. He must therefore choose among the various subjects of human opinion, adopting many beliefs without questioning them so that he can examine more deeply the small number he has reserved for investigation.

It is true that anyone who accepts an opinion on someone else's word puts his mind in a kind of bondage; but it is a beneficial servitude that allows him to make good use of his freedom.

So no matter what happens, authority must exist somewhere in the intellectual and moral world. Its location may vary, but it must necessarily have a location. Individual independence may be more or less extensive, but it cannot be boundless. The question, then, is not whether intellectual authority exists in democratic ages, but simply where it is lodged and how far it extends.

I showed in the previous chapter how equality of social conditions gives people a kind of instinctive skepticism toward the supernatural and a very high — often exaggerated — opinion of human reason.

People living in these times of equality are therefore not easily led to place the intellectual authority to which they submit outside of and above humanity. It is in themselves or in their fellow men that they ordinarily seek the sources of truth. This alone would be enough to prove that no new religion could establish itself in such times, and that any attempt to create one would be not only impious but ridiculous and unreasonable. It is safe to predict that democratic peoples will not easily believe in divine missions, that they will happily mock new prophets, and that they will want to find the ultimate arbiter of their beliefs within the limits of humanity, not beyond it.

When conditions are unequal and people are dissimilar, there exist a few individuals who are very enlightened, very learned, and very powerful in intellect, alongside a multitude that is very ignorant and quite limited. People living in aristocratic times are therefore naturally inclined to take the superior reason of one person or one class as the guide for their opinions, while they are little disposed to recognize the infallibility of the masses.

The opposite happens in ages of equality.

As citizens become more equal and more alike, the tendency to blindly trust a particular person or class diminishes. The inclination to trust the masses grows, and it is more and more public opinion that leads the world.

Not only is collective opinion the sole guide that remains for individual reason among democratic peoples, but it holds infinitely more power among these peoples than among any others. In times of equality, people have no faith in one another, because of their very similarity; but that same similarity gives them an almost unlimited confidence in the judgment of the public, since it seems implausible to them that, all having roughly equal knowledge, the truth would not be found on the side of the greater number.

When a person living in a democratic country compares himself individually to everyone around him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of each of them. But when he comes to contemplate the whole body of his fellows and places himself alongside that great mass, he is instantly overwhelmed by his own insignificance and weakness.

This same equality that makes him independent of each of his fellow citizens in particular delivers him, isolated and defenseless, to the influence of the greater number.

In democratic nations, the public therefore has a singular power that aristocratic nations could not even conceive of. It does not persuade people of its beliefs — it imposes them, driving them into people's minds through a kind of immense pressure of everyone's thought on each individual's intelligence.

In the United States, the majority takes it upon itself to supply individuals with a host of ready-made opinions, relieving them of the obligation to form their own. There are a great many theories in philosophy, morality, and politics that everyone there adopts without examination, on the faith of the public; and if you look very closely, you will see that religion itself reigns there far less as revealed doctrine than as common opinion.

I know that among the Americans, the political laws are such that the majority governs society with sovereign power, which greatly increases the hold it naturally exercises over people's minds. For there is nothing more familiar to human beings than recognizing superior wisdom in the person who oppresses them.

This political omnipotence of the majority in the United States does amplify the influence that public opinion would obtain over each citizen's mind even without it, but it does not create that influence. The sources of this influence must be sought in equality itself, not in the more or less popular institutions that equal people may give themselves. It is likely that the intellectual empire of the majority would be less absolute among a democratic people subject to a king than in a pure democracy; but it will always be very nearly absolute, and whatever political laws may govern people in ages of equality, one can predict that faith in public opinion will become a kind of religion, with the majority as its prophet.

So intellectual authority will be different, but it will not be smaller. And far from believing it will disappear, I foresee that it could easily grow too great, and that it might ultimately confine individual reason within limits narrower than is good for the greatness and happiness of the human race. I see very clearly in equality two tendencies: one that leads every person's mind toward new thoughts, and another that would gladly reduce him to not thinking at all. And I can see how, under certain laws, democracy could extinguish the very intellectual freedom that democratic social conditions promote — so that, after breaking all the chains once imposed by classes or individuals, the human mind would bind itself tightly to the general will of the majority.

If democratic peoples merely substituted the absolute power of a majority for all the various forces that once hindered and excessively restrained the development of individual reason, the evil would only have changed its character. People would not have found the means to live independently; they would merely have discovered — no easy feat — a new face for servitude. There is in this, and I cannot say it often enough, something to make those who see intellectual freedom as sacred and who hate not just the despot but despotism itself think very deeply. For my part, when I feel the hand of power pressing down on my brow, it matters little to me who my oppressor is, and I am no more inclined to put my head in the yoke just because a million arms are holding it out to me.

CHAPTER III.

Why Americans Show More Aptitude and Taste for General Ideas Than Their English Forebears.

God does not think about the human race in general terms. He sees at a single glance, and separately, every being that makes up humanity, and He perceives in each one both the similarities that connect him to all the others and the differences that set him apart.

God, then, has no need for general ideas — that is, He never feels the need to group a very large number of similar objects under a single heading in order to think about them more conveniently.

This is not the case with human beings. If the human mind tried to examine and judge individually every particular case that strikes it, it would soon be lost in the immensity of detail and see nothing at all. In this extremity, it resorts to an imperfect but necessary method — one that both aids its weakness and proves it.

After considering a certain number of objects superficially and noticing that they resemble one another, it gives them all the same name, sets them aside, and moves on.

General ideas do not testify to the strength of the human intellect, but rather to its insufficiency. For there are no beings in nature that are exactly alike, no identical facts, no rules that can be applied indiscriminately and in the same way to several things at once.

What is admirable about general ideas is that they allow the human mind to make rapid judgments about a great number of objects at once; but on the other hand, they never provide anything more than incomplete notions, and what they give in breadth they always cost in precision.

As societies age, they acquire knowledge of new facts and almost unknowingly seize upon particular truths each day.

As people grasp more truths of this kind, they are naturally led to conceive a greater number of general ideas. You cannot observe a multitude of particular facts separately without eventually discovering the common thread that links them. Observing several individuals leads to the notion of the species; several species lead inevitably to that of the genus. The habit and taste for general ideas will therefore always be stronger in a people whose knowledge is older and more extensive.

But there are still other reasons that push people toward generalizing their ideas — or pull them away from it.

Americans make far more frequent use of general ideas than the English and take far greater pleasure in them. This seems very strange at first glance, given that the two peoples share a common origin, lived for centuries under the same laws, and still constantly exchange opinions and customs. The contrast appears even more striking when you turn your attention to Europe and compare the two most enlightened peoples that inhabit it.

Among the English, the human mind seems to tear itself away only with regret and pain from the contemplation of particular facts in order to trace things back to their causes, and it generalizes only in spite of itself.

Among us French, by contrast, the taste for general ideas seems to have become such an unbridled passion that it must be satisfied at every turn. Each morning when I wake up, I learn that some new general and eternal law has just been discovered — one I had never heard of before. There is no writer so mediocre that, for his first attempt, it suffices to discover truths applicable to a great kingdom. He remains dissatisfied with himself unless he has managed to fit all of humanity into the scope of his argument.

Such a dissimilarity between two very enlightened peoples astonishes me. If I turn my mind at last to England and observe what has been happening there over the past half-century, I believe I can say that the taste for general ideas has been growing there precisely as the country's old constitution has been weakening.

The more or less advanced state of knowledge alone, then, is not enough to explain what draws the human mind toward general ideas or turns it away from them.

When conditions are very unequal and inequalities are permanent, individuals gradually become so dissimilar that it is as though there were as many distinct humanities as there are classes. You never see more than one of them at a time, and, losing sight of the general link that gathers them all within the vast bosom of the human race, you never see humanity as a whole — only certain men.

People living in these aristocratic societies therefore never form very general ideas about themselves, and that is enough to give them a habitual distrust and instinctive distaste for such ideas.

The person living in a democratic country, by contrast, sees around him only beings who are more or less the same. He cannot think about any part of the human species without his thought expanding and broadening until it embraces the whole. Every truth that applies to him seems to apply equally and in the same way to each of his fellow citizens and fellow human beings. Having acquired the habit of general ideas in the study that concerns him most and interests him most deeply, he carries this same habit into everything else. And so the need to find common rules in all things, to group a great number of objects under a single heading, and to explain an entire set of facts by a single cause becomes an ardent and often blind passion of the human mind.

Nothing illustrates the truth of this better than antiquity's views on slavery.

The most profound and far-reaching minds of Rome and Greece never managed to arrive at that most general yet simplest of ideas — the similarity of all human beings and the equal right each of them brings, at birth, to freedom. They exerted themselves to prove that slavery was rooted in nature and would exist forever. What is more, everything suggests that those among the ancients who had been slaves before becoming free, several of whom left us fine writings, saw servitude in exactly the same light.

All the great writers of antiquity belonged to the aristocracy of masters, or at least they saw that aristocracy established beyond dispute before their eyes. Their minds, having expanded in many directions, found themselves blocked in this one, and it took the coming of Jesus Christ to make people understand that all members of the human species were naturally alike and equal.

In ages of equality, all people are independent of one another, isolated and weak; you cannot find anyone whose will permanently directs the movements of the crowd. In such times, humanity seems to march by itself. To explain what is happening in the world, you are therefore reduced to searching for a few great causes that, acting in the same way on each of our fellow beings, lead them all to voluntarily follow the same path. This too naturally leads the human mind to conceive general ideas and to develop a taste for them.

I showed earlier how equality of conditions leads everyone to seek truth on their own. It is easy to see how such a method must gradually push the human mind toward general ideas. When I reject the traditions of class, profession, and family and escape the influence of example in order to seek, by the sole effort of my own reason, the path to follow, I am inclined to draw the motives for my opinions from the very nature of man — which leads me necessarily, and almost without my knowing it, toward a great many very general ideas.

All of the foregoing helps explain why the English show much less aptitude and taste for generalizing ideas than their sons the Americans, and especially than their neighbors the French — and why the English of our day show more of it than their forebears did.

The English were long a very enlightened and at the same time very aristocratic people. Their knowledge kept pushing them toward very general ideas, while their aristocratic habits held them back in very particular ones. From this arose a philosophy at once bold and timid, broad and narrow, which has dominated England to this day and still holds so many minds there in its constricted and immobile grip.

Beyond the causes I have pointed out above, there are others, less visible but no less powerful, that produce in nearly all democratic peoples the taste — and often the passion — for general ideas.

One must carefully distinguish between different kinds of general ideas. Some are the product of slow, careful, painstaking intellectual work, and these enlarge the sphere of human knowledge.

Others arise easily from an initial quick effort of the mind and produce only very superficial and very uncertain conclusions.

People who live in ages of equality have a great deal of curiosity and very little leisure. Their lives are so practical, so complicated, so agitated, so active, that they have little time left for thinking. People in democratic ages love general ideas because they spare them from studying particular cases — they contain, if I may put it this way, a great deal in a small package and yield a big return in a short time. So when, after a brief and inattentive examination, they think they spot a common relationship between certain things, they do not push their inquiry further. Without examining in detail how these various objects resemble or differ from each other, they rush to group them all under the same formula so they can move on.

One of the distinguishing traits of democratic ages is the taste all people have for easy successes and immediate pleasures. This shows up in intellectual pursuits as much as in everything else. Most people living in times of equality are full of an ambition that is at once intense and soft: they want great success immediately, but they would prefer not to make great efforts. These conflicting instincts lead them directly to the pursuit of general ideas, with the help of which they flatter themselves they can paint very large subjects at little cost and attract public attention without much work.

And I am not sure they are wrong to think this way, for their readers are just as afraid of going deep as they are, and ordinarily look for nothing in works of the mind but easy pleasures and learning without effort.

If aristocratic nations do not make enough use of general ideas and often show them an ill-considered contempt, democratic peoples, by contrast, are always ready to abuse these kinds of ideas and to get carried away by them without discretion.

CHAPTER IV.

Why Americans Have Never Been as Passionate as the French About General Ideas in Politics.

I said earlier that Americans show less enthusiasm than the French for general ideas. This is especially true of general ideas about politics.

Although Americans introduce infinitely more general ideas into legislation than the English, and are far more concerned than the English with adjusting the practice of human affairs to theory, no political body in the United States has ever been as infatuated with general ideas as our Constituent Assembly and our Convention were. The American nation as a whole has never been seized with the same passion for these kinds of ideas that gripped the French people of the eighteenth century, nor has it ever shown such blind faith in the absolute goodness and truth of any theory.

The difference between the Americans and us springs from several causes, but principally from this one:

The Americans are a democratic people who have always managed their own public affairs. We are a democratic people who, for a long time, could only dream about the best way to run them.

Our social conditions were already pushing us to conceive very general ideas about government, even as our political constitution still prevented us from testing these ideas through experience and gradually discovering their shortcomings — whereas among the Americans, these two things constantly balance and naturally correct each other.

At first glance, this seems to flatly contradict what I said earlier about democratic nations drawing their love of theory from the very busyness of their practical lives. A closer look reveals no contradiction at all.

People living in democratic countries are very eager for general ideas because they have little leisure and these ideas save them from wasting time examining particular cases. This is true, but it should be understood to apply only to matters that are not the habitual and necessary objects of their thought. Businesspeople will eagerly and uncritically seize upon any general ideas presented to them about philosophy, politics, science, and the arts — but they will accept ideas relating to their own trade only after examination and only with reservations.

The same applies to statesmen when it comes to general ideas about politics.

So whenever there is a subject on which it is particularly dangerous for democratic peoples to give themselves over blindly and excessively to general ideas, the best corrective one can apply is to make them deal with that subject every day in a practical way. They will then be forced into the details, and the details will show them the weak points of the theory.

The remedy is often painful, but its effect is sure.

This is how democratic institutions, by forcing every citizen to engage practically with government, temper the excessive taste for general political theories that equality inspires.

CHAPTER V.

How Religion in the United States Makes Use of Democratic Instincts.

I established in an earlier chapter that people cannot do without dogmatic beliefs, and that it is even highly desirable that they have them. I will add here that, among all dogmatic beliefs, the most desirable to my mind are dogmatic beliefs about religion — and this follows quite clearly, even if you are only thinking about the interests of this world.

There is virtually no human action, however particular you might suppose it, that does not spring from some very general idea that people have formed about God, His relationship with the human race, the nature of their souls, and their duties toward their fellow beings. Nothing can prevent these ideas from being the common source from which everything else flows.

People therefore have an immense interest in forming settled ideas about God, their souls, and their general duties toward their Creator and fellow human beings — because doubt on these fundamental questions would leave all their actions at the mercy of chance and condemn them, in a sense, to disorder and impotence.

This, then, is the subject on which it matters most that each of us have settled ideas — and unfortunately, it is also the one where it is hardest for each person, left to himself and relying solely on his own reason, to arrive at them.

Only minds very free from the ordinary preoccupations of life — very penetrating, very nimble, very practiced — can, with a great deal of time and care, work their way to these essential truths.

And even then, we see that these philosophers are almost always surrounded by uncertainty; that at every step, the natural light that guides them grows dim and threatens to go out; and that, despite all their efforts, they have only managed to discover a small number of contradictory ideas among which the human mind has been drifting for thousands of years, unable either to seize the truth firmly or even to find new errors. Such studies are far beyond the average person's capacity, and even if most people were capable of undertaking them, it is clear they would not have the time.

Settled ideas about God and human nature are indispensable for the daily conduct of life, and it is the daily conduct of life that prevents people from acquiring them.

This seems unique to me. Among the sciences, there are some that, being useful to the masses, are within their reach. Others are accessible only to the few and are not cultivated by the majority, who need only their most remote applications. But the daily practice of this one is indispensable to everyone, even though its study is inaccessible to most.

General ideas about God and human nature are therefore, of all ideas, the ones it is most appropriate to shield from the habitual activity of individual reason — and the ones where there is the most to gain and the least to lose from recognizing an authority.

The first purpose, and one of the principal advantages, of religion is to provide a clear, precise, widely intelligible, and enduring answer to each of these fundamental questions.

There are religions that are very false and very absurd. Still, one can say that any religion that stays within the circle I have just described — that does not try to go beyond it, as several have attempted, trying to block the free movement of the human mind in every direction — imposes a beneficial yoke on the intellect. And one must acknowledge that, even if it does not save people in the next world, it is at least very useful for their happiness and their greatness in this one.

This is especially true of people living in free countries.

When religion is destroyed among a people, doubt seizes the highest regions of the intellect and half-paralyzes all the rest. Everyone grows accustomed to having only confused and shifting ideas on the subjects that matter most to themselves and their fellow beings. People defend their opinions badly, or abandon them; and, despairing of being able to resolve on their own the greatest problems that human destiny presents, they give up thinking about them altogether, like cowards.

Such a condition cannot fail to drain the soul. It slackens the springs of the will and prepares citizens for servitude.

Not only do people then let their freedom be taken — they often hand it over themselves.

When authority no longer exists in matters of religion, any more than in politics, people are soon alarmed by the sight of this limitless independence. The constant agitation of all things makes them restless and exhausted. Since everything is in motion in the realm of ideas, they want at least for everything to be firm and stable in the material realm — and, unable to reclaim their old beliefs, they give themselves a master.

For my part, I doubt that human beings can ever simultaneously endure complete religious independence and full political liberty. And I am inclined to think that if they have no faith, they must serve; and if they are free, they must believe.

I do not know, however, whether this great usefulness of religion is not even more apparent among peoples whose conditions are equal than among all others.

One must admit that equality, while introducing great goods into the world, also suggests to people, as will be shown further on, some very dangerous instincts. It tends to isolate them from one another, leading each person to concern himself only with himself.

It opens their souls immoderately to the love of material pleasures.

The greatest advantage of religion is to inspire instincts that are the exact opposite. There is no religion that does not place the object of human desires above and beyond earthly goods, and that does not naturally lift the soul toward regions far superior to those of the senses. And there is none that does not impose on each person certain duties toward the human race, or in common with it, thus pulling him from time to time out of the contemplation of himself. This is true even of the most false and dangerous religions.

Religious peoples are therefore naturally strong precisely where democratic peoples are weak — which makes it clear how important it is that people keep their religion as they become equal.

I have neither the right nor the desire to examine the supernatural means by which God brings religious belief into the human heart. I am looking at religions right now from a purely human point of view. I am trying to determine how they can most easily maintain their hold in the democratic centuries we are entering.

I showed earlier how, in times of knowledge and equality, the human mind consents only reluctantly to accept dogmatic beliefs and feels a keen need for them only in matters of religion. This tells us, first, that in these times, religions must keep themselves more discreetly within their proper boundaries than at any other time, and must not try to go beyond them. For by seeking to extend their power beyond religious matters, they risk not being believed in any matter at all. They must therefore carefully draw the circle within which they claim to confine the human mind, and beyond it leave it entirely free and on its own.

Muhammad brought down from heaven and placed in the Quran not only religious doctrines but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, by contrast, speak only of the general relationships between human beings and God, and among one another. Beyond that, they teach nothing and require belief in nothing. That alone, among a thousand other reasons, is enough to show that the first of these two religions cannot long dominate in times of knowledge and democracy, while the second is destined to reign in these centuries as in all others.

If I pursue this same inquiry further, I find that in order for religions to maintain themselves — humanly speaking — in democratic times, it is not enough for them to stay carefully within the sphere of religious matters. Their power also depends greatly on the nature of the beliefs they profess, the external forms they adopt, and the obligations they impose.

What I said earlier about equality leading people toward very general and very broad ideas applies above all to religion. Similar and equal people readily grasp the idea of a single God, imposing the same rules on each of them and granting future happiness at the same price. The idea of the unity of the human race constantly leads them back to the idea of the unity of the Creator — whereas people who are very separate from one another and very dissimilar are inclined to make as many gods as there are peoples, castes, classes, and families, and to trace a thousand particular paths to heaven.

One cannot deny that Christianity itself has, to some degree, been affected by the influence that social and political conditions exert on religious beliefs.

When the Christian religion appeared on earth, Providence — which was no doubt preparing the world for its coming — had gathered a large part of the human race, like an immense flock, under the scepter of the Caesars. The people who made up this multitude differed greatly from one another, but they had this in common: they all obeyed the same laws; and each was so feeble and so small compared to the greatness of the prince that they all appeared equal when you compared them to him.

One must recognize that this new and particular condition of humanity must have disposed people to receive the general truths that Christianity teaches, and helps to explain the easy and rapid way in which it penetrated the human mind at that time.

The reverse experiment came after the fall of the empire.

When the Roman world shattered, so to speak, into a thousand fragments, each nation reverted to its original separateness. Soon, within these same nations, ranks multiplied endlessly; races became marked; castes divided each nation into several peoples. Amid this common effort that seemed to push human societies to subdivide themselves into as many fragments as conceivable, Christianity did not lose sight of the principal general ideas it had brought to light. But it did seem to lend itself, as much as it could, to the new tendencies that the splintering of the human race was producing. People continued to worship a single God, creator and sustainer of all things; but each people, each city, and, so to speak, each individual believed he could obtain some special privilege and create particular protectors for himself before the sovereign master. Unable to divide the Divinity, people at least multiplied and excessively magnified its agents. The homage owed to angels and saints became, for most Christians, a nearly idolatrous worship, and there was reason to fear for a moment that the Christian religion might slide back toward the religions it had conquered.

It seems evident to me that the more the barriers separating nations within humanity and citizens within each nation tend to disappear, the more the human mind moves, as if of its own accord, toward the idea of a single, all-powerful being dispensing the same laws equally and in the same manner to every person. It is therefore particularly in these democratic centuries that it matters not to let the homage paid to secondary agents be confused with the worship due only to the Creator.

Another truth seems very clear to me: religions should burden themselves less with external practices in democratic times than in all others.

I showed, in discussing the philosophical method of the Americans, that nothing offends the human mind more in times of equality than the idea of submitting to forms. People living in these times have little patience for ritual; symbols strike them as childish devices used to veil or dress up truths that it would be more natural to show them naked and in broad daylight. They remain cold at the sight of ceremonies and are naturally inclined to attach only secondary importance to the details of worship.

Those charged with regulating the external forms of religion in democratic centuries must pay close attention to these natural instincts of the human mind, so as not to struggle unnecessarily against them.

I firmly believe in the necessity of forms. I know that they fix the human mind in the contemplation of abstract truths and, by helping it grasp them firmly, make it embrace them with passion. I do not think it is possible to maintain a religion without external practices. But on the other hand, I believe that in the centuries we are entering, it would be particularly dangerous to multiply them excessively; that they should rather be restricted; and that only what is absolutely necessary for the perpetuation of dogma itself — which is the substance of religion — should be retained.

In all religions there are ceremonies that are inherent in the very substance of belief and that must not be tampered with. This is especially apparent in Catholicism, where form and substance are often so closely united that they become one.

A religion that became more minute, more rigid, and more loaded with petty observances at the very time when people were becoming more equal would soon find itself reduced to a troop of passionate zealots in the midst of an unbelieving multitude.

I know I will be told that religions, since they all deal with general and eternal truths, cannot bend to the shifting instincts of each age without losing, in people's eyes, the character of certainty. To this I would respond again that one must very carefully distinguish between the core doctrines that constitute a belief and that theologians call articles of faith, and the secondary ideas attached to them. Religions are obliged to hold firm on the former, whatever the particular spirit of the time may be; but they should be careful not to bind themselves in the same way to the latter, in centuries when everything is constantly changing and the mind, accustomed to the shifting spectacle of human affairs, suffers when forced to stand still. Rigidity in external and secondary matters seems to me a chance for durability only when civil society itself is immobile; everywhere else, I am inclined to think it is a danger.

We shall see that among all the passions that equality produces or encourages, there is one that it makes particularly intense and that it plants in every human heart: the love of material comfort. The taste for material comfort is, as it were, the defining and indelible feature of democratic ages.

One can safely say that a religion that tried to destroy this master-passion would in the end be destroyed by it. If it attempted to tear people entirely away from the contemplation of this world's goods to devote them exclusively to thoughts of the next, their souls would eventually slip from its grasp and go plunge, far from it, into nothing but material and present pleasures.

The main business of religion is to purify, regulate, and restrain the overly ardent and overly exclusive taste for material comfort that people feel in times of equality; but I believe religions would be wrong to try to conquer it entirely and destroy it. They will never succeed in turning people away from the love of wealth; but they may still persuade them to grow rich only by honest means.

This leads me to a final consideration that, in a sense, encompasses all the others. As people become more alike and more equal, it becomes ever more important for religions to carefully hold themselves apart from the daily movement of affairs and not to clash unnecessarily with the ideas generally accepted and the permanent interests that prevail among the masses. For common opinion appears more and more as the primary and most irresistible of all powers, and there is no force outside it strong enough to resist its blows for long. This is no less true of a democratic people under a despot than of a republic. In ages of equality, kings may often compel obedience, but it is always the majority that shapes belief. It is therefore the majority that must be accommodated in everything that does not go against the faith.

I showed in my first book how American priests keep their distance from public affairs. This is the most striking example, but not the only one, of their restraint. In America, religion is a world apart where the priest rules — but one he is careful never to leave. Within its boundaries, he guides the mind; outside them, he leaves people to themselves, to the independence and instability that are natural to them and to the times. I have never seen a country where Christianity wrapped itself in fewer forms, practices, and rituals than in the United States, or where it presented clearer, simpler, and more general ideas to the human mind. Although American Christians are divided into a multitude of denominations, they all see their religion in this same light. This applies to Catholicism just as much as to the other faiths. There are no Catholic priests in the world who show less taste for petty individual observances, for extraordinary and particular methods of earning salvation, or who hold more closely to the spirit of the law and less to its letter, than the Catholic priests of the United States. Nowhere is the Church's doctrine that forbids rendering to saints the worship reserved for God alone taught more clearly or followed more faithfully. And yet American Catholics are very devout and very sincere.

Another observation applies to the clergy of every denomination: American priests do not try to seize and fix all of a person's attention on the life to come. They willingly surrender a portion of his heart to the cares of the present. They seem to regard this world's goods as important, if secondary, objects. If they do not join in industry themselves, they are at least interested in its progress and applaud it. And while constantly showing the faithful that the next world is the great object of their hopes and fears, they do not forbid him from honestly pursuing comfort in this one. Far from showing how these two things are separate and opposed, they work instead to find the point where they connect.

All American priests know the intellectual hold that the majority exercises, and they respect it. They wage only necessary battles against it. They do not get involved in party disputes, but they readily adopt the general opinions of their country and time, and they let themselves drift without resistance in the current of feelings and ideas that carries everything around them. They try to correct their contemporaries, but they do not cut themselves off from them. Public opinion is therefore never their enemy; it supports and protects them, and their beliefs reign at once through their own power and through the power of the majority, which they borrow.

It is in this way — by respecting all the democratic instincts that are not hostile to it and drawing on several of them — that religion succeeds in fighting effectively against the spirit of individual independence, which is the most dangerous of all its enemies.

CHAPTER VI.

The Progress of Catholicism in the United States.

America is the most democratic country on earth, and it is at the same time the country where, by reliable accounts, the Catholic religion is making the most progress. That is surprising at first glance.

Two things must be carefully distinguished here: equality disposes people to want to judge for themselves; but on the other hand, it gives them a taste for — and the idea of — a single, simple, and uniform social power. People living in democratic ages are therefore strongly inclined to shake off all religious authority. But if they do consent to submit to any such authority, they want it at least to be one and unified. Religious powers that do not all lead back to a single center naturally offend their intelligence, and they find it almost as easy to conceive of no religion at all as of several.

In our time, more than in previous eras, we see Catholics becoming unbelievers and Protestants becoming Catholics. If you look at Catholicism from the inside, it seems to be losing ground; if you look at it from the outside, it is gaining. This makes sense.

People today are not naturally inclined to believe; but as soon as they have a religion, they encounter within themselves a hidden instinct that pushes them, without their knowing it, toward Catholicism. Several of the doctrines and practices of the Roman church astonish them, but they feel a secret admiration for its governance, and its great unity attracts them.

If Catholicism could finally manage to disentangle itself from the political hatreds it has generated, I have little doubt that the very spirit of the age — which seems so hostile to it — would actually become very favorable to it, and that it would suddenly make great conquests.

One of the most familiar weaknesses of the human intellect is the desire to reconcile contradictory principles and to buy peace at the expense of logic. So there have always been, and always will be, people who, having submitted some of their religious beliefs to an authority, will want to exempt several others from it, letting their minds float at random between obedience and freedom. But I am inclined to think that the number of such people will be smaller in democratic ages than in others, and that our descendants will increasingly tend to divide into only two camps: those leaving Christianity entirely and those entering the Roman church.

CHAPTER VII.

What Inclines the Minds of Democratic Peoples Toward Pantheism.

I will show later how the dominant taste of democratic peoples for very general ideas shows up in politics. But I want to point out right now its principal effect in philosophy.

It cannot be denied that pantheism has made great strides in our time. The writings of a large part of Europe visibly bear its mark. The Germans are introducing it into philosophy and the French into literature. Among the works of imagination published in France, most contain some opinions or some depictions borrowed from pantheistic doctrines, or reveal in their authors a kind of tendency toward those doctrines. This does not seem to me to come merely from an accident, but from a lasting cause.

As conditions become more equal and each person in particular becomes more like everyone else — weaker and smaller — people grow accustomed to no longer seeing individual citizens but only the people as a whole. They forget individuals to think only about the species.

In these times, the human mind loves to embrace a great many different objects at once; it aspires constantly to be able to trace a multitude of consequences back to a single cause.

The idea of unity obsesses it. It searches for unity everywhere, and when it thinks it has found it, it gladly settles into that idea and rests there. Not only does it come to see in the world nothing but one creation and one creator — even this first division of things still bothers it, and it willingly seeks to expand and simplify its thought by enclosing God and the universe within a single whole. If I encounter a philosophical system according to which all the material and immaterial things in the world, visible and invisible, are no longer regarded as anything but the various parts of one immense being who alone remains eternal amid the continual change and ceaseless transformation of everything that makes it up, I will have no trouble concluding that such a system — though it destroys human individuality, or rather precisely because it destroys it — will hold secret charms for people living in democracies. All their intellectual habits prepare them to conceive it and put them on the path to adopting it. It naturally attracts their imagination and holds it there; it feeds the pride of their minds and flatters their laziness.

Among the various systems by which philosophy attempts to explain the universe, pantheism seems to me one of the most likely to seduce the human mind in democratic ages. All those who remain devoted to the true greatness of man should unite and fight against it.

CHAPTER VIII.

How Equality Suggests to Americans the Idea of the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man.

Equality suggests to the human mind several ideas that would never have occurred to it otherwise, and it modifies nearly all the ideas it already had. I take as my example the idea of human perfectibility, because it is one of the most important ideas the mind can conceive and because it constitutes, all by itself, a grand philosophical theory whose consequences show up constantly in the practical conduct of affairs.

Although human beings resemble animals in several respects, one trait belongs to them alone: they improve themselves, and animals do not. The human species could not have failed to notice this difference from the very beginning. The idea of perfectibility is therefore as old as the world. Equality did not create it, but it gives it a new character.

When citizens are ranked by birth, profession, and social position, and when all are forced to follow the path on which chance has placed them, each person believes he can see the outer limits of human power close at hand, and no one tries to fight against an inevitable destiny. It is not that aristocratic peoples absolutely deny humanity the capacity for self-improvement; they simply do not judge it to be indefinite. They conceive of improvement, not transformation. They imagine the condition of future societies as better, but not fundamentally different. And while admitting that humanity has made great progress and may make some more, they lock it in advance within certain impassable limits.

They do not believe they have arrived at the supreme good or at absolute truth (what person or people has ever been foolish enough to imagine that?) — but they like to persuade themselves that they have reached more or less the degree of greatness and knowledge that our imperfect nature allows. And since nothing around them is moving, they readily assume that everything is in its proper place. It is then that the lawmaker claims to promulgate eternal laws, that peoples and kings seek to erect only monuments for the ages, and that the present generation takes it upon itself to spare future generations the trouble of shaping their own destinies.

As castes disappear, as classes draw closer together, as people mingle chaotically and customs, habits, and laws shift, as new facts arise and new truths come to light, as old opinions vanish and others take their place — the image of an ideal perfection, always elusive, presents itself to the human mind.

Continual changes then pass before each person's eyes at every moment. Some worsen his condition, and he understands only too well that a people, or an individual, however enlightened, is not infallible. Others improve his lot, and he concludes that humanity in general possesses an indefinite capacity for improvement. His setbacks show him that no one can flatter himself with having discovered the absolute good; his successes fire him to pursue it without rest. Thus, always searching, falling, picking himself up again, often disappointed but never discouraged, he strives ceaselessly toward that immense greatness he dimly glimpses at the end of the long road that humanity must still travel.

It is hard to believe how many facts flow naturally from this philosophical theory that man is indefinitely perfectible, and the prodigious influence it exerts even on those who, having never done anything but act rather than think, seem to conform their actions to it without knowing it.

I meet an American sailor and ask him why his country's ships are built to last such a short time. He answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is making such rapid progress every day that the finest vessel would soon become nearly useless if it lasted more than a few years.

In these words, spoken offhandedly by a rough man about a particular fact, I glimpse the general and systematic idea by which a great people guides all its affairs.

Aristocratic nations are naturally inclined to narrow the limits of human perfectibility too much, and democratic nations sometimes extend them beyond all measure.

CHAPTER IX.

How the American example does not prove that a democratic people is incapable of aptitude and taste for the sciences, literature, and the arts.

It must be acknowledged that, among the civilized nations of our time, few have made less progress in the advanced sciences than the United States, and few have produced fewer great artists, famous poets, or celebrated writers.

Several Europeans, struck by this spectacle, have treated it as a natural and inevitable result of equality, concluding that if democratic social conditions and institutions ever prevailed across the entire earth, the human mind would watch its own lights slowly dim, and humanity would sink back into darkness.

Those who reason this way are conflating, I think, several ideas that would be better separated and examined on their own. They are confusing what is democratic with what is merely American, without realizing it.

The religion practiced by the first emigrants, and passed down to their descendants — simple in its worship, austere and almost savage in its principles, hostile to outward display and ceremonial pomp — is by nature unfavorable to the fine arts and barely tolerates literary pleasures.

The Americans are a very old and very enlightened people who happened upon a new and immense land where they could expand at will and cultivate without difficulty. There is no precedent for this in the world. In America, everyone finds opportunities unknown elsewhere to make a fortune or increase one. Greed is always active there, and the human mind, constantly distracted from the pleasures of imagination and the labors of intellect, is drawn only toward the pursuit of wealth. In the United States you find not just the commercial and industrial classes that exist in every country, but something never before seen: everyone is involved in industry and commerce at the same time.

I am nevertheless convinced that if the Americans had been alone in the universe, with the freedoms and knowledge inherited from their forebears and the passions that were their own, they would not have waited long to discover that you cannot keep making progress in the practical sciences without cultivating theory; that all the arts improve through one another; and however absorbed they might have been in pursuing the main object of their desires, they would soon have recognized the need to step back from it now and then in order to reach it more effectively.

The taste for intellectual pleasures is, moreover, so natural to the heart of civilized humanity that even among the most polished nations least inclined to indulge in it, there are always some citizens who develop it. Once this intellectual need is felt, it would soon be satisfied.

But at the same time that Americans were naturally inclined to ask of science only its practical applications to useful arts — only the means of making life easier — learned and literary Europe was busy tracing knowledge back to its general sources, perfecting everything that serves human pleasure as well as everything that meets human needs.

At the head of the enlightened nations of the Old World, the inhabitants of the United States could identify one in particular to which they were closely bound by a common origin and similar habits. Among that people they found famous scientists, skilled artists, and great writers, and they could harvest the treasures of intellect without needing to labor at accumulating them.

I cannot bring myself to separate America from Europe, despite the ocean between them. I see the people of the United States as the portion of the English people charged with clearing the forests of the New World, while the rest of the nation, blessed with more leisure and less preoccupied with the material demands of life, can devote itself to thought and develop the human mind in every direction.

The situation of the Americans is therefore entirely exceptional, and it is unlikely that any other democratic people will ever be placed in it. Their entirely Puritan origins, their exclusively commercial habits, the very country they inhabit, which seems to divert their intelligence from the study of the sciences, literature, and arts; the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without falling back into barbarism; a thousand particular causes, of which I have been able to describe only the most important — all of these have combined in a singular way to focus the American mind on purely material concerns. Passions, needs, education, circumstances — everything seems to conspire to tilt the inhabitant of the United States toward the earth. Only religion, from time to time, makes him lift a distracted, fleeting gaze toward the sky.

Let us stop, then, viewing every democratic nation through the lens of the American people, and try at last to see them on their own terms.

It is possible to imagine a people with no castes, no hierarchies, no classes; where the law, recognizing no privileges, divides inheritances equally, and yet a people that is at the same time deprived of knowledge and liberty. This is not an idle hypothesis: a despot might find it in his interest to make his subjects equal and keep them ignorant, the better to keep them enslaved.

Not only would a democratic people of this kind show no aptitude or taste for the sciences, literature, and the arts — there is every reason to believe it never would.

Inheritance laws would themselves destroy fortunes with each generation, and no one would create new ones. The poor, deprived of knowledge and liberty, would not even conceive the idea of rising toward wealth, and the rich would let themselves drift into poverty without knowing how to resist. A complete and unbreakable equality would soon be established between these two kinds of citizens. No one would then have the time or the taste for intellectual work and intellectual pleasure. Everyone would remain numb in the same ignorance and the same servitude.

When I try to imagine a democratic society of this kind, I feel as though I am immediately in one of those low, dark, suffocating places where light brought from outside quickly fades and dies. A sudden heaviness seems to crush me, and I drag myself through the surrounding darkness searching for the exit that will bring me back to air and daylight. But none of this applies to people who are already enlightened and who, after destroying among themselves the particular and hereditary rights that permanently fixed wealth in the hands of certain individuals or certain groups, remain free.

When people who live in a democratic society are educated, they easily discover that nothing confines them, nothing fixes them in place, nothing forces them to be content with their present situation.

They all conceive the idea of improving it, and if they are free, they all try to do so — but not all succeed equally. The legislature no longer grants privileges, it is true, but nature does. Since natural inequality is very great, fortunes become unequal the moment everyone makes full use of their abilities to get rich.

Inheritance laws still prevent the establishment of wealthy dynasties, but they no longer prevent the existence of wealthy individuals. They constantly pull citizens back toward a common level from which those citizens constantly escape; the more extensive their education and the greater their freedom, the more unequal in wealth they become.

In our own time, a celebrated movement distinguished by its genius and its eccentricities proposed concentrating all property in the hands of a central authority, which would then redistribute it according to merit. This would have been one way to escape the complete and eternal equality that seems to threaten democratic societies.

There is another remedy, simpler and less dangerous: grant no one privileges, give everyone equal education and equal independence, and leave each person to mark out their own place. Natural inequality will soon show itself, and wealth will naturally flow to the most capable.

Free and democratic societies will therefore always contain a multitude of wealthy or comfortable people. These rich will not be as tightly bound to one another as the members of the old aristocratic class; they will have different instincts and will almost never enjoy leisure as secure or as complete; but they will be far more numerous than those who made up that class. These people will not be narrowly confined to the concerns of material life, and they will be able, in varying degrees, to devote themselves to intellectual work and intellectual pleasure. And they will do so — because if the human mind leans on one side toward the limited, the material, and the useful, on the other it naturally rises toward the infinite, the immaterial, and the beautiful. Physical needs tie it to the earth, but the moment it is no longer held down, it straightens up on its own.

Not only will the number of those who can take an interest in intellectual work be greater, but the taste for intellectual enjoyment will spread, step by step, all the way down to those very people who, in aristocratic societies, seemed to have neither the time nor the ability for it.

When there is no more inherited wealth, no class privilege, no birthright, and when each person draws strength only from themselves, it becomes obvious that what mainly determines the difference in people's fortunes is intelligence. Everything that strengthens, extends, or adorns intelligence immediately acquires great value.

The usefulness of knowledge reveals itself with special clarity even to the eyes of the crowd. Those who do not appreciate its charms still value its effects, and make some effort to attain it.

In democratic, educated, and free centuries, there is nothing to separate people or hold them in place; they rise or fall with remarkable speed. All classes can see each other constantly because they are so close together. They communicate and mingle every day, imitating and envying one another; this suggests to the people a host of ideas, concepts, and desires they would never have had if social ranks had been fixed and society immobile. In these nations, the servant never considers himself entirely a stranger to the pleasures and labors of the master, the poor man to those of the rich; the rural person tries to resemble the urban one, and the provinces try to resemble the capital.

And so no one readily allows themselves to be reduced to purely material concerns, and even the humblest craftsman occasionally casts eager, furtive glances into the higher world of the mind. People do not read in the same spirit or in the same way as in aristocratic nations, but the circle of readers keeps expanding until it embraces every citizen.

The moment the crowd begins to take an interest in intellectual work, it becomes clear that excelling in some branch of it is a powerful way to win glory, power, or wealth. The restless ambition that equality breeds immediately turns in this direction, as it does in every other. The number of people who cultivate the sciences, literature, and the arts becomes immense. A prodigious activity emerges in the world of the mind; everyone tries to carve out a path for themselves and to attract the public's attention. Something similar to what happens in American political society takes place here: the works are often imperfect, but they are innumerable; and although the results of any individual effort are typically quite small, the collective result is always very large.

It is therefore not true that people who live in democratic centuries are naturally indifferent to the sciences, literature, and the arts; only, one must recognize that they cultivate these things in their own way, bringing to them the strengths and weaknesses that are distinctly their own.

CHAPTER X.

Why Americans are more attached to the practice of the sciences than to their theory.

If democratic social conditions and institutions do not halt the flight of the human mind, it is at least undeniable that they steer it in one direction rather than another. Their efforts, though limited in this way, are still very great, and I hope the reader will forgive me for pausing a moment to contemplate them.

When discussing the philosophical method of the Americans, we made several observations worth drawing on here.

Equality develops in each person the desire to judge everything for themselves; it gives them, in all things, a taste for the tangible and the real, and a contempt for traditions and forms. These general instincts are especially visible in the particular subject of this chapter.

Those who pursue the sciences in democratic nations are always wary of losing themselves in abstractions. They distrust systems; they like to stay very close to the facts and study them firsthand. Since they do not easily defer to anyone's reputation, they are never inclined to take a master's word for anything; on the contrary, you see them constantly looking for the weak points in his doctrine. Scientific traditions have little hold on them; they never linger long in the subtleties of any particular school and are not easily impressed by grand terminology. They penetrate, as far as they can, to the core of the subject at hand, and they prefer to present their findings in plain language. Science then moves with a freer and surer step — but a less lofty one.

The mind can, it seems to me, divide science into three parts.

The first contains the most theoretical principles, the most abstract concepts — those whose application is either unknown or very remote.

The second consists of general truths that, while still rooted in pure theory, lead by a direct and short path to practice.

The third is made up of the methods of application and the means of execution.

Each of these different portions of science can be cultivated separately, though reason and experience both show that none of them can flourish for long when completely cut off from the other two.

In America, the purely practical part of science is admirably cultivated, and careful attention is given to the portion of theory immediately necessary for application. Americans display, in this regard, a mind that is always clear, free, original, and fertile. But there is almost no one in the United States who devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge. In this the Americans demonstrate the extreme version of a tendency that will be found, I believe, though to a lesser degree, among all democratic peoples.

Nothing is more essential to the cultivation of the higher sciences — or the elevated portion of the sciences — than meditation, and there is nothing less suited to meditation than the interior of a democratic society. You do not find there, as in aristocratic nations, a large class that stays at rest because it is well off, and another that does not stir because it has given up hope of being better off. Everyone is in motion; some want to reach power, others to seize wealth. In the midst of this universal tumult, this constant clash of opposing interests, this continuous march of people toward fortune, where do you find the calm necessary for the deep workings of the intellect? How can you fix your thought on a single point when everything around you is moving, and you yourself are swept along and tossed about every day in the rushing current that carries all things with it?

One must carefully distinguish between the kind of permanent restlessness that prevails within a peaceful and established democracy, and the tumultuous, revolutionary upheavals that almost always accompany the birth and growth of a democratic society.

When a violent revolution occurs among a highly civilized people, it cannot fail to give a sudden push to feelings and ideas.

This is especially true of democratic revolutions, which, by overturning all the classes of a people at once, simultaneously kindle immense ambitions in every citizen's heart.

If the French made such admirable, sudden progress in the exact sciences at the very moment they were finishing off the remains of feudal society, this sudden fertility must be attributed not to democracy, but to the unprecedented revolution that accompanied its rise. What happened then was a particular event; it would be reckless to see in it the sign of a general law.

Great revolutions are no more common among democratic peoples than among others; I am even inclined to think they are less so. But within these nations there prevails a small, uncomfortable movement, a sort of incessant jostling of people against one another, that disturbs and distracts the mind without energizing or elevating it.

Not only do people who live in democratic societies find it difficult to meditate, they naturally have little respect for meditation. Democratic social conditions and institutions lead most people to act constantly; and the habits of mind suited to action are not always suited to thought. The person of action must often settle for approximation, because if they tried to perfect every detail, they would never reach the end of their plan. They must constantly rely on ideas they have not had the leisure to think through deeply, because what helps them is the timeliness of an idea rather than its rigorous accuracy; and all things considered, there is less risk in using a few false principles than in consuming their time establishing the truth of all their principles. The world is not run by long and learned demonstrations. A quick glance at a particular fact, the daily study of the crowd's shifting passions, the chance of the moment and the skill to seize it — these are what decide all affairs.

In centuries when nearly everyone is active, there is a general tendency to place excessive value on the quick leaps and superficial conceptions of the mind, and, conversely, to undervalue its slow, deep labor.

This public opinion influences the judgment of those who pursue the sciences; it persuades them they can succeed without meditation, or drives them away from subjects that require it.

There are several ways of studying the sciences. Among a great number of people you find a selfish, mercantile, industrial interest in the discoveries of the mind that must not be confused with the disinterested passion that burns in the hearts of a few. There is a desire to use knowledge, and a pure desire to know. I have no doubt that here and there, in some individuals, an ardent and inexhaustible love of truth is born — one that feeds on itself and delights ceaselessly without ever being satisfied. It is this ardent, proud, disinterested love of the true that leads people to the abstract sources of truth to draw out foundational ideas.

If Pascal had been motivated only by some great profit, or even driven only by the desire for glory, I cannot believe he would ever have been able to marshal, as he did, all the powers of his mind to uncover the deepest secrets of the Creator. When I see him tearing his soul, so to speak, from the cares of daily life in order to attach it entirely to this quest, and then prematurely breaking the bonds that tied his soul to his body, dying of old age before forty — I stop short in wonder, and I understand that no ordinary cause can produce such extraordinary efforts.

The future will show whether these passions, so rare and so productive, arise and flourish as easily in democratic societies as in aristocracies. For my part, I confess I find it hard to believe.

In aristocratic societies, the class that directs opinion and runs affairs, being permanently and hereditarily placed above the crowd, naturally conceives a lofty idea of itself and of humanity. It readily imagines glorious satisfactions for itself and sets magnificent goals for its desires. Aristocracies often commit deeply tyrannical and inhumane acts, but they rarely conceive base thoughts, and they display a kind of proud disdain for petty pleasures even while indulging in them; this sets every soul to a very high pitch. In aristocratic times, people generally hold very expansive ideas about the dignity, the power, and the grandeur of humanity. These views influence those who pursue the sciences just as they influence everyone else: they facilitate the mind's natural flight toward the highest regions of thought, and naturally dispose it to conceive a sublime, almost divine love of truth.

The scholars of those times are therefore drawn toward theory, and it often happens that they conceive a reckless contempt for practice. "Archimedes," says Plutarch, "had so high a spirit that he never deigned to leave behind any written work on how to construct all those war machines; regarding the whole science of inventing and building machines, and indeed any art that serves some practical purpose, as vile, base, and mercenary, he devoted his mind and his study to writing only about things whose beauty and subtlety were in no way mixed with necessity." That is the aristocratic vision of science.

It cannot be the same in democratic nations.

Most of the people who make up these nations are hungry for material, present-day pleasures; since they are always dissatisfied with their position and always free to leave it, they think only of ways to change their fortune or increase it. For minds disposed this way, every new method that leads by a shorter path to wealth, every machine that shortens labor, every tool that reduces the cost of production, every discovery that makes pleasures easier and multiplies them — these seem the most magnificent achievements of the human mind. It is primarily from this angle that democratic peoples engage with the sciences, understand them, and honor them. In aristocratic centuries, people look to the sciences chiefly for pleasures of the mind; in democracies, for pleasures of the body.

Count on it: the more democratic, educated, and free a nation is, the more the number of these self-interested admirers of scientific genius will grow, and the more discoveries immediately applicable to industry will bring profit, glory, and even power to their makers — because in democracies, the working class takes part in public affairs, and those who serve it can expect honors as well as money.

It is easy to see that in a society organized this way, the human mind will be insensibly led to neglect theory and will instead feel driven with unmatched energy toward application — or at least toward that portion of theory that is necessary to those who apply it.

In vain does an instinctive impulse lift the mind toward the highest spheres of intelligence; interest pulls it back to the middle ground. That is where it deploys its strength and its restless energy, and where it produces wonders. These same Americans, who have not discovered a single one of the general laws of mechanics, have introduced into navigation a new machine that is changing the face of the world.

I am certainly far from claiming that the democratic peoples of our time are destined to watch the higher lights of the human mind go out, or even that no new ones will be kindled among them. At the stage of the world we have reached, with so many literate nations ceaselessly driven by industrial ambition, the connections linking the different parts of science to each other cannot fail to catch the eye; and the taste for practice itself, if it is informed, should lead people not to neglect theory. In the midst of so many attempted applications, so many experiments repeated daily, it is virtually impossible that very general laws should not frequently come to light — so that great discoveries would be common, even if great inventors were rare.

I believe, moreover, in great scientific vocations. If democracy does not lead people to cultivate the sciences for their own sake, it does, on the other hand, enormously increase the number of those who pursue them. And it is hard to believe that, out of so vast a multitude, some speculative genius will not from time to time be born, set ablaze by nothing more than the love of truth itself. You can be sure that such a person will strive to penetrate the deepest mysteries of nature, whatever the prevailing spirit of their country and their age. There is no need to aid their ascent; it is enough not to hold them back. All I mean to say is this: permanent inequality of conditions leads people to shut themselves up in the proud and sterile pursuit of abstract truths; while democratic social conditions and institutions incline them to ask of the sciences only their immediate and useful applications.

This tendency is natural and inevitable. It is worth understanding, and it may be necessary to point it out.

If those who are called to lead the nations of our time could clearly see from a distance these new instincts that will soon be irresistible, they would understand that, with education and liberty, people living in democratic centuries cannot fail to perfect the industrial side of the sciences, and that from now on, all the effort of social authority should be directed toward supporting advanced study and creating great scientific passions.

Today, the human mind must be held back in theory — it runs toward practice on its own. Instead of constantly pulling it back toward the detailed examination of secondary effects, it would be well to distract it occasionally and lift it toward the contemplation of first causes.

Because Roman civilization died following the barbarian invasions, we are perhaps too inclined to believe that civilization can only die that way.

If the light that guides us ever went out, it would dim little by little, as if of its own accord. By confining themselves entirely to application, people would lose sight of principles, and when they had completely forgotten the principles, they would follow badly the methods derived from them; they would no longer be able to invent new ones, and they would employ, without intelligence or art, sophisticated procedures they could no longer understand.

When Europeans arrived in China three hundred years ago, they found nearly every art had reached a certain level of perfection, and they were astonished that, having gotten that far, the Chinese had not gone further. Later, they discovered the vestiges of some advanced knowledge that had been lost. The nation was industrious; most of its scientific methods had been preserved; but science itself no longer existed. This explained the remarkable immobility in which they had found the minds of the Chinese people. The Chinese, following in the footsteps of their ancestors, had forgotten the reasons that had guided them. They still used the formula without understanding its meaning; they kept the tool but no longer possessed the art of modifying or reproducing it. The Chinese could therefore change nothing. They had to give up on improvement. They were forced to imitate their ancestors in everything, always — for fear of plunging into impenetrable darkness if they strayed even for a moment from the path those ancestors had marked out. The source of human knowledge was nearly dried up; and though the river still flowed, it could no longer swell its waters or change its course.

Yet China survived peacefully for centuries; its conquerors had adopted its customs; order reigned there. A kind of material well-being was visible on every side. Revolutions were extremely rare, and war was virtually unknown.

We should not reassure ourselves, then, by thinking that the barbarians are still far away — because if there are peoples who let the light be torn from their hands, there are others who smother it themselves beneath their own feet.

CHAPTER XI.

In what spirit the Americans cultivate the arts.

I would be wasting the reader's time and my own if I labored to show how the general mediocrity of fortunes, the absence of luxury, the universal desire for well-being, and the constant efforts everyone makes to achieve it cause the taste for the useful to prevail over the love of the beautiful in the human heart. Democratic nations, where all these conditions exist, will therefore cultivate the arts that make life comfortable in preference to those whose purpose is to embellish it; they will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and they will want the beautiful to be useful.

But I intend to go further, and after sketching this first feature, to draw several others.

In centuries of privilege, the practice of nearly every art becomes itself a privilege, and each profession is a world apart that not everyone is free to enter. And even when industry is technically open, the natural immobility of aristocratic nations means that everyone working in the same trade ends up forming a distinct class, always made up of the same families, whose members all know one another and among whom a public opinion and a professional pride soon develop. In an industrial class of this kind, each craftsman has not only his fortune to make but his reputation to protect. His rule is not simply his own interest, or even the buyer's interest, but the interest of the guild — and the guild's interest is that every craftsman produce masterpieces. In aristocratic centuries, then, the aim of the arts is to make things as well as possible, not as quickly or as cheaply as possible.

When, on the contrary, every profession is open to everyone, when the crowd is constantly entering and leaving, when its members become strangers, indifferent, and nearly invisible to each other because of their sheer numbers, the social bond is destroyed, and each worker, thrown back on himself, seeks only to earn as much money as possible at the lowest cost. Nothing limits him but the will of the consumer. And it happens that, at the very same time, a corresponding revolution is taking place among consumers themselves.

In countries where wealth, like power, is concentrated in a few hands and never leaves them, the use of most of the world's goods belongs to a small number of individuals, always the same ones; necessity, opinion, and the moderation of desires keep everyone else away.

Since this aristocratic class remains fixed at the height where it is placed — neither shrinking nor expanding — it always experiences the same needs and feels them in the same way. The people who compose it naturally draw from the superior, hereditary position they occupy a taste for what is very well made and very durable.

This gives a general direction to the nation's ideas about the arts.

It often happens that, among such peoples, even the peasant would rather go entirely without the things he covets than acquire them in an imperfect form.

In aristocracies, then, workers labor for a limited number of very demanding buyers. It is primarily on the perfection of their work that their profits depend.

This is no longer the case once all privileges are destroyed, social ranks merge, and everyone is constantly rising and falling on the social ladder.

Within a democratic people, you always find a crowd of citizens whose wealth is being divided and shrinking. They developed certain needs in better times, needs that persist even after the means to satisfy them have disappeared, and they cast about anxiously for some roundabout way to meet them.

On the other hand, you always see in democracies a very large number of people whose fortunes are growing, but whose desires grow much faster than their fortunes, and who devour with their eyes the good things wealth promises them long before it delivers. These people look everywhere for shortcuts to these nearby pleasures. From the combination of these two causes, it follows that in democracies you always find a multitude of citizens whose needs exceed their resources and who would willingly settle for an incomplete satisfaction rather than give up on the object of their desire entirely.

The worker easily understands these passions, because he shares them himself. In aristocracies, he sought to sell his products at a high price to a few; he now sees that there would be a quicker way to get rich — selling them cheaply to everyone.

Now, there are only two ways to lower the price of a product.

The first is to find better, shorter, and more efficient methods of producing it. The second is to manufacture in greater quantity objects that are roughly similar but of lesser value. Among democratic peoples, all the intellectual faculties of the worker are directed toward these two goals.

He strives to invent processes that allow him to work not just better, but faster and more cheaply — and if he cannot manage that, to reduce the intrinsic quality of what he makes without rendering it entirely unfit for its intended use. When only the rich had watches, they were nearly all excellent. Now hardly any good ones are made, but everyone has one. Thus democracy does not merely steer the human mind toward the useful arts; it leads craftsmen to produce a great many imperfect things very quickly, and the consumer to be satisfied with them.

This does not mean that in democracies art is incapable, when necessary, of producing wonders. That happens sometimes, when buyers appear who are willing to pay for the time and effort. In this struggle of every industry against every other, amid the immense competition and the countless experiments, excellent workers do emerge who push to the very limits of their craft. But they rarely get the chance to show what they can do: they carefully husband their efforts, maintaining a kind of skillful mediocrity that judges itself clearly, and which, capable of reaching beyond the target it sets, aims only at the target it hits. In aristocracies, by contrast, workers always do everything they know how to do; when they stop, it is because they have reached the end of their ability.

When I arrive in a country and see the arts producing a few admirable products, that tells me nothing about its social conditions or political constitution. But if I see that the products of the arts are generally imperfect, extremely numerous, and cheap, I can be sure that in this country privileges are weakening, classes are beginning to mingle, and they will soon merge entirely.

Craftsmen living in democratic centuries do not merely try to bring their useful products within reach of every citizen; they also strive to give all their products flashy qualities they do not actually possess.

In the confusion of all classes, everyone hopes to appear to be what they are not, and devotes great effort to pulling it off. Democracy does not create this impulse — it is all too natural to the human heart — but it applies it to material things. The hypocrisy of virtue belongs to every era; the hypocrisy of luxury belongs especially to democratic ones.

To satisfy these new needs of human vanity, there is no trickery that the arts will not resort to. Industry sometimes goes so far in this direction that it ends up hurting itself. People have already managed to imitate diamonds so perfectly that it is easy to be fooled. The moment someone invents the art of making fake diamonds indistinguishable from real ones, both will probably be abandoned and revert to being pebbles.

This brings me to those arts that have been called, par excellence, the fine arts.

I do not believe that the necessary effect of democratic social conditions and institutions is to reduce the number of people who cultivate the fine arts; but these causes powerfully influence the manner in which the fine arts are cultivated. Most of those who had already developed a taste for the fine arts are becoming poor, while, on the other side, many who are not yet rich are beginning to develop, by imitation, a taste for them. The number of consumers in general is growing, while the very rich and very refined consumers are becoming rarer. Something then happens in the fine arts analogous to what I have already described in the useful arts. They multiply their works and diminish the merit of each.

Unable to aim at greatness any longer, people pursue elegance and prettiness; they tend less toward reality than toward appearance.

In aristocracies, a few great paintings are made; in democratic countries, a multitude of small ones. In the former, bronze statues are raised; in the latter, plaster ones are cast.

When I first arrived in New York by way of that part of the Atlantic Ocean called the East River, I was surprised to see, along the shore at some distance from the city, a number of small white marble palaces, several of which had a classical architecture. The next day, having gone to examine more closely the one that had particularly caught my eye, I found that its walls were whitewashed brick and its columns painted wood. The same was true of all the monuments I had admired the day before.

Democratic social conditions and institutions also give all the imitative arts certain particular tendencies that are easy to identify. They often turn these arts away from painting the soul and attach them only to painting the body; they substitute the representation of movements and sensations for the representation of feelings and ideas; in place of the ideal, they put the real.

I doubt that Raphael made as thorough a study of the tiniest mechanisms of the human body as the draftsmen of our own day. He did not attach the same importance they do to rigorous exactness on that point, because he aimed to surpass nature. He wanted to make of man something superior to man; he undertook to embellish beauty itself.

David and his students were, on the contrary, as good anatomists as they were painters. They represented the models before their eyes with marvelous accuracy, but they rarely imagined anything beyond them. They followed nature exactly, while Raphael sought something better than nature. They left us an exact portrait of man, but Raphael lets us glimpse the divine in his works.

What I have said about the manner of treatment can also be applied to the choice of subject.

The painters of the Renaissance typically looked above themselves, or far from their own time, for great subjects that left vast room for their imagination. Our painters often use their talent to reproduce exactly the details of private life that they constantly have before their eyes, and they copy from every angle small objects that have all too many originals in nature.

CHAPTER XII.

Why Americans build both very small and very large monuments at the same time.

I have just said that in democratic centuries, works of art tend to become more numerous and less grand. I hasten to point out the exception to this rule myself.

Among democratic peoples, individuals are very weak, but the state that represents them all and holds them all in its hand is very strong. Nowhere do citizens appear smaller than in a democratic nation. Nowhere does the nation itself appear greater, and nowhere does the mind more easily form a vast picture of it. In democratic societies, people's imaginations shrink when they think about themselves; they expand without limit when they think about the State. It follows that the same people who live small lives in cramped dwellings often aim for the gigantic when it comes to public monuments.

The Americans laid out the boundaries of an immense city on the site they chose for their capital — a city that today is still barely more populated than Pontoise, but which, according to them, will one day hold a million inhabitants. They have already cleared the trees for ten leagues around, lest they inconvenience the future citizens of this imaginary metropolis. They have raised a magnificent palace at the center of the city to serve as the seat of Congress and given it the pompous name of the Capitol.

Every day, the individual states themselves conceive and carry out prodigious undertakings that would astonish the greatest nations of Europe.

Thus democracy does not only lead people to produce a multitude of minor works; it also leads them to erect a small number of very large monuments. But between these two extremes, there is nothing. A few scattered remains of very vast buildings therefore tell us nothing about the social conditions and institutions of the people who raised them.

I would add, though it takes me beyond my subject, that they tell us nothing about a people's greatness, education, or real prosperity either.

Whenever any power is capable of rallying an entire people to a single enterprise, it will manage, with little science and a great deal of time, to extract from the combined effort something immense — without that proving the people to be very happy, very enlightened, or even very powerful. The Spanish found the city of Mexico filled with magnificent temples and vast palaces, which did not prevent Cortes from conquering the Mexican empire with six hundred foot soldiers and sixteen horses.

If the Romans had better understood the laws of hydraulics, they would not have built all those aqueducts that surround the ruins of their cities; they would have made better use of their power and their wealth. If they had discovered the steam engine, they might never have extended to the far reaches of their empire those long artificial ridges of stone we call Roman roads.

These things are magnificent testaments to their ignorance as much as to their greatness.

The people who left no other traces of their passage than a few lead pipes in the ground and a few iron rods on its surface might have been greater masters of nature than the Romans.

CHAPTER XIII.

The literary character of democratic ages.

When you walk into a bookstore in the United States and browse the American books lining the shelves, the number of titles seems very large, while the number of known authors seems, on the contrary, very small.

First you find a multitude of elementary textbooks designed to provide a basic introduction to human knowledge. Most of these works were composed in Europe. The Americans reprint them, adapting them to their own use. Then comes an almost innumerable quantity of religious books — bibles, sermons, pious anecdotes, theological controversies, reports of charitable organizations. Finally, there appears the long catalog of political pamphlets. In America, the parties do not write books to fight each other — they write pamphlets that circulate with incredible speed, live for a day, and die.

In the midst of all these obscure productions of the human mind, the more remarkable works of a small number of authors appear — writers known to Europeans, or who ought to be.

Though America is perhaps the civilized country where people today concern themselves least with literature, there is nonetheless a great number of individuals who take an interest in things of the mind and who make them, if not the study of their entire lives, at least the delight of their leisure. But it is England that supplies most of the books they demand. Nearly all the major English works are reproduced in the United States. The literary genius of Great Britain still beams its light into the depths of the New World's forests. There is hardly a pioneer's cabin where you will not find a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log house.

Not only do the Americans draw daily from the treasures of English literature, but it can be said truthfully that they find England's literature on their own soil. Among the small number of people who write literary works in the United States, most are English in substance and especially in form. They transplant into the midst of democracy the literary ideas and conventions that prevail in the aristocratic nation they have taken as their model. They paint with borrowed colors and foreign customs; they almost never represent the reality of the country where they were born, and they are rarely popular there.

The citizens of the United States seem so convinced that books are not published for them that before deciding on the merit of one of their own writers, they typically wait until he has been approved in England. It is as though, with paintings, one willingly leaves to the creator of the original the right to judge the copy.

The inhabitants of the United States do not yet, properly speaking, have a literature of their own. The only authors I would recognize as American are journalists. They are not great writers, but they speak the language of the country and make themselves heard. Everyone else I see as foreigners. They are to the Americans what the imitators of the Greeks and Romans were to us at the dawn of our own literary tradition — objects of curiosity, not of general sympathy. They amuse the mind but have no effect on customs and values.

I have already said that this state of affairs is far from being caused solely by democracy, and that one must look for its causes in several particular circumstances independent of it.

If the Americans, while keeping their social conditions and laws, had a different origin and found themselves in a different country, I have no doubt they would have a literature. As they are, I am certain they will eventually have one; but it will have a character different from what we see in American writing today — a character entirely its own. It is not impossible to sketch that character in advance.

Imagine an aristocratic people among whom literature is cultivated. The work of the mind, like the business of government, is controlled by a sovereign class. Literary life, like political existence, is almost entirely concentrated in that class and in those closest to it. This gives me the key to everything else.

When a small number of people, always the same ones, occupy themselves with the same subjects at the same time, they easily reach agreement and establish certain basic rules that are supposed to guide each of them. If the subject that draws the attention of these people is literature, the work of the mind will soon be subjected by them to a set of precise rules from which no one may depart.

If these people hold hereditary positions in society, they will naturally be inclined not only to adopt a certain number of fixed rules but to follow those their forebears imposed; their legislation will be both rigorous and traditional.

Since they are not necessarily preoccupied with material concerns — and never have been, and neither were their fathers before them — they have been able, over several generations, to take an interest in the work of the mind. They have come to understand the literary art, and they end up loving it for its own sake and taking a refined pleasure in seeing it followed.

That is not all: the people I am describing began their lives and end them in comfort or wealth; they have therefore naturally developed a taste for refined pleasures and a love of delicate, subtle enjoyments.

What is more, a certain softness of mind and heart that they often acquire amid this long and peaceful enjoyment of so many goods leads them to push aside from their very pleasures anything too unexpected or too intense. They prefer to be entertained rather than deeply moved; they want to be interested, but not swept away.

Now imagine a great number of literary works produced by people like the ones I have just described, or for them, and you will easily conceive a literature in which everything is orderly and arranged in advance. The slightest work will be polished in its smallest details; art and craftsmanship will be visible in everything; each genre will have its own particular rules from which it is not permitted to stray and which isolate it from all others.

Style will seem almost as important as thought, form as important as substance; the tone will be polished, measured, sustained. The writing will always have a noble bearing, rarely a lively pace, and authors will care more about perfecting than producing.

It will sometimes happen that the members of the literary class, living entirely among themselves and writing only for each other, will lose sight of the rest of the world entirely, which will send them into the precious and the artificial. They will impose on themselves petty literary rules intended only for their own use, rules that will gradually lead them away from common sense and finally out of nature itself.

By trying too hard to speak differently from ordinary people, they will arrive at a kind of aristocratic jargon hardly less distant from fine language than the dialect of the common folk.

These are the natural pitfalls of literature in aristocracies.

Every aristocracy that cuts itself off entirely from the people becomes powerless. This is as true in literature as in politics.

All of this applies especially to aristocratic countries that have been long and peacefully subject to the rule of a single king. When liberty prevails in an aristocracy, the upper classes are constantly obliged to make use of the lower ones; and in making use of them, they draw closer to them. This often allows something of the democratic spirit to penetrate their ranks. Moreover, within a privileged governing class, there develops an energy and a habit of enterprise, a taste for movement and activity, that inevitably influence all literary work.

Let us now turn the picture around and look at the other side.

Let us transport ourselves into the midst of a democracy whose ancient traditions and present knowledge make it receptive to the pleasures of the mind. Social ranks there are blended and confused; knowledge, like power, is divided to infinity and — if I may say so — scattered in every direction.

Here is a confused crowd whose intellectual needs must be satisfied. These new lovers of the pleasures of the mind have not all received the same education; they do not possess the same knowledge; they do not resemble their fathers, and at every moment they differ from themselves, because they are constantly changing place, feelings, and fortunes. Each person's mind is therefore not bound to everyone else's by shared traditions and common habits, and they have never had the power, the will, or the time to come to an understanding among themselves.

Yet it is from the midst of this incoherent and restless multitude that authors emerge, and it is this multitude that distributes to them both profit and glory.

I have no trouble understanding that, things being this way, I should expect to find in the literature of such a people only a small number of the rigorous conventions that readers and writers in aristocratic centuries acknowledge. If the people of one era happened to agree on a few, that would prove nothing for the next era, because in democratic nations each new generation is a new people. In these nations, literature can be only with difficulty subjected to narrow rules, and it is virtually impossible for it ever to be subjected to permanent ones.

In democracies, it is far from true that all the people who engage in literature have received a literary education, and most of those who have some knowledge of fine letters pursue a political career or practice a profession they can only step away from briefly to steal a taste of the pleasures of the mind. They do not make these pleasures the main delight of their existence; they regard them as a passing and necessary relaxation in the midst of the serious business of life. Such people can never acquire a deep enough knowledge of literary art to appreciate its finer points; the subtle nuances escape them. Having only a short time to devote to reading, they want to make the most of every minute. They like books that are easy to obtain, quick to read, and that require no scholarly research to be understood. They want beauty that delivers itself and can be enjoyed on the spot; above all, they need the unexpected and the new. Accustomed to a practical, contested, monotonous existence, they crave vivid, rapid emotions — sudden flashes of clarity, brilliant truths or errors that snatch them instantly out of themselves and plunge them, suddenly and almost violently, into the heart of the subject.

Do I need to say more? Who cannot see, without my spelling it out, what follows?

Taken as a whole, the literature of democratic centuries cannot present, as in aristocratic times, the image of order, regularity, learning, and art. Form will typically be neglected, and sometimes scorned. Style will often be strange, incorrect, overloaded, and slack — and nearly always bold and vehement. Authors will aim at speed of execution more than perfection of detail. Short writings will be more common than long books; wit more valued than erudition, imagination more than depth. Thought will often display a raw, almost savage force, and there will be a very great variety and a remarkable fertility in its output. The effort will be to astonish rather than to please, and to seize the passions rather than to charm the taste.

From time to time, writers will appear who try to take a different path, and if they have superior merit, they will succeed in being read despite their defects and their virtues alike. But these will be rare exceptions, and even those who in the whole of their works have departed from the common practice will always fall back into it in certain details.

I have just painted two extreme states; but nations do not leap suddenly from one to the other. They get there only gradually, through infinite gradations. In the passage that takes a literate people from one to the other, there nearly always comes a moment when the literary genius of democratic nations meets that of aristocracies, and both seem to want to rule the human mind together.

These are passing but very brilliant epochs: there is fertility without excess, and movement without confusion. Such was French literature of the eighteenth century.

I would go further than my own argument if I said that a nation's literature is always subordinate to its social conditions and political constitution. I know that, independent of these causes, there are others that give literary works certain characteristics; but these seem to me the principal ones.

The connections between a people's social and political condition and the genius of its writers are always very numerous; to know one is never to be entirely ignorant of the other.

CHAPTER XIV.

The literary industry.

Democracy does not merely spread a taste for literature into the industrial classes; it introduces the industrial spirit into the heart of literature.

In aristocracies, readers are demanding and few; in democracies, it is less difficult to please them, and their number is prodigious. It follows that among aristocratic peoples, one can hope to succeed only through immense effort, and that such efforts may win great glory but can never bring in much money; while in democratic nations, a writer can flatter himself that he will obtain, at little cost, a mediocre reputation and a large fortune. To achieve this he does not need to be admired; it is enough to be enjoyed.

The ever-growing crowd of readers and their constant need for something new guarantee the sale of a book they barely respect.

In democratic times, the public often treats authors the way kings typically treat their courtiers: it enriches them and despises them. What more do the venal souls need — those born in courts or worthy of living there?

Democratic literatures always swarm with authors who see in literature nothing but an industry, and for every great writer you find there, you can count thousands of idea-peddlers.

CHAPTER XV.

Why the study of Greek and Latin literature is especially useful in democratic societies.

What people called "the people" in the most democratic republics of antiquity bore little resemblance to what we call the people today. In Athens, all citizens took part in public affairs, but there were only twenty thousand citizens out of more than three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. All the rest were slaves, and they performed most of the functions that today belong to the common people and even the middle classes.

Athens, with its universal suffrage, was therefore, when all was said and done, nothing more than an aristocratic republic in which all the nobles had an equal right to govern.

The struggle between the patricians and the plebeians in Rome must be seen in the same light — as nothing more than an internal quarrel between the younger and the elder sons of the same family. All of them belonged to the aristocracy, and all had its spirit.

One should also note that throughout antiquity, books were rare and expensive, and that reproducing and distributing them was extremely difficult. These circumstances concentrated the taste for and practice of literature in a small number of people, forming a kind of small literary aristocracy drawn from the elite of a large political aristocracy. Accordingly, nothing suggests that among the Greeks and Romans, literature was ever treated as an industry.

These peoples, who were not merely aristocracies but also highly civilized and free nations, were therefore bound to give their literary productions the particular faults and special qualities that characterize literature in aristocratic centuries.

One need only glance at the writings antiquity has left us to discover that if their authors sometimes lacked variety and fertility of subject, boldness, movement, and breadth of thought, they always displayed admirable art and care in the details. Nothing in their works seems done in haste or by chance; everything is written for connoisseurs, and the pursuit of ideal beauty is always on display. There is no literature that highlights more clearly than that of the ancients precisely those qualities that democratic writers naturally lack. No literature, therefore, is more worth studying in democratic centuries. This study is the best of all remedies for combating the literary defects inherent to those centuries; as for their natural strengths, those will emerge on their own, without anyone needing to teach them.

Here, though, it is important to be clear.

A field of study can be useful to a people's literature without being well suited to their social and political needs.

If one insisted on teaching nothing but fine letters in a society where everyone is habitually driven to make vigorous efforts to increase or maintain their fortune, the result would be very polished and very dangerous citizens. Their social and political situation would give them, every day, needs that their education would never teach them to satisfy, and they would disturb the State in the name of the Greeks and Romans instead of enriching it through their industry.

It is obvious that in democratic societies, the interest of individuals as well as the security of the state demands that the education of the majority be scientific, commercial, and industrial rather than literary.

Greek and Latin should not be taught in every school. But it matters greatly that those whom their natural talent or their fortune destines to cultivate literature — or who are predisposed to appreciate it — should find schools where one can achieve a thorough mastery of ancient literature and steep oneself fully in its spirit. A few excellent universities would serve this purpose better than a multitude of bad colleges where superfluous studies, badly done, prevent necessary studies from being done well.

All those who aspire to literary excellence in democratic nations should frequently nourish themselves on the works of antiquity. It is a salutary discipline.

It is not that I consider the literary productions of the ancients beyond reproach. I simply think they have special qualities that can serve wonderfully to counterbalance our particular defects. They hold us up on the side where we are leaning.

CHAPTER XVI.

How American Democracy Has Modified the English Language.

If the reader has properly understood what I said earlier about literature in general, it will be easy enough to grasp the kind of influence that social conditions and democratic institutions can exert on language itself — the primary instrument of thought.

American authors, strictly speaking, live more in England than in their own country, since they constantly study English writers and take them as their daily models. But the same is not true of the population at large: ordinary people are shaped more directly by the particular forces at work in the United States. So if you want to see the changes that an aristocratic people's language can undergo when it becomes the language of a democracy, you need to pay attention not to the written word but to the spoken one.

Educated Englishmen — far more competent judges of these delicate nuances than I could ever be — have often told me that the educated classes of the United States differ noticeably from the educated classes of Great Britain in the way they speak.

Their complaint was not simply that Americans had put a great many new words into circulation — the distance and separation between the two countries would have been enough to explain that. What struck them was that these new words were borrowed specifically from the jargon of political parties, from the mechanical arts, or from the language of business. They added that old English words were often given new meanings by Americans. And they said, finally, that Americans frequently jumbled styles together in peculiar ways, sometimes placing side by side words that, in the language of the mother country, had always made a point of avoiding each other.

These observations, which were made to me repeatedly by people who seemed entirely credible, led me to reflect on the subject myself — and my thinking brought me, through theory, to the very same point they had reached through practice.

In aristocracies, language naturally shares in the stillness that pervades everything else. Few new words are coined because few new things happen; and even when new things do happen, people make an effort to describe them using familiar words whose meaning tradition has fixed.

If the human mind does finally stir on its own, or if light penetrating from outside awakens it, the new expressions that are created have a learned, intellectual, and philosophical character — a sign that they were not born of democracy. When the fall of Constantinople sent the sciences and letters flooding back toward the West, the French language found itself almost overnight invaded by a swarm of new words, all rooted in Greek and Latin. What France witnessed was a scholarly neologism, available only to the educated classes, whose effects were never felt by the common people — or reached them only very slowly.

All the nations of Europe put on the same show, one after another. Milton alone introduced more than six hundred words into the English language, nearly all drawn from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

The perpetual motion that reigns within a democracy tends, on the contrary, to renew the face of the language ceaselessly, just as it renews the face of business. In the midst of this general agitation and competition of minds, a great number of new ideas take shape; old ideas disappear or resurface; or else they subdivide into infinite little nuances.

So there are always words that need to fall out of use, and others that need to be brought in.

Democratic peoples, moreover, love movement for its own sake. This shows in their language as much as in their politics. Even when they have no need to change their words, they sometimes feel the desire to do so.

The genius of democratic peoples reveals itself not only in the sheer number of new words they put into circulation, but also in the nature of the ideas those new words represent.

Among these peoples, the majority makes the rules in matters of language, just as it does in everything else. Its character shows through here as it does everywhere. Now, the majority is more occupied with business than with study, with political and commercial interests than with philosophical speculation or fine literature. Most of the words it creates or adopts will bear the stamp of these habits; they will serve mainly to express the needs of industry, the passions of political parties, or the details of public administration. That is the direction in which language will keep expanding, while it gradually retreats from the terrain of metaphysics and theology.

As for where democratic nations find their new words and how they go about making them, that is easy enough to explain.

People living in democratic countries have little knowledge of the languages spoken in Rome and Athens, and they do not bother going all the way back to antiquity to find the expression they are missing. When they do resort to learned etymologies, it is usually vanity that sends them digging in dead languages — not genuine erudition offering terms naturally to their minds. It even happens sometimes that the most ignorant among them make the heaviest use of such borrowings. The thoroughly democratic desire to rise above one's station often drives people to dress up a very ordinary trade with a Greek or Latin name. The lower and more distant from learning the occupation, the more pompous and erudite the title. This is how our rope dancers transformed themselves into acrobats and funambulists.

Failing dead languages, democratic peoples happily borrow words from living ones — because they are in constant communication with one another, and people from different countries readily imitate each other, since they grow more alike with every passing day.

But it is mainly within their own language that democratic peoples look for ways to innovate. From time to time they revive forgotten expressions and bring them back into the light; or they take a term that belongs to a particular class of citizens and push it into common usage with a figurative meaning. A multitude of expressions that originally belonged only to the specialized language of a party or a profession are swept into general circulation this way.

The most common device democratic peoples use to innovate in language is to give an existing expression an unfamiliar meaning. This method is very simple, very quick, and very convenient. It takes no learning to use it well, and ignorance itself actually makes it easier. But it puts the language in serious danger. By doubling the meaning of a word this way, democratic peoples sometimes make both the old meaning and the new one uncertain.

An author begins by slightly diverting a well-known expression from its original sense and, after modifying it this way, adapts it as best he can to his subject. Another comes along and pulls the meaning in a different direction; a third drags it down some new path entirely. And since there is no common arbiter, no permanent tribunal that can definitively fix the meaning of a word, it ends up in a wandering state. The result is that writers almost never seem to stick to a single thought; instead they always appear to be aiming at the middle of a cluster of ideas, leaving the reader to judge which one was actually hit.

This is an unfortunate consequence of democracy. I would rather see the language bristling with Chinese, Tatar, or Huron words than have the meaning of French words rendered uncertain. Harmony and homogeneity are merely secondary beauties of language. There is a great deal of convention in such things, and we can manage without them if we must. But there is no good language without clear terms.

Equality inevitably brings several other changes to language as well.

In aristocratic centuries, when each nation tends to keep to itself and loves to maintain its own distinctive character, it often happens that several peoples sharing a common origin become quite foreign to one another — so much so that, while they never lose the ability to understand each other, they no longer all speak in the same way.

In those same centuries, each nation is divided into a certain number of classes that see little of each other and never mix. Each of these classes acquires and invariably maintains intellectual habits that belong to it alone, and adopts by preference certain words and terms that are then passed down from generation to generation like inheritances. Within the same language, then, you find a language of the poor and a language of the rich, a language of commoners and a language of nobles, a language of the learned and a language of the vulgar. The deeper the divisions and the more impassable the barriers, the more this must be so. I would readily bet that among the castes of India, language varies prodigiously, and that there is nearly as great a difference between the speech of an untouchable and that of a Brahmin as between their clothes.

When, on the other hand, people are no longer fixed in their places and see and communicate with each other constantly — when castes are destroyed and classes are renewed and merged — all the words of the language mix together. Those that cannot suit the greatest number perish; the rest form a common mass from which everyone draws more or less at random. Nearly all the different dialects that once divided Europe's languages are visibly fading; there are no regional dialects in the New World, and they are disappearing every day in the Old.

This revolution in the social order affects style just as much as it affects language.

Not only does everyone use the same words, but people grow accustomed to using each of them indiscriminately. The rules that style had created are nearly destroyed. One hardly encounters expressions that seem, by their nature, vulgar, or others that seem distinguished. Individuals from different ranks having brought with them, wherever they end up, the expressions and terms they were used to, the origin of words has been lost just as the origin of people has been, and there is now a confusion in language as there is in society.

I know that in classifying words there are rules that do not depend on one form of society rather than another, but that derive from the very nature of things. There are expressions and turns of phrase that are vulgar because the feelings they express are genuinely base, and others that are elevated because the things they seek to describe are naturally lofty.

No amount of mixing between ranks will ever erase these differences. But equality cannot fail to destroy whatever is purely conventional and arbitrary in the forms of thought. I am not even sure that the necessary classification I just mentioned will not always be less respected in a democratic people than in any other — because in such a people, there are no individuals whose education, knowledge, and leisure permanently incline them to study the natural laws of language and to enforce them by observing those laws themselves.

I do not want to leave this subject without painting one final feature of democratic languages — one that may characterize them more than any other.

I showed earlier that democratic peoples have a taste for — and often a passion for — general ideas; this stems from qualities and defects that are distinctly their own. This love of general ideas manifests itself in democratic languages through the constant use of generic terms and abstract words, and through the way these are employed. This is both the great strength and the great weakness of these languages.

Democratic peoples are passionately fond of generic terms and abstract words because such expressions enlarge thought and, by allowing a great many things to be packed into a small space, help the work of the mind.

A democratic writer will readily say, in abstract fashion, "capabilities" to mean capable people, without specifying what those capabilities apply to. He will speak of "current events" to paint in a single stroke everything happening before his eyes at the moment, and he will use the word "contingencies" to cover everything that might happen in the universe from the moment he is speaking.

Democratic writers endlessly coin abstract words of this kind, or they take words that are already abstract and use them in an increasingly abstract sense.

What is more, to make their speech faster, they personify the object of these abstract words and make it act like a real individual. They will say that "the force of circumstances requires that capabilities govern."

Let me illustrate my point with my own example:

I have often used the word equality in an absolute sense; I have even personified equality in several places, and have said, for instance, that equality does certain things or refrains from others. One can be sure that the men of Louis XIV's century would never have spoken that way; it would never have occurred to any of them to use the word equality without applying it to some particular thing, and they would sooner have given up using the word altogether than consent to turn equality into a living person.

These abstract words that fill democratic languages, and that are used at every turn without being attached to any particular fact, enlarge and veil the thought at the same time; they make expression quicker and the idea less clear. But when it comes to language, democratic peoples prefer obscurity to effort.

I am not even sure, in fact, that vagueness does not hold a certain secret charm for those who speak and write in these nations.

The people who live in democracies, being often left to the individual efforts of their own intelligence, are almost always troubled by doubt. Moreover, since their situation changes constantly, they are never held firmly to any of their opinions by the very immobility of their fortune.

So the people who inhabit democratic countries often have wavering thoughts; they need very broad expressions to contain them. Since they never know whether the idea they are expressing today will suit the new situation they find themselves in tomorrow, they naturally develop a taste for abstract terms. An abstract word is like a box with a false bottom: you put in whatever ideas you want, and you take them out again without anyone seeing.

Among all peoples, generic and abstract terms form the foundation of language; I do not claim, then, that such words are found only in democratic languages. I say merely that the tendency in times of equality is to increase the number of words of this kind, to use them always in isolation in their most abstract sense, and to employ them at every opportunity — even when the needs of the discourse do not require it.

CHAPTER XVII.

On Some Sources of Poetry in Democratic Nations.

The word poetry has been given many very different meanings. It would tire my readers to sort through them all and figure out which is best; I prefer to tell them right away which one I have chosen.

Poetry, in my eyes, is the search for and the depiction of the ideal.

The person who, by stripping away part of what exists, adding a few imaginary touches to the picture, and combining certain real circumstances whose conjunction does not actually occur, completes and enlarges nature — that person is the poet. Poetry's aim, then, is not to represent the true, but to adorn it and to offer the mind a higher image.

Verse strikes me as the ideal beauty of language, and in that sense it is eminently poetic; but verse alone does not constitute poetry.

I want to ask whether, among the actions, feelings, and ideas of democratic peoples, there may not be some that lend themselves to the imagination of the ideal and that should, for that reason, be considered natural sources of poetry.

We must first acknowledge that the taste for the ideal, and the pleasure people take in seeing it depicted, are never as lively or as widespread in a democracy as in an aristocracy.

In aristocratic nations, the body sometimes acts almost on its own, while the soul is plunged into a rest that weighs on it. Among these nations, even the common people often display poetic tastes, and their minds sometimes soar beyond and above everything around them.

But in democracies, the love of material pleasures, the idea of improvement, competition, the nearby lure of success — all of these act as so many spurs that drive each person headlong down the career he has chosen and forbid him from straying even for a moment. The soul's main effort goes in this direction. Imagination is not extinguished, but it devotes itself almost exclusively to conceiving the useful and representing the real.

Equality does not merely turn people away from depicting the ideal; it reduces the number of subjects worth depicting.

Aristocracy, by holding society still, supports the solidity and endurance of established religions, just as it supports the stability of political institutions.

Not only does it keep the human mind in a state of faith, but it inclines it to adopt one faith in particular. An aristocratic people will always tend to place intermediary powers between God and man.

In this respect, one can say that aristocracy is very favorable to poetry. When the universe is populated with supernatural beings that escape the senses but that the mind discovers, the imagination feels at ease, and poets — finding a thousand different subjects to paint — find countless spectators ready to take an interest in their work.

In democratic centuries, it sometimes happens, on the contrary, that beliefs drift like laws. Doubt then pulls the poet's imagination back to earth and confines it within the visible and real world.

Even when equality does not shake religion, it simplifies it — diverting attention from secondary agents and directing it mainly toward the sovereign master.

Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind toward contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives people a kind of instinctive distaste for what is old. In this, aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry — because things generally grow larger and more veiled as they recede into the distance, and in both respects they lend themselves more readily to the depiction of the ideal.

After stripping poetry of the past, equality also takes away part of the present.

Among aristocratic peoples there are a certain number of privileged individuals whose existence is, so to speak, above and beyond the human condition; power, wealth, glory, wit, refinement, and distinction in all things seem to belong to them by right. The crowd never sees them up close, never follows them into the details of their lives; it takes little effort to make a poetic portrait of such people.

On the other hand, among these same peoples there are classes that are ignorant, humble, and enslaved, and these lend themselves to poetry through the very excess of their coarseness and misery, just as the others do through their refinement and grandeur. Moreover, since the different classes of an aristocratic society are sharply separated from one another and know each other poorly, the imagination can always, when portraying them, add or subtract something from reality.

In democratic societies, where everyone is very small and very much alike, each person, looking at himself, sees all the others at the same instant. Poets who live in democratic centuries can therefore never take a particular individual as the subject of their portrait — because a mediocre-sized object, seen distinctly from all sides, will never lend itself to the ideal.

And so equality, as it establishes itself on earth, dries up most of the ancient sources of poetry.

Let us try to show how it discovers new ones.

When doubt had depopulated the heavens and the progress of equality had reduced each person to better-known and smaller proportions, poets — not yet imagining what they could put in the place of those grand subjects that were vanishing along with the aristocracy — turned their eyes toward inanimate nature. Losing sight of heroes and gods, they set about painting rivers and mountains.

This gave birth, in the last century, to what has been called, par excellence, descriptive poetry.

Some have thought that this embellished painting of the material, inanimate things that cover the earth was the poetry proper to democratic centuries; but I think that is a mistake. I believe it represents only a transitional phase.

I am convinced that in the long run, democracy will turn the imagination away from everything external to man and fix it on man alone.

Democratic peoples may amuse themselves for a time by looking at nature, but they only truly come alive at the sight of themselves. It is only in this direction that the natural sources of poetry lie for these peoples, and it is fair to believe that all poets who refuse to draw from this well will lose their hold on the souls they mean to enchant and will end up with nothing but cold witnesses to their passions.

I have shown how the idea of progress and the indefinite perfectibility of the human race belong naturally to democratic ages.

Democratic peoples care little about what has been, but they dream eagerly about what will be — and in that direction, their imagination has no limits. It stretches and expands beyond all measure.

This opens a vast field to poets and lets them push their canvas far from the viewer's eye. Democracy, which closes the past to poetry, opens the future to it.

Since all the citizens of a democratic society are roughly equal and alike, poetry cannot attach itself to any one of them; but the nation itself offers itself to the poet's brush. The very similarity of all individuals, which makes each one separately unsuitable as a subject for poetry, allows poets to gather them all into a single image and to contemplate the people itself. Democratic nations perceive their own collective figure more clearly than any others, and this grand figure lends itself marvelously to the depiction of the ideal.

I will readily concede that Americans have no poets; I cannot concede that they have no poetic ideas.

In Europe, people are fascinated by the wilderness of America; but Americans themselves hardly think about it. The marvels of inanimate nature leave them unmoved, and they barely notice the magnificent forests surrounding them until the moment they fall under the ax. Their eyes are filled with a different spectacle. The American people watch themselves marching through those wildernesses — draining the swamps, straightening the rivers, populating the solitudes, taming nature. This magnificent image of themselves does not appear to Americans only now and then; you could say it follows each of them through the smallest of their actions as well as the greatest, and remains forever suspended before their mind's eye.

Nothing could be imagined so small, so dull, so filled with petty interests, so anti-poetic, in a word, as the life of an individual in the United States; but among the ideas that guide that life, there is always one that is full of poetry, and it acts as the hidden nerve that gives strength to all the rest.

In aristocratic centuries, each people, like each individual, tends to stay still and separate from all others.

In democratic centuries, the extreme mobility of people and their impatient desires drive them to change places constantly, and the inhabitants of different countries mingle, see each other, listen to each other, and borrow from each other. It is not just the members of a single nation who become alike; the nations themselves grow similar, and all of them together form, in the spectator's eye, nothing more than one vast democracy in which each citizen is a people. This brings the figure of the human race into full daylight for the first time.

Everything relating to the existence of the human race taken as a whole — its vicissitudes, its future — becomes an enormously fertile source of poetry.

Poets who lived in aristocratic ages produced admirable paintings by taking as their subjects certain episodes in the life of a people or a man; but none of them ever dared to encompass in their picture the destinies of the entire human species, whereas poets writing in democratic ages can attempt it.

At the very moment when each person, lifting his eyes above his own country, begins at last to perceive humanity itself, God reveals himself more and more to the human mind in his full and complete majesty.

If, in democratic centuries, faith in established religions often wavers and belief in intermediary powers — whatever name you give them — grows dim, on the other hand people are inclined to conceive a much vaster idea of the Divinity itself, and God's intervention in human affairs appears to them in a new and grander light.

Perceiving the human race as a single whole, they easily conceive that a single design governs its destinies; and in the actions of each individual, they tend to recognize the trace of that general and constant plan by which God guides the species.

This too can be considered a very abundant source of poetry that opens up in these centuries.

Democratic poets will always seem small and cold if they try to give gods, demons, or angels bodily forms and bring them down from heaven to fight over the earth.

But if they want to connect the great events they describe to God's general designs for the universe — and, without showing the sovereign master's hand, let the reader penetrate his thought — they will be admired and understood, because the imagination of their contemporaries naturally follows this same path.

One can equally predict that poets living in democratic ages will paint passions and ideas rather than persons and actions.

The language, dress, and daily actions of people in democracies resist the imagination of the ideal. These things are not poetic in themselves, and they would cease to be poetic in any case, for the simple reason that they are too well known to everyone the poet might address. This forces poets to keep piercing beneath the outer surface that the senses reveal, in order to glimpse the soul itself. Now, there is nothing that lends itself more to the depiction of the ideal than man viewed this way, in the depths of his immaterial nature.

I do not need to travel through heaven and earth to find a wondrous object full of contrasts, of infinite grandeur and infinite smallness, of profound darkness and strange flashes of light, capable of inspiring pity, admiration, contempt, and terror all at once. I need only look at myself: man emerges from nothingness, passes through time, and is about to vanish forever into the bosom of God. You see him for only a moment, wandering on the edge of two abysses — where he is lost.

If man knew nothing at all about himself, he would not be poetic, for you cannot paint what you have no idea of. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would lie idle, with nothing to add to the picture. But man is revealed just enough that he glimpses something of himself, and veiled just enough that the rest plunges into impenetrable darkness — into which he dives ceaselessly, and always in vain, trying to grasp what he is.

We should not expect, then, that the poetry of democratic peoples will live on legends, or feed on traditions and ancient memories, or try to repopulate the universe with supernatural beings that neither readers nor poets themselves believe in anymore, or that it will coldly personify virtues and vices that people want to see in their true form. All these resources are gone; but man remains, and that is enough. Human destinies — man taken apart from his time and his country and placed face to face with nature and with God, with his passions, his doubts, his unheard-of prosperities and his incomprehensible miseries — will become for these peoples the principal and almost sole object of poetry; and one can already be sure of this by looking at what the greatest poets since the world began turning toward democracy have written.

The writers who, in our own day, have so admirably reproduced the features of Childe Harold, of Rene, and of Jocelyn, did not set out to tell the story of one man's actions; they wanted to illuminate and enlarge certain still-obscure corners of the human heart.

These are the poems of democracy.

Equality, then, does not destroy all the objects of poetry; it makes them fewer and vaster.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Why American Writers and Orators Are Often Bombastic.

I have often noticed that Americans, who generally handle practical matters in a clear, dry language, stripped of all ornament and often so plain as to be vulgar, happily plunge into bombast the moment they attempt the poetic style. They become relentlessly pompous from one end of the speech to the other, and watching them pile up images at every turn, you would think they had never said anything simply in their lives.

The English fall into this fault much less often.

The reason can be explained without much difficulty.

In democratic societies, every citizen is habitually occupied with contemplating one very small object — himself. If he happens to look higher, he sees only the immense image of society, or the even grander figure of the human race. His ideas are either very specific and very clear, or very general and very vague; the space in between is empty.

So when he is drawn away from himself, he always expects to be offered something prodigious to look at — and only at this price does he consent to tear himself away, for a moment, from the complicated little concerns that agitate and charm his life.

This seems to me a fair explanation of why people in democracies, whose business is generally so modest, demand such vast conceptions and such outsized paintings from their poets.

For their part, the writers are happy to obey instincts they share: they inflate their imaginations ceaselessly, and by stretching them beyond all measure, they make them reach the gigantic — for which they often abandon the merely great.

In this way, they hope to catch the crowd's eye immediately and hold it around them, and they often succeed — because the crowd, which looks to poetry only for very grand subjects, has neither the time to measure the exact proportions of everything placed before it nor the sure taste to see easily where things are out of proportion. The author and the public corrupt each other this way, each through the other.

We have also seen that among democratic peoples, the sources of poetry are beautiful but not abundant. They are soon exhausted. Finding no more material for the ideal in the real and the true, poets abandon reality altogether and create monsters.

I have no fear that the poetry of democratic peoples will prove timid or keep too close to the ground. What I worry about, rather, is that it will lose itself constantly in the clouds and end up painting entirely imaginary lands. I fear that the works of democratic poets will frequently offer up immense and incoherent images, overloaded paintings, bizarre composites — and that the fantastic beings sprung from their minds will sometimes make us miss the real world.

CHAPTER XIX.

Some Observations on the Theater of Democratic Peoples.

When the revolution that has changed the social and political order of an aristocratic people first begins to surface in literature, it is generally through the theater that it shows itself — and it is there that it always remains most visible.

The spectator of a dramatic work is, in a sense, caught off guard by the impression being suggested to him. He has no time to consult his memory or check with the experts; it does not occur to him to resist the new literary instincts beginning to stir within him; he gives in to them before he even knows what they are.

Authors are quick to discover which way the public's taste is secretly leaning. They turn their works in that direction, and plays — having first served to reveal the coming literary revolution — soon finish the job of accomplishing it. If you want to judge in advance what the literature of a people turning toward democracy will look like, study its theater.

Plays, moreover, are the most democratic portion of literature even in aristocratic nations. There is no literary pleasure more accessible to the crowd than what you experience watching a stage. It requires no preparation and no study to feel it. It seizes you in the middle of your preoccupations and your ignorance. When the still half-crude love of intellectual pleasures first begins to enter a class of citizens, it drives them straight to the theater. The theaters of aristocratic nations have always been filled with spectators who did not belong to the aristocracy. It was at the theater alone that the upper classes mixed with the middle and the lower, and where they consented — if not to take advice from them — at least to let them give it. It was at the theater that scholars and writers always had the hardest time imposing their taste on the people and defending themselves from being carried away by theirs. The pit has often made the rules for the boxes.

If it is hard for an aristocracy to keep the people from invading the theater, it is easy to see that the people must reign there as masters once democratic principles have penetrated the laws and the customs, once ranks are blurred and minds draw closer together like fortunes, and once the upper class loses — along with its hereditary wealth — its power, its traditions, and its leisure.

The natural tastes and instincts of democratic peoples, when it comes to literature, will therefore show themselves at the theater first, and one can predict they will arrive there with force. In written works, the literary rules of the aristocracy will be modified gradually, step by step, almost legally. At the theater, they will be overthrown by riots.

The theater puts on full display most of the qualities and nearly all the faults inherent in democratic literatures.

Democratic peoples have only a very modest regard for learning, and they care little about what happened in Rome and Athens; they want to hear about themselves, and it is a portrait of the present that they demand.

So when the heroes and customs of antiquity are frequently staged and faithfully reproduced, that alone is enough to conclude that democratic classes do not yet dominate the theater.

Racine apologizes very humbly in the preface to Britannicus for having made Junia a vestal virgin, since, according to Aulus Gellius, he says, "no one was admitted under the age of six, nor above the age of ten." He probably would not have thought to accuse or defend himself for such a crime if he had been writing in our day.

A fact like this sheds light not only on the state of literature in the times it occurs, but on the state of society itself. A democratic theater does not prove the nation is a democracy, because, as we have just seen, even in aristocracies democratic tastes can influence the stage. But when the spirit of aristocracy reigns unchallenged at the theater, that demonstrates conclusively that the entire society is aristocratic — and one can safely conclude that the same learned and literate class that directs the authors also commands the citizens and runs the country.

When aristocracy rules the theater, its refined tastes and lofty inclinations almost always lead it to make, as it were, a selection from human nature. Certain social conditions interest it above all, and it enjoys seeing them painted on stage. Certain virtues — and even certain vices — seem to it especially worth portraying; it welcomes the depiction of these while pushing all others out of sight. At the theater, as everywhere else, it wants to encounter only great lords, and it is moved only by kings. The same goes for style: aristocracy readily imposes particular ways of speaking on playwrights and demands that everything be said in a certain tone.

This often leads the theater to paint only one side of human nature, or even sometimes to portray things not found in it at all; the theater rises above human nature and leaves it behind.

In democratic societies, spectators have no such preferences and rarely show such aversions. They like to find on stage the same confused mixture of conditions, feelings, and ideas that they encounter in daily life; the theater becomes more striking, more vulgar, and more true.

Sometimes, however, those who write for the democratic theater also depart from human nature — but from the other end. In their eagerness to reproduce the petty peculiarities of the present moment and the particular features of certain individuals, they forget to trace the general features of the species.

When democratic classes rule the theater, they introduce as much freedom in the way a subject is treated as in the choice of the subject itself.

Since the love of theater is, of all literary tastes, the most natural to democratic peoples, the number of authors and spectators grows constantly in such nations, as does the number of productions. A multitude so diverse, spread across so many different places, cannot recognize the same rules or submit to the same laws. No agreement is possible among judges who are too numerous and who, not knowing where to find one another, each render their verdict alone. If the general effect of democracy is to make literary rules and conventions doubtful, in the theater it abolishes them entirely and replaces them with nothing but the whim of each author and each audience.

It is also in the theater that what I said elsewhere, in general terms, about style and craft in democratic literatures shows up most clearly. When you read the criticism prompted by dramatic works in the age of Louis XIV, you are struck by the public's great esteem for verisimilitude and by the importance it placed on a character remaining consistent with himself and doing nothing that could not be easily explained and understood. It is equally surprising how much value was placed on the niceties of language, and what petty quarrels over words were picked with playwrights.

It seems that people in Louis XIV's century placed an exaggerated value on details that are noticed in the study but vanish on the stage. After all, a play's primary purpose is to be performed, and its first merit is to move. This happened because the audience of that era were also readers. When the performance was over, they waited for the writer at home to finish judging him.

In democracies, people listen to plays but do not read them. Most of those who go to the theater are not looking for pleasures of the mind but for strong emotions of the heart. They do not expect to find a work of literature but a spectacle; and provided the author speaks the language of the country well enough to be understood and his characters arouse curiosity and sympathy, they are satisfied. Without asking anything more from fiction, they immediately return to the real world. Style, therefore, matters less — because on stage, the rules of style escape notice more easily.

As for verisimilitude: it is impossible to be frequently novel, unexpected, and fast while remaining faithful to it. So it is neglected, and the audience forgives the neglect. You can count on the fact that the audience will not worry about the roads you took to get there, so long as you bring them before something that moves them. They will never blame you for having stirred them in defiance of the rules.

Americans display all the different instincts I have just described when they go to the theater. But it must be said that only a small number of them actually go. Although audiences and productions have grown enormously in the United States over the past forty years, the population still indulges in this form of entertainment with extreme restraint.

This is due to particular causes the reader already knows and that need only a brief reminder:

The Puritans who founded the American republics were not merely hostile to pleasure; they professed a special horror of the theater. They regarded it as an abominable diversion, and as long as their spirit ruled without challenge, dramatic performances were absolutely unknown among them. These opinions of the first colonial fathers left deep marks on the minds of their descendants.

The extreme regularity of habits and the great rigidity of customs visible in the United States have, moreover, been unfavorable until now to the development of the theatrical art.

There are no dramatic subjects in a country that has not witnessed great political catastrophes and where love always leads by a direct and easy path to marriage. People who spend every day of the week making money and Sunday praying to God do not lend themselves to the comic muse.

A single fact is enough to show that theater is not very popular in the United States.

Americans, whose laws guarantee freedom and even license of speech in all things, have nonetheless subjected playwrights to a kind of censorship. Theatrical performances can take place only when the township administrators permit them. This shows clearly that peoples are like individuals: they indulge their principal passions without restraint, and then take great care not to give in too much to tastes they do not have.

There is no branch of literature more closely and more extensively tied to the current state of society than the theater.

The theater of one era can never suit the next if, between the two, an important revolution has changed customs and laws.

We still study the great writers of another age. But we no longer attend plays written for another audience. Playwrights of the past live on only in books.

The traditional taste of a few people, vanity, fashion, the genius of a particular actor — these can sustain or even revive an aristocratic theater within a democracy for a while. But soon enough, it collapses on its own. It is not overthrown; it is simply abandoned.

CHAPTER XX.

Some Particular Tendencies of Historians in Democratic Centuries.

Historians who write in aristocratic centuries usually make all events depend on the particular will and temperament of certain individuals, and they readily trace the most sweeping revolutions to the smallest accidents. They shrewdly bring out the tiniest causes — and often fail to see the largest ones.

Historians who live in democratic centuries display exactly the opposite tendencies.

Most of them attribute almost no influence to the individual over the destiny of the species, or to individual citizens over the fate of the people. But in return, they assign great general causes to every small particular event. These opposing tendencies are easy to explain.

When historians of aristocratic centuries look at the world stage, they immediately spot a very small number of principal actors who are running the whole show. These grand figures, standing at the front of the stage, capture their gaze and hold it: while the historians busy themselves uncovering the secret motives that make these few people act and speak, they forget about everyone else.

The importance of what they see a few individuals accomplish gives them an exaggerated idea of the influence one person can exert, and naturally inclines them to believe that you always have to trace the movements of the crowd back to the particular actions of a single individual.

When, on the other hand, all citizens are independent of one another and each one is weak, you cannot find anyone who wields great power over the mass — much less lasting power. At first glance, individuals seem completely powerless to affect it, and you would think society moves along entirely on its own, through the free and spontaneous cooperation of all the people who compose it.

This naturally leads the mind to search for the general cause that could have struck so many minds at once and turned them all simultaneously in the same direction.

I am thoroughly convinced that even in democratic nations, the genius, the vices, or the virtues of certain individuals speed up or slow down the natural course of a people's destiny. But these kinds of contingent, secondary causes are infinitely more varied, more hidden, more complex, less powerful, and therefore more difficult to untangle and trace in times of equality than in aristocratic centuries, where all you need to do is analyze the particular actions of a single person or a handful of people amid the general sweep of events.

The historian soon grows weary of such work; his mind gets lost in this labyrinth. Unable to see individual influences clearly or bring them sufficiently to light, he denies they exist. He prefers to talk to us about the character of races, the physical constitution of the country, or the spirit of civilization. This shortens his work and, at less cost, satisfies the reader better.

M. de Lafayette said somewhere in his memoirs that the exaggerated belief in general causes provides marvelous consolation to mediocre public men. I would add that it provides admirable consolation to mediocre historians as well. It always supplies them with a few grand explanations that get them quickly out of trouble at the most difficult point in their book, and it indulges the weakness or laziness of their minds while doing credit to their profundity.

For my part, I think there is no era in which one should not attribute part of what happens in the world to very general facts and another part to very particular influences. These two types of causes are always present; only their relative weight differs. General facts explain more things in democratic centuries than in aristocratic ones, and particular influences explain fewer. In aristocratic times, the reverse is true: particular influences are stronger and general causes are weaker — unless you count inequality of conditions itself as a general cause, since it is what allows a few individuals to counteract the natural tendencies of everyone else.

Historians who try to depict what happens in democratic societies are therefore right to give general causes a large role and to focus primarily on discovering them. But they are wrong to deny the particular actions of individuals entirely, just because those actions are hard to find and harder to follow.

Not only are historians living in democratic centuries drawn to assign every event a large cause — they are also inclined to link events together and derive a system from them.

In aristocratic centuries, the historian's attention is constantly being pulled toward individuals, and the chain of events escapes him — or rather, he does not believe in such a chain. The thread of history seems to him to break at every moment with the passage of one man.

In democratic centuries, on the contrary, since the historian sees far fewer actors and far more acts, he can easily establish a sequence and a methodical order among them.

Ancient literature, which left us such beautiful histories, did not produce a single great historical system, while the most mediocre modern literatures are teeming with them. It seems that ancient historians did not make enough use of those general theories that our own historians are always on the verge of abusing.

Those who write in democratic centuries have another tendency that is more dangerous still.

When the trace of individual action on nations is lost, you often see the world moving without the mover being discovered. Since it becomes very hard to perceive and analyze the reasons that, acting separately on the will of each citizen, end up producing the movement of the whole people, one is tempted to believe that this movement is not voluntary — that societies obey, without knowing it, some superior force that dominates them.

Even when you think you have identified the general fact on earth that directs the particular will of every individual, that does not save human freedom. A cause vast enough to apply to millions of people at once, and strong enough to bend them all in the same direction, easily seems irresistible; after seeing that people yielded to it, you are very close to believing that they could not have resisted.

Historians who live in democratic times therefore do not merely deny a few citizens the power to act on a people's destiny — they also strip peoples themselves of the ability to modify their own fate, and they subject them either to an inflexible providence or to a kind of blind fatality. According to them, each nation is inescapably bound — by its position, its origins, its past, its character — to a certain destiny that all its efforts cannot change. They make generations responsible for one another, and tracing this chain backward from age to age, from necessary event to necessary event, all the way to the origin of the world, they forge a tight and immense chain that wraps around the entire human race and binds it.

It is not enough for them to show how events happened; they take pleasure in showing that events could not have happened otherwise. They look at a nation that has arrived at a certain point in its history and declare that it was compelled to follow the path that brought it there. That is easier than teaching how it might have taken a better road.

Reading the historians of aristocratic ages — and especially those of antiquity — you get the feeling that to become master of his fate and to govern his fellow men, a man has only to learn to master himself. Reading the histories written in our time, you would think that man can do nothing — neither over himself nor over what surrounds him. The historians of antiquity taught how to command; those of our day teach little except how to obey. In their writings, the author often appears great, but humanity is always small.

If this doctrine of fatality — which has such appeal for those who write history in democratic centuries — were to pass from writers to readers, penetrate the mass of citizens, and seize hold of the public mind, one can foresee that it would soon paralyze the movement of modern societies and reduce Christians to the condition of Turks.

I will add that such a doctrine is particularly dangerous in our own time. Our contemporaries are already far too inclined to doubt free will, because each of them feels hemmed in on all sides by his own weakness. But they still willingly grant strength and independence to people joined together in a social body. We must be careful not to obscure this idea — because the task at hand is to lift up souls, not to finish the job of crushing them.

CHAPTER XXI.

On Parliamentary Eloquence in the United States.

In aristocratic nations, everyone is bound to and depends on everyone else; there is a hierarchical chain connecting them all, which serves to keep each person in his place and the whole body in obedience. Something similar can always be found inside the political assemblies of these peoples. The parties naturally fall in line behind certain leaders whom they obey through a kind of instinct that is really just the product of habits formed elsewhere. They carry the customs of the larger society into the smaller one.

In democratic countries, it often happens that a great many citizens are heading toward the same point — but each one walks there, or at least flatters himself that he walks there, on his own. Accustomed to governing his movements only according to his personal impulses, he does not easily submit to receiving direction from outside. This taste for independence, this habit of it, follows him into the national assemblies. If he agrees to join with others in pursuit of the same goal, he still wants to remain in control of contributing to the common success in his own way.

This is why, in democratic countries, parties endure leadership so impatiently and show themselves subordinate only when the danger is extreme. Even then, the authority of leaders — which in those circumstances may extend to making people act and speak — almost never reaches the power of making them be quiet.

In aristocratic nations, the members of political assemblies are at the same time members of the aristocracy. Each of them holds, on his own, a high and secure rank, and the seat he occupies in the assembly is often less important in his eyes than the position he holds in the country. This consoles him for not playing a role in political discussions and inclines him not to pursue a mediocre one too eagerly.

In America, it usually happens that a representative is somebody only by virtue of his position in the assembly. He is therefore constantly tormented by the need to acquire importance there, and he feels an impetuous desire to put his ideas on display at every moment.

He is pushed in this direction not only by his own vanity but by the vanity of his constituents and the constant need to please them.

In aristocratic nations, the legislator is rarely in close dependence on his voters; often he is in some sense a necessary representative for them; sometimes he holds them in tight dependence on him. And if they do finally refuse him their vote, he easily gets himself nominated elsewhere, or — retiring from public life — he retreats into a leisured existence that still has its splendor.

In a democratic country like the United States, a representative almost never has a lasting hold on his voters' minds. However small an electoral district may be, democratic instability keeps it constantly changing its complexion. It must therefore be won over every single day.

He is never sure of them; and if they abandon him, he is immediately without recourse — because he does not naturally occupy a position high enough to be easily noticed by those who are not close by, and given the complete independence in which the citizens live, he cannot hope that his friends or the government will easily impose him on a district that does not know him. All the seeds of his career are planted in the district he represents; it is from this little patch of earth that he must rise to command the people and influence the destinies of the world.

It is natural, then, that in democratic countries the members of political assemblies think more about their constituents than about their party, while in aristocracies they think more about their party than about their constituents.

Now, what must be said to please the voters is not always what would best serve the political opinion they profess.

The general interest of a party often requires that its member never speak about the great affairs he understands poorly; that he speak little about the small ones that would obstruct the progress of the great ones; and, most of all, that he keep quiet entirely. Silence is the most useful service a mediocre speaker can render to the public good.

But that is not how voters see it.

The people of a district send a citizen to take part in governing the state because they have formed a very lofty idea of his abilities. Since people appear larger in proportion to how small their surroundings are, it stands to reason that the opinion formed of a representative will be all the higher the rarer talent is among those he represents. It will therefore often happen that voters expect all the more from their representative the less they are entitled to expect, and however incapable he may be, they cannot fail to demand from him extraordinary efforts that match the rank they have given him.

Beyond seeing him as a legislator of the state, the voters also see their representative as the natural protector of the district before the legislature; they are not far from considering him the personal agent of each person who elected him, and they expect that he will show no less energy in advancing their private interests than those of the country.

So voters take it for granted in advance that the representative they choose will be an orator; that he will speak often if he can; and that, should he have to limit himself, he will at least manage to pack into his rare speeches an examination of all the great affairs of state combined with an account of all the petty grievances they themselves wish to voice — so that, being unable to show himself frequently, he will demonstrate at each appearance everything he is capable of, and, instead of spreading himself thin at all times, he will compress himself entirely into a small package from time to time, providing a sort of brilliant and complete summary of his constituents and himself. On these terms, they promise their next votes.

This drives to despair honest mediocrities who, knowing themselves, would never have put themselves forward on their own. The representative, thus goaded, takes the floor to the great dismay of his friends and, throwing himself recklessly into the midst of the most celebrated orators, tangles up the debate and exhausts the assembly.

All laws that tend to make the elected official more dependent on the voter therefore affect not only the behavior of legislators — as I have pointed out elsewhere — but also their language. They influence both the business of government and the way people talk about it.

There is hardly a member of Congress who will agree to go home without having sent ahead at least one speech, or who will tolerate being interrupted before he has managed to squeeze into the limits of his oration everything useful that can be said about the twenty-four states that make up the Union — and especially the district he represents. He thus marches his listeners through grand general truths that he often does not see himself and can only gesture at vaguely, and through small, extremely thin details that he has all too much facility in discovering and explaining. As a result, it very often happens that within this great body the debate becomes vague and muddled, seeming to crawl toward its goal rather than march toward it.

Something of this kind will, I think, always be visible in the public assemblies of democracies.

Fortunate circumstances and good laws might manage to draw into a democratic legislature men far more remarkable than those the Americans send to Congress; but nothing will ever prevent the mediocrities who find their way there from complacently putting themselves on full display, from every possible angle, in broad daylight.

The problem does not seem to me entirely curable, because it is rooted not just in the rules of the assembly but in its very constitution and in that of the country itself.

The people of the United States seem to see it this way themselves, and they demonstrate their long experience of parliamentary life not by abstaining from bad speeches but by submitting with courage to hear them. They resign themselves to it, as to an evil that experience has taught them is unavoidable.

We have shown the petty side of political debate in democracies; now let us show the grand side.

What has taken place over the past hundred and fifty years in the Parliament of England has never had much resonance abroad; the ideas and sentiments expressed by its orators have always found little sympathy even among the nations closest to the great theater of British liberty. Whereas from the very first debates that took place in the small colonial assemblies of America at the time of the Revolution, Europe was stirred.

This was not due merely to particular and accidental circumstances, but to general and lasting causes.

I can think of nothing more admirable or more powerful than a great orator debating great questions in a democratic assembly. Since no class has its own representatives there to defend its interests, it is always to the nation as a whole, and in the name of the nation as a whole, that one speaks. This enlarges the thought and elevates the language.

Since precedent carries little weight there; since there are no longer privileges attached to certain types of property, or rights inherent in certain bodies or certain men, the mind is forced to go back to general truths drawn from human nature in order to deal with the particular matter at hand. This gives political debate in a democratic people — however small that people may be — a quality of generality that often makes it compelling to all humanity. Every person takes an interest, because it deals with Man — who is everywhere the same.

Among the greatest aristocratic nations, on the contrary, the most general questions are nearly always treated by means of particular arguments drawn from the usages of an era or the rights of a class — which interests only that class, or at most the people within which that class exists.

It is to this cause, as much as to the greatness of the French nation and the favorable dispositions of the peoples who listen to it, that we must attribute the great effect our political debates sometimes produce in the world.

Our orators often speak to all mankind, even when they are addressing only their fellow citizens.

CHAPTER I.

Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Passionate and Enduring Love for Equality Than for Liberty.

The first and most powerful passion that equality of social conditions produces -- I hardly need to say it -- is the love of that very equality. So no one will be surprised that I address it before all others.

Everyone has noticed that in our time, and especially in France, this passion for equality has been claiming a larger and larger place in the human heart. It has been said a hundred times that our contemporaries feel a far more intense and far more tenacious love for equality than for liberty. But I do not think anyone has traced this fact back to its causes well enough. I am going to try.

You can imagine an extreme point where liberty and equality meet and merge.

Suppose that all citizens take part in government, and that each has an equal right to do so.

Since no one then differs from his fellows, no one could exercise tyrannical power. People would be perfectly free because they were all entirely equal; and they would be all perfectly equal because they were entirely free. This is the ideal that democratic peoples strive toward.

That is the most complete form equality can take on earth; but there are a thousand others that, without being as perfect, are hardly less dear to those peoples.

Equality can be established in civil society without reigning in the political world. You can have the right to enjoy the same pleasures, enter the same professions, meet in the same places -- in a word, to live in the same manner and pursue wealth by the same means -- without all taking the same part in government.

A kind of equality can even be established in the political world without political liberty being present. You are the equal of all your fellows, except one, who is, without distinction, the master of all, and who draws equally from among all the agents of his power.

It would be easy to imagine several other scenarios in which a very great equality could be combined with more or less free institutions, or even with institutions that were not free at all.

Although people cannot become absolutely equal without being entirely free, and although equality in its most extreme degree merges with liberty, there is good reason to distinguish one from the other.

The taste that people have for liberty and the taste they feel for equality are, in fact, two distinct things, and I am not afraid to add that among democratic peoples they are two unequal things.

If you pay close attention, you will see that in every age there is one singular, dominant fact to which all others are connected. This fact almost always gives rise to a master idea or a ruling passion that ends up drawing all feelings and all ideas into its current. It is like a great river toward which every surrounding stream seems to flow.

Liberty has appeared to human beings at different times and in different forms; it has not attached itself exclusively to one type of social order, and you encounter it outside of democracies as well. So it cannot be the defining characteristic of democratic ages.

The particular, dominant fact that sets these ages apart is the equality of social conditions; the ruling passion that drives people in these times is the love of that equality.

Do not ask what peculiar charm people in democratic ages find in living as equals, or what particular reasons they may have for clinging so stubbornly to equality rather than to the other goods that society offers them. Equality is the defining characteristic of the era they live in; that alone is enough to explain why they prefer it to everything else.

But independently of this reason, there are several others that will always lead people, in every era, to prefer equality to liberty.

If a people could ever manage to destroy -- or even merely diminish -- the equality that prevails among them, they could only do so through long and painful efforts. They would have to alter their social conditions, abolish their laws, remake their ideas, change their habits, transform their customs and values. But to lose political liberty, you only have to fail to hold on to it, and it slips away.

People are therefore attached to equality not only because it is dear to them; they cling to it because they believe it will last forever.

That political liberty can, in its excesses, endanger the peace, the property, the lives of individuals -- there is no one so limited or so careless who does not grasp this. On the other hand, only attentive, clear-sighted people perceive the dangers that equality threatens us with, and they usually avoid pointing them out. They know that the miseries they dread are far off, and they reassure themselves that those miseries will only strike future generations -- generations the present one scarcely worries about. The harms that liberty sometimes brings are immediate; they are visible to everyone, and everyone, more or less, feels them. The harms that extreme equality can produce reveal themselves only bit by bit; they creep gradually into the social body; you see them only from time to time, and by the moment they become most severe, habit has already made them imperceptible.

The goods that liberty provides only appear over the long run, and it is always easy to mistake the cause that produces them.

The advantages of equality make themselves felt right away, and every day you can see them flowing from their source.

Political liberty gives sublime pleasures, from time to time, to a certain number of citizens.

Equality provides every person with a multitude of small enjoyments every single day. The charms of equality are felt at every moment and are within everyone's reach; the noblest hearts are not insensitive to them, and the most ordinary souls make them their delight. The passion that equality creates must therefore be at once powerful and universal.

People cannot enjoy political liberty without purchasing it through some sacrifices, and they never seize it without great effort. But the pleasures that equality provides come of their own accord. Each small incident of private life seems to produce them, and to savor them you only need to be alive.

Democratic peoples love equality at all times, but there are certain periods when they push the passion they feel for it to the point of frenzy. This happens at the moment when the old social hierarchy, long under threat, finally collapses after one last internal struggle, and the barriers that separated citizens are at last torn down. People then rush toward equality as toward a conquest, and they cling to it as to a precious good that someone wants to steal from them. The passion for equality penetrates every corner of the human heart; it expands, it fills it completely. Do not tell people that by blindly surrendering to an exclusive passion they are compromising their most cherished interests -- they are deaf. Do not show them liberty slipping from their hands while they look elsewhere -- they are blind, or rather, they see in the entire universe only one good worth desiring.

Everything above applies to all democratic nations. What follows concerns only ourselves.

Among most modern nations, and particularly among the peoples of continental Europe, the taste and the idea of liberty only began to emerge and develop at the same time that social conditions were becoming more equal, and as a consequence of that very equality. It was absolute kings who worked hardest to level the ranks among their subjects. Among these peoples, equality preceded liberty. Equality was already an ancient fact when liberty was still a new thing. The one had already created opinions, customs, and laws proper to it, while the other was appearing alone, for the first time, in the light of day. Thus liberty was still only in people's ideas and tastes, while equality had already penetrated their habits, taken hold of their customs and values, and given a particular turn to the smallest actions of life. How surprising is it that the people of our day prefer the one to the other?

I believe that democratic peoples have a natural taste for liberty. Left to themselves, they seek it, they love it, and it pains them to be pushed away from it. But for equality they have a passionate, insatiable, eternal, invincible love. They want equality in liberty, and if they cannot have it, they want it even in slavery. They will endure poverty, subjection, barbarism -- but they will not endure aristocracy.

This is true in all times, and above all in our own. Every person and every power that tries to fight against this irresistible force will be overthrown and destroyed by it. In our day, liberty cannot establish itself without equality's support, and despotism itself cannot reign without it.

CHAPTER II.

On Individualism in Democratic Countries.

I have shown how, in ages of equality, each person looks within himself for his beliefs. Now I want to show how, in those same ages, he turns all his feelings toward himself alone.

Individualism is a recent expression, born of a new idea. Our fathers knew only selfishness.

Selfishness is a passionate and exaggerated love of self that leads a person to relate everything to himself alone and to prefer himself to everything.

Individualism is a reflective, peaceful feeling that disposes each citizen to withdraw from the mass of his fellows and retreat into a circle of family and friends; so that, having created this little society for his own use, he willingly abandons the larger society to its own devices.

Selfishness springs from blind instinct. Individualism proceeds from flawed judgment rather than depraved feeling. Its roots lie in defects of the mind as much as in vices of the heart.

Selfishness dries up the seed of every virtue. Individualism at first saps only the wellspring of public virtues; but in the long run, it attacks and destroys all the others, and finally merges into selfishness.

Selfishness is a vice as old as the world. It belongs to one form of society hardly more than to another.

Individualism is democratic in origin, and it threatens to grow as social conditions become more equal.

Among aristocratic peoples, families remain for centuries in the same condition, and often in the same place. This makes all generations, so to speak, contemporaries of one another. A man almost always knows his ancestors and respects them; he already believes he can see his great-grandchildren, and he loves them. He willingly takes on duties toward both, and it frequently happens that he sacrifices his personal pleasures for the sake of beings who are no longer alive or who do not yet exist.

Aristocratic institutions also have the effect of binding each person tightly to several of his fellow citizens.

Since classes are sharply distinct and immobile within an aristocratic society, each one becomes, for those who belong to it, a kind of small homeland -- more visible and more dear than the larger one.

Because in aristocratic societies all citizens are placed at fixed stations, some above others, it also follows that each person always sees above him someone whose protection he needs, and below him someone whose assistance he can claim.

People who live in aristocratic ages are therefore almost always bound in a tight way to something placed outside themselves, and they are often disposed to forget about themselves. It is true that in these same ages the general notion of one's fellow human being is obscure, and people scarcely think of devoting themselves to the cause of humanity. But they frequently sacrifice themselves for particular people.

In democratic ages, by contrast -- where the duties of each individual toward the species are much clearer -- devotion to any single person becomes rarer. The bond of human affection stretches wider and loosens.

Among democratic peoples, new families are constantly rising from nothing, others constantly falling back into it, and all those that endure are changing their character. The thread of time is broken at every moment, and the trace of generations fades away. You easily forget those who came before you, and you have no idea of those who will follow. Only those nearest to you matter.

As each class draws closer to the others and mingles with them, its members become indifferent to one another, almost like strangers.

Aristocracy had made all citizens into one long chain reaching from the peasant to the king. Democracy breaks the chain and sets each link apart.

As social conditions become more equal, you find a growing number of individuals who, no longer rich enough or powerful enough to exercise great influence over the fate of their fellows, have nonetheless acquired or retained enough education and enough wealth to be self-sufficient. These people owe nothing to anyone; they expect, so to speak, nothing from anyone. They get used to thinking of themselves in isolation, and they readily imagine that their entire destiny is in their own hands.

Thus democracy not only makes each person forget his ancestors; it hides his descendants from him and separates him from his contemporaries. It constantly drives him back toward himself alone, and threatens to lock him up entirely in the solitude of his own heart.

CHAPTER III.

How Individualism Is Greater Right After a Democratic Revolution Than at Any Other Time.

It is above all at the moment when a democratic society is finishing its formation on the ruins of an aristocracy that this isolation of people from one another, and the selfishness that follows from it, most easily strikes the eye.

These societies do not merely contain a large number of independent citizens -- they are filled every day with people who arrived at independence only yesterday and are drunk with their new power. These newcomers conceive a presumptuous confidence in their own strength, and, unable to imagine they could ever need to call on their fellows for help, they make no secret of the fact that they think only of themselves.

An aristocracy usually falls only after a prolonged struggle, during which implacable hatreds have been kindled between the different classes. These passions outlive the victory, and you can trace their marks through the democratic confusion that follows.

Those citizens who stood at the top of the destroyed hierarchy cannot immediately forget their former greatness. For a long time they see themselves as strangers within the new society. They see in all the equals that society gives them nothing but oppressors whose fate could not possibly inspire sympathy. They have lost sight of their old equals and no longer feel bound by a common interest to their fate. Each one, withdrawing into himself, feels reduced to caring for no one but himself. Those, on the other hand, who were formerly at the bottom of the social ladder and whom a sudden revolution has brought up to the common level, enjoy their newly acquired independence with a kind of secret restlessness. If they find some of their former superiors at their side, they cast looks of triumph and fear upon them, and draw away.

It is therefore usually at the birth of democratic societies that citizens are most inclined to isolate themselves.

Democracy inclines people not to draw near to their fellows; but democratic revolutions dispose them to flee from one another, and perpetuate within equality the hatreds that inequality gave birth to.

The great advantage of the Americans is that they arrived at democracy without having to endure democratic revolutions, and that they were born equal instead of becoming so.

CHAPTER IV.

How Americans Combat Individualism with Free Institutions.

Despotism, which is fearful by nature, sees the isolation of people from one another as the surest guarantee of its own survival, and it usually does everything it can to keep them isolated. No vice of the human heart pleases a despot as much as selfishness. A despot easily forgives the governed for not loving him, so long as they do not love one another. He does not ask them to help him run the state; it is enough that they do not aspire to run it themselves. He calls those who try to unite their efforts to create shared prosperity "troublemakers" and "agitators," and, twisting the natural meaning of words, he calls "good citizens" those who shut themselves up entirely within themselves.

Thus the vices that despotism breeds are precisely the ones that equality encourages. These two things complement and reinforce each other in a dangerous way.

Equality places people side by side with no common bond to hold them together. Despotism raises barriers between them and keeps them apart. Equality disposes them not to think of their fellows, and despotism makes a kind of public virtue out of indifference.

Despotism, which is dangerous in all times, is therefore especially to be feared in democratic ages.

It is easy to see that in these same ages people have a particular need for liberty.

When citizens are forced to attend to public affairs, they are necessarily pulled out of the middle of their individual interests and torn, from time to time, from the sight of themselves.

The moment people deal with common affairs in common, each person realizes he is not as independent of his fellows as he first imagined, and that to gain their support he must often lend them his.

When the public governs, there is no one who does not feel the value of public goodwill and who does not try to win it by earning the esteem and affection of those among whom he must live.

Many of the passions that chill hearts and divide them are then forced to retreat to the depths of the soul and hide. Pride conceals itself; contempt dares not show its face. Selfishness is afraid of itself.

Under a free government, most public offices being elective, people whose lofty spirit or restless ambitions make private life feel too confining realize every day that they cannot do without the population around them.

It then happens that you think about your fellows out of ambition, and that you often find it in your interest, in a way, to forget yourself. I know that someone can object here with all the intrigues that an election produces, the shameful methods candidates often use, and the slanders their enemies spread. These are occasions for hatred, and they come around all the more often as elections become more frequent.

These evils are no doubt great, but they are temporary, while the goods that are born alongside them endure.

The desire to be elected may lead certain people to make war on one another for a time; but this same desire, in the long run, leads everyone to lend one another mutual support. And if it happens that an election accidentally divides two friends, the electoral system permanently brings together a multitude of citizens who would otherwise have remained forever strangers to one another. Liberty creates particular hatreds, but despotism breeds universal indifference.

Americans have used liberty to combat the individualism that equality was breeding, and they have won.

America's lawmakers did not believe that, to cure a disease so natural to the democratic social body and so destructive, it was enough to grant the nation as a whole a representation of itself. They judged that it was also necessary to give political life to every part of the territory, so as to multiply infinitely the occasions for citizens to act together and to make them feel, every day, that they depend on one another.

This was wise.

A nation's general affairs occupy only its leading citizens. They assemble only at long intervals and in the same places, and since they often lose sight of each other afterward, no lasting bonds form between them. But when it comes to having the particular affairs of a district managed by the people who live there, the same individuals are always in contact, and they are in a sense forced to know one another and to please one another.

It is hard to pull a person out of himself and get him interested in the fate of the whole state, because he poorly understands what influence the state's fate can have on his own. But if you need to build a road past the edge of his property, he will see at a glance the connection between this small public matter and his larger private affairs, and he will discover, without anyone having to show him, the tight link between his particular interest and the general interest.

It is therefore by entrusting citizens with the management of small affairs, far more than by handing them the government of large ones, that you engage them in the public good and make them see the constant need they have of one another to produce it.

You can capture a people's favor all at once through a brilliant deed; but to win the love and respect of the population around you requires a long succession of small services rendered, obscure good deeds, a steady habit of benevolence, and a well-established reputation for selflessness.

Local liberties, which make a great number of citizens value the affection of their neighbors and those close to them, therefore constantly draw people back toward one another despite the instincts that push them apart, and force them to help one another.

In the United States, the wealthiest citizens are careful not to isolate themselves from the people. On the contrary, they constantly draw close to them, listen to them willingly, and speak with them every day. They know that the rich in democracies always need the poor, and that in democratic times you win the poor through your manner more than through your generosity. The very scale of generous gifts, by highlighting the difference in social conditions, provokes a secret resentment in those who benefit from them. But simplicity of manner has an almost irresistible charm; familiarity is winning, and even a certain roughness is not always displeasing.

This truth does not penetrate the minds of the rich overnight. They usually resist it as long as the democratic revolution lasts, and they do not accept it even right after the revolution is accomplished. They are willing enough to do good for the people, but they insist on keeping them carefully at arm's length. They think this is enough; they are wrong. They could bankrupt themselves this way without warming the hearts of the people around them. What the people ask of them is not the sacrifice of their money; it is the sacrifice of their pride.

It is as though in the United States there is no imagination that does not exhaust itself inventing ways to increase the wealth and meet the needs of the public. The most enlightened residents of each district constantly use their knowledge to discover new methods for increasing the common prosperity, and when they find one, they hasten to share it with the crowd.

When you look closely at the vices and weaknesses often displayed by those who govern in America, you are astonished by the growing prosperity of the people -- and you are wrong to be. It is not the elected official who makes American democracy prosper; rather, it prospers because the official is elected.

It would be unfair to believe that the patriotism of Americans and the zeal each of them shows for the well-being of his fellow citizens are not genuine. Although private interest drives most human actions in the United States, as elsewhere, it does not govern them all.

I must say that I have often seen Americans make great and genuine sacrifices for the public good, and I have noticed a hundred times that when the need arises they almost never fail to lend one another faithful support.

The free institutions that the people of the United States possess, and the political rights they exercise so extensively, remind every citizen, constantly and in a thousand ways, that he lives in society. They bring his mind back at every moment to the idea that it is the duty as well as the interest of people to make themselves useful to their fellows. And since he sees no particular reason to hate them -- because he is never either their slave or their master -- his heart leans easily toward benevolence. People attend to the general interest at first out of necessity, then by choice. What began as calculation becomes instinct; and by dint of working for the good of their fellow citizens, they finally acquire the habit and the taste for serving them.

Many people in France regard equality of social conditions as a primary evil and political liberty as a secondary one. When they are forced to submit to the first, they do their best to escape the second. And I say that to combat the evils that equality can produce, there is only one effective remedy: political liberty.

CHAPTER V.

On the Use Americans Make of Associations in Civil Life.

I do not wish to discuss political associations, through which people seek to defend themselves against the despotic action of a majority or against the encroachments of royal power. I have already treated that subject elsewhere. It is clear that if each citizen, as he becomes individually weaker and therefore less capable of preserving his liberty on his own, did not learn the art of joining with his fellows to defend it, tyranny would necessarily grow alongside equality. Here I am concerned only with the associations formed in civil life whose purpose is not political.

The political associations that exist in the United States are merely one detail in the vast picture that the whole of American association presents.

Americans of all ages, all social conditions, all temperaments are constantly joining together. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which everyone takes part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, serious, trivial, very broad and very narrow, enormous and tiny. Americans form associations to hold festivals, found seminaries, build inns, raise churches, distribute books, send missionaries to the other side of the world. In this way they create hospitals, prisons, schools. If, finally, they want to bring a truth to light or develop a feeling through the power of a great example -- they form an association. Wherever in France you would see the government at the head of a new enterprise, and in England a great lord, count on finding an association in the United States.

I have encountered in America types of associations that I confess I had not even imagined, and I have often admired the infinite skill with which the inhabitants of the United States managed to set a common goal for the efforts of a great number of people and get them to advance toward it freely.

I have since traveled through England, where Americans got some of their laws and many of their customs, and it seemed to me that the English were far from making as constant and as skillful a use of association.

It often happens that the English carry out very great things individually, while there is scarcely any enterprise too small for Americans to unite over. The former clearly regard association as a powerful means of action; the latter seem to see it as the only means they have of acting at all.

Thus the most democratic country on earth turns out to be the one where people have most perfected the art of pursuing their shared desires in common, and have applied this new science to the greatest number of purposes.

Is this an accident, or does a necessary connection actually exist between associations and equality?

Aristocratic societies always contain, amid a multitude of individuals who can do nothing by themselves, a small number of very powerful and very wealthy citizens, each of whom can carry out great enterprises on his own.

In aristocratic societies, people do not need to join together to act, because they are held firmly together already.

Every rich and powerful citizen in such a society is, in effect, the head of a permanent, involuntary association made up of everyone he keeps in his dependence and whom he enlists in the execution of his plans.

Among democratic peoples, by contrast, all citizens are independent and weak. They can do almost nothing by themselves, and none of them can compel his fellows to lend their assistance. They all fall into helplessness if they do not learn to help one another freely.

If the people living in democratic countries had neither the right nor the taste for joining together for political purposes, their independence would be in great danger, but they could preserve their wealth and their education for a long time. Whereas if they did not acquire the practice of associating in everyday life, civilization itself would be at risk. A people among whom individuals lost the power to accomplish great things on their own without acquiring the ability to produce them collectively would soon slide back toward barbarism.

Unfortunately, the same social conditions that make associations so necessary for democratic peoples also make them harder to form than for anyone else.

When several members of an aristocracy want to associate, they succeed easily. Since each of them brings great strength to the group, the number of members can be quite small, and when there are only a few members, it is very easy for them to know one another, understand one another, and establish fixed rules.

The same ease is not found among democratic nations, where the members must always be very numerous for the association to have any power.

I know that many of my contemporaries are not troubled by this. They claim that as citizens become weaker and less capable, the government must be made more skillful and more active, so that society can accomplish what individuals can no longer do. They think they have answered everything by saying this. But I believe they are wrong.

A government could take the place of some of the largest American associations, and within the Union several individual states have already tried. But what political power could ever manage to handle the countless small enterprises that American citizens carry out every day with the help of associations?

It is easy to foresee that the time is approaching when individuals will be less and less able to produce by themselves the most basic and necessary things in life. The task of the social power will therefore grow ceaselessly, and its very efforts will make that task larger every day. The more it takes the place of associations, the more individuals, losing the idea of associating, will need it to come to their aid -- causes and effects endlessly generating one another. Will the public administration end up directing every industry that no isolated citizen can manage? And if the extreme division of landed property eventually reaches the point where the land is split into infinitely small parcels that can only be cultivated by associations of farmers, will the head of government have to leave the helm of state to go hold the plow?

The moral and intellectual life of a democratic people would face no smaller dangers than its commerce and industry if the government came to take the place of associations everywhere.

Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind develops only through the reciprocal influence of people on one another.

I have shown that this influence is almost nonexistent in democratic countries. It must therefore be created artificially. And that is what only associations can do.

When members of an aristocracy adopt a new idea or conceive a new feeling, they place it, so to speak, beside themselves on the grand stage where they stand, and by exposing it to the gaze of the crowd, they easily introduce it into the minds or hearts of everyone around them.

In democratic countries, only the social power is naturally capable of acting this way, but it is easy to see that its action is always insufficient and often dangerous.

A government can no more sustain on its own the circulation of feelings and ideas among a great people than it can direct all their industrial enterprises. The moment it tries to step outside the political sphere and throw itself into this new arena, it will exercise, even without meaning to, an unbearable tyranny. For a government can only dictate precise rules; it imposes the feelings and ideas it favors, and it is always hard to tell its advice from its commands.

Things will be even worse if the government actually believes it has an interest in keeping everything still. It will then stand motionless and let itself sink into a voluntary slumber.

It is therefore essential that it not act alone.

In democratic peoples, associations must take the place of the powerful individuals whom equality of social conditions has swept away.

As soon as several inhabitants of the United States have conceived a feeling or an idea that they wish to bring into the world, they seek one another out, and when they have found one another, they unite. From that point on, they are no longer isolated individuals but a visible power whose actions serve as an example, a power that speaks and is heard.

The first time I heard in the United States that a hundred thousand men had publicly pledged not to drink hard liquor, I found the thing more amusing than serious, and I did not at first see why these temperate citizens were not content simply to drink water in the privacy of their own homes.

I eventually understood that these hundred thousand Americans, alarmed by the progress that drunkenness was making around them, had wanted to give their endorsement to sobriety. They had acted precisely like a great lord who would dress very plainly to inspire ordinary citizens to scorn luxury. It is safe to say that if these hundred thousand men had lived in France, each of them would have individually petitioned the government to monitor the taverns across the entire kingdom.

In my view, nothing deserves our attention more than the intellectual and moral associations of America. The political and industrial associations of Americans are easy for us to grasp, but the others elude us. And if we do discover them, we understand them poorly, because we have almost never seen anything like them. Yet we should recognize that they are just as necessary as the former to the American people -- and perhaps more so.

In democratic countries, the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.

Among the laws that govern human societies, there is one that seems more precise and clearer than all the rest. For people to remain civilized -- or to become so -- the art of association must develop and improve among them in the same proportion as equality of social conditions increases.

CHAPTER VI.

On the Relationship Between Associations and Newspapers.

When people are no longer bound to one another in a solid and permanent way, you cannot get a large number of them to act in concert unless you persuade each one whose cooperation is needed that his private interest requires him to voluntarily join his efforts to those of everyone else.

This can only be done regularly and conveniently with the help of a newspaper. Only a newspaper can plant the same idea in a thousand minds at the same moment.

A newspaper is an advisor you do not need to go find -- it shows up on its own and speaks to you every day, briefly, about the common cause, without pulling you away from your private affairs.

Newspapers therefore become more necessary as people become more equal and individualism more to be feared. To believe that they serve only to safeguard liberty would be to underestimate their importance: they sustain civilization itself.

I will not deny that in democratic countries newspapers often lead citizens to undertake very reckless ventures together. But if there were no newspapers, there would be almost no common action at all. The harm they produce is therefore far less than the harm they cure.

A newspaper does not merely suggest a common purpose to a great number of people; it also provides them with the means to carry out purposes they would have conceived on their own.

The leading citizens of an aristocratic country can spot one another from afar, and if they want to combine their forces, they march toward one another, pulling a crowd in their wake.

In democratic countries, by contrast, it often happens that a great number of people who want or need to associate cannot do so, because they are all too small and lost in the crowd -- they cannot see one another and do not know where to find one another. Then a newspaper appears that brings to light the feeling or the idea that had presented itself simultaneously, but separately, to each of them. They all turn at once toward that light, and these wandering minds, which had been searching for one another in the darkness, finally meet and unite.

The newspaper brought them together, and it continues to be necessary to keep them together.

For an association in a democratic people to have any power, it must be large. Those who compose it are therefore scattered across a wide area, and each is held in place by the smallness of his fortune and the multitude of small demands it makes on him. They need to find a way to speak to one another every day without meeting face to face, and to march in step without having gathered together. There is therefore hardly any democratic association that can do without a newspaper.

A necessary connection thus exists between associations and newspapers: newspapers create associations, and associations create newspapers. And if it is true that associations must multiply as social conditions become more equal, it is no less certain that the number of newspapers grows as associations multiply.

This is why America is the country in the world where you find both the most associations and the most newspapers.

This relationship between the number of newspapers and the number of associations leads us to discover another one: between the state of the periodical press and the form of a country's administration. It tells us that the number of newspapers in a democratic people must shrink or grow in proportion to the degree of administrative centralization. For among democratic peoples, you cannot entrust the exercise of local powers to the leading citizens the way you can in aristocracies. You must either abolish those powers or hand their use over to a very large number of people. These people form a genuine association, permanently established by law, for the administration of a portion of the territory, and they need a newspaper to come find them every day amid their small affairs and tell them how the public business stands. The more numerous the local powers, the greater the number of those whom the law calls to exercise them, and the more constantly this need makes itself felt, the more newspapers proliferate.

It is the extraordinary fragmentation of administrative power, far more than the great political liberty or the absolute independence of the press, that so remarkably multiplies the number of newspapers in America. If all the inhabitants of the Union were voters under a system that limited their electoral rights to choosing state legislators, they would need only a small number of newspapers, because they would have only a few very important but very rare occasions to act together. But within the great national association, the law has established in every province, in every city, and practically in every village, small associations for the purpose of local administration. The lawmaker has thus forced every American to work together with some of his fellow citizens on a shared task every day, and each of them needs a newspaper to tell him what all the others are doing.

I say a democratic people. In an aristocratic people, the administration may be very decentralized without creating a need for newspapers, because local powers are then in the hands of a very small number of people who act alone or who know each other and can easily meet and consult.

I believe that a democratic people with no national legislature but a great many small local powers would end up having more newspapers than a people with a centralized administration alongside an elected legislature. What best explains to me the prodigious growth of the daily press in the United States is that I see among the Americans the greatest national liberty combined with local liberties of every kind.

People generally believe in France and England that abolishing the taxes that weigh on the press would be enough to increase the number of newspapers indefinitely. This greatly exaggerates the effects of such a reform. Newspapers do not multiply simply because they are cheap, but because of the more or less frequent need that a great number of people have to communicate with one another and act together.

I would also attribute the growing power of newspapers to more general causes than those usually invoked to explain it.

A newspaper can survive only by expressing a doctrine or a sentiment shared by a large number of people. A newspaper therefore always represents an association whose regular readers are the members.

This association may be more or less defined, more or less tight-knit, more or less numerous; but it exists at least in embryo in people's minds, for the simple reason that the newspaper has not died.

This brings us to a final reflection that will close this chapter.

The more equal social conditions become, the less individually strong people are, the more easily they let themselves be carried along by the current of the crowd, and the harder they find it to hold on to an opinion that the crowd has abandoned.

The newspaper represents the association. You might say it speaks to each of its readers in the name of all the others, and it sweeps them along all the more easily the weaker they are individually.

The power of newspapers must therefore grow as people become more equal.

CHAPTER VII.

The Relationship Between Civil Associations and Political Associations.

There is only one nation on earth that makes daily use of the unlimited freedom to associate for political purposes. This same nation is the only one in the world whose citizens have thought to make continual use of the right of association in civil life, and have managed in this way to obtain for themselves all the goods that civilization can offer.

Among all the peoples where political association is forbidden, civil association is rare.

It is unlikely that this is a coincidence. Rather, we should conclude that a natural and perhaps necessary connection exists between these two kinds of association.

People happen to share a common interest in some matter. A commercial enterprise needs to be managed, an industrial operation needs to be completed; they meet and join together. In this way they gradually become familiar with association.

The more the number of these small common affairs increases, the more people acquire -- without even realizing it -- the ability to pursue large ones together.

Civil associations therefore facilitate political associations. But on the other hand, political association develops and perfects civil association in remarkable ways.

In civil life, each person can, at a stretch, imagine that he is capable of being self-sufficient. In politics, he can never think so. When a people has a public life, the idea of association and the desire to associate present themselves to every citizen's mind every day. However much natural reluctance people have for acting in common, they will always be ready to do so for the sake of a party.

Politics thus spreads the taste and the habit of association. It teaches the desire to unite and the art of doing so to a multitude of people who would otherwise have lived their whole lives alone.

Politics does not merely give birth to many associations -- it creates very large ones.

In civil life, it is rare for the same interest to naturally draw a large number of people toward a common action. It takes a great deal of ingenuity to create such a convergence.

In politics, the occasion arises on its own at every moment. Now, it is only in large associations that the general value of association reveals itself. Individually weak citizens cannot form in advance a clear idea of the strength they can gain by uniting; you have to show them before they understand. This is why it is often easier to rally a multitude to a common purpose than a handful of people: a thousand citizens may not see the interest they have in uniting, but ten thousand see it. In politics, people come together for great enterprises, and the advantage they draw from association in important affairs teaches them, through practical experience, the interest they have in using it for smaller ones.

A political association pulls a multitude of individuals out of themselves all at once. However separated they naturally are by age, temperament, or fortune, it brings them together and puts them in contact. They meet once and learn how to find one another again forever after.

You cannot join most civil associations without putting some of your assets at risk; this is the case for all commercial and industrial ventures. When people are still inexperienced in the art of association and do not know its basic rules, they fear that their first attempt will cost them dearly. So they would rather give up a powerful means of success than run the risks that come with it. But they hesitate less to join political associations, which seem to them risk-free because they are not putting their money on the line. Yet they cannot take part in these for long without discovering how to maintain order among a large number of people, and by what process you can get them to advance, in agreement and methodically, toward the same goal. There they learn to submit their will to the will of all the others and to subordinate their individual efforts to the common action -- all things that are no less necessary to know in civil associations than in political ones.

Political associations can therefore be considered great free schools where every citizen comes to learn the general theory of association.

Even if political association did not directly serve the progress of civil association, it would still harm civil association to destroy the political kind.

When citizens can associate only in certain cases, they regard association as a rare and unusual procedure, and they hardly think of resorting to it.

When they are allowed to associate freely in all things, they end up seeing association as the universal, and so to speak unique, instrument that people can use to achieve their various ends. Every new need immediately calls forth the idea. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone studies it and applies it.

When certain associations are banned and others permitted, it is hard to tell in advance which are which. In doubt, people avoid all of them, and a kind of public opinion takes hold that tends to make any association at all seem like a bold and almost illicit undertaking.

This is especially true when it is the executive power that is charged with permitting or banning associations at its arbitrary discretion. When the law simply prohibits certain associations and leaves it to the courts to punish those who disobey, the harm is much less. Each citizen then knows roughly where he stands. He judges himself, in a sense, before his judges, and, steering clear of forbidden associations, he freely joins the permitted ones. This is how all free peoples have always understood that the right of association could be restricted. But if the lawmaker were to charge a single individual with determining in advance which associations are dangerous and which useful, and leave him free to destroy all associations at their inception or let them be born, then no one could foresee when you can associate and when you must abstain, and the spirit of association would be struck completely with inertia. The first of these two laws attacks only certain associations; the second targets society itself and wounds it. I can understand a regular government resorting to the first, but I deny any government the right to impose the second.

It is therefore an illusion to believe that the spirit of association, suppressed at one point, will develop with equal vigor at all others, and that it is enough to allow people to carry out certain ventures in common for them to rush to try it. When citizens have the ability and the habit of associating for everything, they will associate just as willingly for small things as for great ones. But if they can associate only for small things, they will not even find the desire or the capacity to do so. In vain will you leave them entirely free to engage together in their business: they will use only halfheartedly the rights you grant them. And after exhausting yourself trying to keep them from forming forbidden associations, you will be surprised to find you cannot persuade them to form the permitted ones.

I am not saying that there can be no civil associations in a country where political association is forbidden -- for people can never live in society without engaging in some common enterprise. But I maintain that in such a country, civil associations will always be very few in number, feebly conceived, ineptly managed, and that they will never undertake vast designs, or will fail in trying to carry them out.

This leads me naturally to think that freedom of association in political matters is not as dangerous to public peace as people assume, and that it may well be that after shaking the state for a time, it actually strengthens it.

In democratic countries, political associations are practically the only powerful individuals that aspire to direct the state. And so today's governments view these kinds of associations the same way medieval kings regarded the great vassals of the crown: they feel an instinctive horror toward them and fight them at every turn.

They have, on the other hand, a natural sympathy for civil associations, because they have easily seen that these, rather than directing citizens' minds toward public affairs, serve to distract them, and by engaging them more and more in projects that cannot be accomplished without public peace, they steer them away from revolutions. But they fail to notice that political associations enormously multiply and facilitate civil associations, and that by avoiding one dangerous evil they deprive themselves of an effective remedy. When you see Americans freely associating every day to advance a political opinion, elevate a statesman to power, or strip power from another, it is hard to understand how people so independent do not constantly fall into lawlessness.

If you then consider the infinite number of industrial enterprises being pursued in common in the United States, and observe from all sides Americans working tirelessly on some important and difficult project that the slightest revolution could derail, you easily grasp why these busy people are not tempted to disturb the state or destroy the public peace from which they profit.

Is it enough to observe these things separately? Should we not discover the hidden thread that connects them? It is in political associations that Americans of all backgrounds, all temperaments, and all ages develop every day the general taste for association and become familiar with its use. There they come together in large numbers, talk to one another, listen to one another, and rally together around all kinds of enterprises. They then carry into civil life the ideas they have acquired this way and put them to a thousand uses.

It is therefore by enjoying a dangerous liberty that Americans learn the art of making the dangers of liberty smaller.

If you pick a single moment in the life of a nation, it is easy to prove that political associations disturb the state and paralyze industry. But take the entire life of a people, and it may well be easy to show that freedom of political association is favorable to the well-being and even the tranquility of citizens.

I said in the first part of this work: "The unlimited freedom of association must not be confused with the freedom to write; the first is at once less necessary and more dangerous than the second. A nation can set limits on it without ceasing to be its own master; it must sometimes do so in order to remain so." And further on I added: "One cannot deny that the unlimited freedom of political association is, of all liberties, the last that a people can endure. If it does not plunge them into anarchy, it brings them, so to speak, to the very edge of it at every moment."

Thus I do not believe that a nation is always free to allow its citizens the absolute right to associate for political purposes, and I even doubt that in any country or at any time it would be wise to set no limits on the freedom of association.

Such and such a people, we are told, cannot maintain the peace within its borders, inspire respect for the law, or build a lasting government unless it confines the right of association within narrow limits. Such goods are undoubtedly precious, and I understand that a nation, to acquire or preserve them, would agree to impose great constraints on itself for a time. But it is well for that nation to know precisely what those goods are costing it.

I understand cutting off a man's arm to save his life. But I do not want anyone to assure me that he will be just as dexterous as if he were not one-handed.

CHAPTER VIII.

How Americans Combat Individualism Through the Doctrine of Self-Interest Properly Understood.

When the world was governed by a small number of powerful and wealthy individuals, those people liked to form a lofty idea of human duty. They took pleasure in professing that it is glorious to forget oneself and that it is right to do good without self-interest, as God himself does. This was the official moral doctrine of the time.

I doubt that people were more virtuous in aristocratic ages than in any other, but it is certain that the beauties of virtue were endlessly discussed. They studied only in private the ways in which virtue might be useful. But as imaginations take a lower flight and each person turns inward, moralists grow frightened by the idea of sacrifice and no longer dare to present it to the human mind. So they settle for investigating whether the individual advantage of citizens might lie in working for the happiness of all. And when they discover one of those points where private interest meets and merges with the general interest, they hasten to bring it to light. Little by little, similar observations multiply. What was once an isolated remark becomes a general doctrine, and people eventually come to believe that by serving his fellow human beings, a person serves himself, and that his private interest lies in doing good.

I have already shown, in several parts of this work, how the inhabitants of the United States almost always know how to combine their own well-being with that of their fellow citizens. What I want to note here is the general theory by which they arrive at this.

In the United States, almost no one talks about virtue being beautiful. People maintain that it is useful, and they prove it every day. American moralists do not claim that you should sacrifice yourself for your fellows because it is noble to do so; they say boldly that such sacrifices are as necessary to the person who makes them as to the one who benefits from them.

They have seen that in their country and their time, people were being drawn back toward themselves by an irresistible force, and, giving up hope of stopping this tendency, they thought only of how to guide it.

They do not deny that every person may pursue his own interest, but they work hard to prove that it is in each person's interest to be honest.

I do not wish to enter here into the detail of their reasoning, which would take me off my subject. Let it suffice to say that they have convinced their fellow citizens.

Montaigne said long ago: "When I would not follow the right path for righteousness' sake, I would follow it for having found by experience that, at the end of the day, it is usually the happiest and the most useful."

The doctrine of self-interest properly understood is therefore not new; but among today's Americans it has been universally accepted. It has become popular. You find it at the bottom of all their actions; it shows through in everything they say. You hear it from the lips of the poor no less than from those of the rich.

In Europe, the doctrine of self-interest is much cruder than in America, but at the same time it is less widespread and especially less openly displayed, and people still pretend every day among us to great acts of devotion that they no longer actually feel.

Americans, by contrast, enjoy explaining almost all the acts of their lives by means of self-interest properly understood. They readily show how enlightened self-love constantly leads them to help one another and disposes them to willingly sacrifice a portion of their time and wealth for the good of the state. I believe that in this they often do themselves an injustice -- for you sometimes see in the United States, as elsewhere, citizens giving themselves over to the disinterested, unreflecting impulses that are natural to human beings. But Americans rarely admit that they yield to feelings of this kind; they prefer to give the credit to their philosophy rather than to themselves.

I could stop here and not attempt to judge what I have just described. The extreme difficulty of the subject would be my excuse. But I do not want to take advantage of it. I would rather have my readers see my purpose clearly and refuse to follow me than leave them in suspense.

Self-interest properly understood is not a lofty doctrine, but it is clear and reliable. It does not aim to reach great heights; but it achieves, without too much effort, everything it aims at. Since it is within reach of every intelligence, everyone grasps it easily and retains it without difficulty. Adapting itself marvelously to human weakness, it readily wins a wide influence, and it has no trouble keeping it, because it turns self-interest against itself and uses the same spur that excites the passions to direct them.

The doctrine of self-interest properly understood does not produce great acts of devotion; but it inspires small sacrifices every day. By itself, it cannot make a person virtuous, but it shapes a multitude of citizens who are orderly, temperate, moderate, farsighted, and self-controlled. And if it does not lead directly to virtue through the will, it draws people imperceptibly closer to it through habits.

If the doctrine of self-interest properly understood were to gain complete dominion over the moral world, extraordinary virtues would no doubt become rarer. But I also think that gross depravity would be less common. The doctrine of self-interest properly understood may prevent some people from rising far above the ordinary level of humanity; but a great many others who would fall below it encounter this doctrine and hold on. Consider a few individuals: it lowers them. Look at the species as a whole: it raises them.

I will not be afraid to say that the doctrine of self-interest properly understood seems to me, of all philosophical theories, the one best suited to the needs of the people of our time, and that I see in it the strongest guarantee they still have against themselves. It is therefore toward this doctrine above all that the minds of today's moralists should turn. Even if they judged it imperfect, they would still need to adopt it as necessary.

I do not believe that, all things considered, there is more selfishness among us than in America. The only difference is that there it is enlightened and here it is not. Every American knows how to sacrifice a portion of his private interests to save the rest. We want to keep everything, and often everything slips through our fingers.

I see around me only people who seem to want to teach their contemporaries, by word and example every day, that what is useful is never dishonorable. Will I never find any who undertake to make them understand how what is honorable can be useful?

There is no power on earth that can prevent the growing equality of social conditions from turning the human mind toward the pursuit of what is useful, and from disposing every citizen to withdraw into himself.

We must therefore expect that individual interest will become more than ever the principal, if not the sole, motive of human action. But it remains to be seen how each person will understand his individual interest.

If citizens, as they became equal, remained ignorant and coarse, it is hard to foresee how far their selfishness might go in its stupidity, and one could not say in advance into what shameful miseries they would plunge themselves for fear of sacrificing some small part of their well-being to the prosperity of their fellows.

I do not believe that the doctrine of self-interest as it is preached in America is self-evident in all its parts; but it contains a great number of truths so evident that you need only educate people for them to see. Educate them then, at all costs -- for the age of blind devotion and instinctive virtue is already receding far behind us, and I see approaching the time when liberty, public peace, and social order itself will not be able to survive without education.

CHAPTER IX.

How Americans Apply the Doctrine of Self-Interest Properly Understood to Religion.

If the doctrine of self-interest properly understood concerned only this world, it would be far from sufficient -- for there are a great many sacrifices that can find their reward only in the next one. And however much intellectual effort you put into proving the usefulness of virtue, it will always be hard to make a person live well who does not want to die.

It is therefore necessary to ask whether the doctrine of self-interest properly understood can be easily reconciled with religious belief.

The philosophers who teach this doctrine tell people that to be happy in life, they must watch over their passions and carefully rein in excess; that lasting happiness cannot be acquired without denying oneself a thousand passing pleasures; and that, in short, one must constantly triumph over oneself in order to serve oneself better.

The founders of nearly every religion have said much the same thing. Without pointing people toward a different path, they simply moved the destination further back: instead of placing in this world the reward for the sacrifices they demand, they placed it in the next.

I refuse, however, to believe that all those who practice virtue in a spirit of religion are acting only with an eye to a reward.

I have met zealous Christians who constantly forgot themselves in order to work with greater ardor for the happiness of all, and I heard them claim that they acted this way only to earn the rewards of the next world. But I cannot help thinking that they are deceiving themselves. I respect them too much to believe them.

Christianity tells us, it is true, that we must prefer others to ourselves in order to gain heaven. But Christianity also tells us that we should do good for our fellow human beings out of love for God. That is a magnificent expression. Through his intelligence, a person penetrates into the mind of God; he sees that God's purpose is order; he freely associates himself with this grand design, and while sacrificing his private interests to this admirable ordering of all things, he expects no other reward than the pleasure of contemplating it.

I do not believe, therefore, that self-interest is the only motive of religious people. But I do think that self-interest is the principal means that religions themselves use to guide people, and I have no doubt that this is the side by which they capture the masses and become popular.

I do not see clearly, then, why the doctrine of self-interest properly understood should push people away from religious belief. It seems to me, on the contrary, that I can make out how it draws them toward it.

Suppose that a person, in order to achieve happiness in this world, resists instinct at every turn and coolly reasons out every act of his life; suppose that instead of blindly giving in to the rush of his first desires, he has learned the art of fighting them, and has gotten used to sacrificing the pleasure of the moment to the permanent interest of his whole life without effort.

If such a person has faith in the religion he professes, it will cost him little to submit to the constraints it imposes. Reason itself counsels him to do so, and habit has already prepared him to bear it.

And if he has conceived doubts about the object of his hopes, he will not easily let himself be stopped by them. He will judge it wise to risk some of the goods of this world to preserve his claim to the immense inheritance promised him in the next.

"To be mistaken in believing the Christian religion true," said Pascal, "is no great loss; but what a misfortune to be mistaken in believing it false!"

Americans do not affect a crude indifference to the next life. They do not display a childish pride in scorning dangers they hope to escape.

They therefore practice their religion without shame and without weakness. But you ordinarily see, even in the midst of their zeal, something so calm, so methodical, so calculated that it seems to be reason far more than the heart that leads them to the foot of the altar.

Not only do Americans follow their religion out of interest, they often place in this world the interest one might have in following it. In the Middle Ages, priests spoke only of the next life; they scarcely bothered to prove that a sincere Christian could be a happy man here below.

But American preachers constantly return to earth, and they can hardly tear their gaze away from it. The better to reach their listeners, they show them every day how religious beliefs promote liberty and public order. And it is often hard to tell, when listening to them, whether the main purpose of religion is to secure eternal happiness in the next world or well-being in this one.

CHAPTER X.

On the Taste for Material Well-Being in America.

In America, the passion for material well-being is not always exclusive, but it is universal. Not everyone experiences it in the same way, but everyone feels it. The concern with satisfying the smallest bodily needs and providing for the minor comforts of life is a universal preoccupation.

Something similar is becoming increasingly visible in Europe.

Among the causes producing these similar effects in both worlds, several relate to my subject and deserve mention.

When wealth is passed down by inheritance within the same families, you see a great number of people who enjoy material well-being without feeling an exclusive taste for it.

What grips the human heart most powerfully is not the peaceful possession of something precious, but the imperfectly satisfied desire to possess it and the constant fear of losing it.

In aristocratic societies, the rich, having never known a condition different from their own, do not fear change. They can scarcely imagine another state. Material well-being is not the purpose of their lives; it is a way of living. They regard it, in a sense, as existence itself, and they enjoy it without thinking about it.

Since the natural, instinctive taste that all human beings feel for well-being is thus satisfied without effort or anxiety, their souls turn elsewhere and attach themselves to some more difficult and greater undertaking that animates and carries them forward.

This is how, in the very midst of material pleasures, the members of an aristocracy often display a proud disdain for those same pleasures, and find remarkable strength when it comes time to give them up. Every revolution that has disrupted or destroyed aristocracies has shown how easily people accustomed to the superfluous can do without the necessary -- while people who have laboriously climbed their way to comfort can barely survive after losing it.

If I turn from the upper ranks to the lower classes, I will see similar effects produced by different causes.

Among nations where aristocracy dominates society and holds it immobile, the common people end up getting used to poverty the way the rich get used to their opulence. The rich do not preoccupy themselves with material well-being because they possess it effortlessly. The poor do not think about it because they despair of ever acquiring it and do not know it well enough to desire it.

In these kinds of societies, the imagination of the poor is pushed toward the next world. The miseries of real life hem it in, but it escapes them and goes looking for its pleasures elsewhere.

When, on the other hand, ranks are blurred and privileges destroyed, when inheritances are divided and education and liberty spread, the desire to acquire well-being presents itself to the imagination of the poor, and the fear of losing it enters the mind of the rich. A multitude of middling fortunes is established. Those who possess them have enough material enjoyment to develop a taste for such pleasures, but not enough to be satisfied. They never obtain these enjoyments without effort, and they never surrender to them without trembling.

They therefore devote themselves ceaselessly to pursuing or holding on to these pleasures -- so precious, so incomplete, so fleeting.

I look for a passion that is natural to people whom the obscurity of their origins or the modesty of their fortunes both stimulate and limit, and I find none better suited than the taste for material well-being. The passion for material well-being is essentially a middle-class passion; it grows and expands with that class; it becomes dominant alongside it. From there it rises to the upper ranks of society and descends into the heart of the common people.

I did not meet a single citizen in America, however poor, who did not cast a gaze of hope and envy toward the pleasures of the rich, or whose imagination did not seize in advance upon the good things that fate stubbornly refused him.

On the other hand, I never observed among the rich of the United States that haughty disdain for material well-being that sometimes shows itself even in the most opulent and dissolute aristocracies.

Most of these rich people were once poor. They felt the sting of need; they long fought against a hostile fortune; and now that the battle is won, the passions that accompanied the struggle survive it. They remain, as if intoxicated, in the midst of the small pleasures they pursued for forty years.

It is not that in the United States, any more than elsewhere, there are not a fair number of rich people who, having inherited their wealth, possess without effort an opulence they did not earn. But even these show themselves no less attached to the pleasures of material life. The love of well-being has become the national and dominant taste; the great current of human passions flows in this direction, and it carries everything in its course.

CHAPTER XI.

On the Particular Effects That the Love of Material Pleasures Produces in Democratic Ages.

You might conclude from what I've just said that the love of material pleasures must constantly pull Americans toward moral disorder, disrupt families, and ultimately threaten the fate of society itself.

But that's not what happens at all. The passion for material pleasures produces very different effects in democracies than it does among aristocratic peoples.

Sometimes weariness with public affairs, excessive wealth, the collapse of beliefs, and the decline of the state gradually redirect the hearts of an aristocracy toward material pleasures alone. Other times, the power of the ruler or the weakness of the people, without actually stripping the nobles of their fortunes, forces them away from power, and by closing off the path to great undertakings, leaves them to the restlessness of their own desires. They fall back heavily upon themselves and seek in bodily pleasures the oblivion of their former greatness.

When members of an aristocratic class turn exclusively to the love of material pleasures this way, they typically channel all the energy that a long habit of power has given them into that single pursuit.

For such men, the search for comfort is not enough. They need a spectacular depravity, a dazzling corruption. They worship material things with magnificence, and they seem to compete with each other to excel in the art of degrading themselves.

The stronger, more glorious, and more free an aristocracy once was, the more depraved it will show itself to be. And whatever the splendor of its virtues may have been, I dare predict that it will always be surpassed by the brilliance of its vices.

The taste for material pleasures does not lead democratic peoples to such excesses. The love of comfort shows itself there as a tenacious, exclusive, universal passion -- but a contained one. There's no question of building vast palaces, conquering or deceiving nature, or draining the universe to better satisfy the passions of one man. It's about adding a few acres to your fields, planting an orchard, expanding a house, making life a little easier and more convenient at every turn, preventing hardship, and meeting the smallest needs without effort and almost without cost. These goals are small, but the soul clings to them. It considers them every day, up close; they end up blocking out the rest of the world, and they sometimes come to stand between the soul and God.

Some will object that this can only apply to citizens of modest fortune, and that the rich will display tastes similar to those they showed in aristocratic ages. I disagree.

When it comes to material pleasures, even the wealthiest citizens of a democracy won't show tastes very different from those of the common people -- either because, having risen from the people, they genuinely share those tastes, or because they believe they must conform to them. In democratic societies, public sensuality has taken on a moderate, tranquil tone that everyone is expected to follow. It is as difficult to stand out from the common rule through your vices as through your virtues.

The rich who live among democratic nations therefore aim at satisfying their smallest needs rather than pursuing extraordinary pleasures. They gratify a multitude of petty desires without indulging any great disordered passion. They fall into softness rather than debauchery.

This particular taste that people in democratic ages develop for material pleasures is not naturally opposed to order -- on the contrary, it often needs order to be satisfied. Nor is it hostile to good customs and values, since good values serve public tranquility and favor industry. It often even combines with a kind of religious morality: people want to be as comfortable as possible in this world without giving up their chances in the next one.

Among material goods, some are criminal to possess, and people take care to abstain from them. Others, which religion and morality permit, they pursue unreservedly -- heart, imagination, and life -- and in striving to grasp these, they lose sight of those more precious goods that constitute the glory and greatness of the human species.

What I hold against equality is not that it leads people to pursue forbidden pleasures, but that it absorbs them entirely in the pursuit of permitted ones.

And so a kind of respectable materialism might well establish itself in the world -- one that would not corrupt souls but would soften them, and would end up quietly loosening all their springs.

CHAPTER XII.

Why Certain Americans Display Such Exalted Spiritualism.

Although the desire to acquire the goods of this world is the dominant passion of Americans, there are moments of release when their souls seem to suddenly break free of the material bonds holding them back and escape impetuously toward heaven.

You sometimes encounter in every state of the Union, but especially in the half-populated regions of the West, itinerant preachers who carry the word of God from place to place.

Entire families -- old men, women, and children -- cross difficult terrain and push through uninhabited forests to come hear them from great distances. And when they've found them, they forget for days and nights on end, as they listen, the care of business and even the most pressing needs of the body.

Here and there within American society you find souls entirely filled with an exalted, almost fierce spiritualism that you'd rarely encounter in Europe. From time to time, bizarre sects spring up that strive to open extraordinary paths to eternal happiness. Religious frenzies are quite common there.

None of this should surprise us.

It's not man who gave himself the taste for the infinite and the love of the immortal. These sublime instincts are not born from a whim of the will; they have their immovable foundation in his nature. They exist in spite of his efforts. He can constrain and distort them, but he cannot destroy them.

The soul has needs that must be met, and no matter how carefully you try to distract it from itself, it soon grows bored, restless, and agitated in the midst of sensory pleasures.

If the minds of the great majority of the human race ever concentrated solely on the pursuit of material goods, you could expect a tremendous reaction in the souls of a few. Those people would throw themselves desperately into the world of the spirit, for fear of remaining trapped in the too-narrow constraints that the body tries to impose on them.

So we should not be surprised if, in a society that thinks only of the earth, we found a small number of individuals who insist on looking only at heaven. I would be surprised if, among a people uniquely preoccupied with their comfort, mysticism didn't soon make progress.

People say it was the persecutions of the emperors and the tortures of the circus that populated the deserts of the Thebaid. I think it was far more the luxuries of Rome and the Epicurean philosophy of Greece.

If the social conditions, circumstances, and laws didn't confine the American mind so tightly to the pursuit of comfort, it's likely that when it turned to immaterial things, it would show more restraint and more experience, and would moderate itself without difficulty. But it feels imprisoned within limits that no one seems willing to let it escape. The moment it passes beyond those limits, it doesn't know where to settle, and it often races past the boundaries of common sense without stopping.

CHAPTER XIII.

Why Americans Are So Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity.

You can still sometimes find, in remote corners of the Old World, small populations that seem to have been forgotten amid the universal tumult and have remained motionless while everything around them was moving. Most of these peoples are deeply ignorant and deeply miserable; they take no part in the affairs of government, and often their governments oppress them. Yet they usually show serene faces, and they often display a cheerful disposition.

In America, I saw the freest and most educated people in the world, placed in the happiest conditions on earth; and it seemed to me that a kind of cloud habitually covered their features. They struck me as grave and almost sad, even in their pleasures.

The main reason for this is that the former never think about the hardships they endure, while the latter are constantly thinking about the good things they don't have.

It's a strange thing to see with what kind of feverish ardor Americans pursue comfort, and how they are ceaselessly tormented by a vague fear that they haven't chosen the shortest route to get there.

The inhabitant of the United States clings to the goods of this world as though he were certain never to die, and he is in such a rush to seize whatever comes within his reach that you'd think he feared at every moment that he might stop living before he had enjoyed it. He grasps at everything but holds onto nothing, and he soon lets things slip from his hands to chase after new pleasures.

A man in the United States carefully builds a house to spend his old age in, and he sells it while the roof is still being laid. He plants a garden and rents it out just as he's about to taste its fruit. He clears a field and leaves it to others to harvest. He takes up a profession and quits it. He settles in a place and soon departs to carry his restless desires elsewhere. If his private affairs give him a moment's respite, he plunges immediately into the whirlwind of politics. And when, toward the end of a year filled with work, he still has some leisure left, he carries his restless curiosity here and there across the vast expanse of the United States. He'll travel five hundred leagues in a few days, the better to distract himself from his happiness.

Death finally comes and stops him before he has tired of this futile pursuit of a complete happiness that forever eludes him.

At first you're astonished to contemplate this singular agitation displayed by so many happy people in the very midst of their abundance. But this spectacle is as old as the world itself; what's new is seeing an entire people put it on.

The taste for material pleasures should be considered the primary source of this secret restlessness that reveals itself in everything Americans do, and of the fickleness they demonstrate daily.

A person who has confined his heart to the sole pursuit of the goods of this world is always in a hurry, because he has only a limited time to find them, seize them, and enjoy them. The memory of life's brevity spurs him on constantly. Beyond whatever goods he already possesses, he imagines a thousand others every moment that death will prevent him from tasting if he doesn't hurry. This thought fills him with anxiety, fear, and regret, and keeps his soul in a kind of incessant agitation that leads him to constantly change his plans and his location.

If the taste for material comfort is joined by a social order in which neither law nor custom keeps anyone in their place, this becomes a powerful additional stimulus for this restlessness of mind: you'll see people continually switching paths for fear of missing the shortest road to happiness.

It's also easy to see that if people who passionately seek material pleasures desire intensely, they must also give up easily. Since the ultimate goal is enjoyment, the means of getting there must be quick and easy, or the pain of acquiring the pleasure would exceed the pleasure itself. Most souls are therefore at once ardent and soft, violent and weak. Often death is less feared than the sustained effort toward a single goal.

Equality leads by an even more direct path to many of the effects I've just described.

When all the privileges of birth and fortune are destroyed, when every profession is open to everyone and you can reach the top of any of them on your own, an immense and easy career seems to open before people's ambitions, and they readily imagine themselves called to great destinies. But this is a mistaken view that experience corrects every day. The very same equality that allows every citizen to conceive vast hopes makes all citizens individually weak. It limits their strength on every side, even as it allows their desires to expand.

Not only are they powerless on their own, but at every step they encounter immense obstacles they hadn't noticed at first.

They've destroyed the burdensome privileges of some of their peers, but now they face the competition of everyone. The barrier has changed shape rather than position. When people are roughly similar and all following the same path, it's very hard for any one of them to walk fast and cut through the uniform crowd that surrounds and presses in on them.

This constant tension between the instincts that equality creates and the means it provides to satisfy them torments and exhausts people's souls.

You can imagine people reaching a certain degree of freedom that fully satisfies them. They then enjoy their independence without restlessness and without passion. But people will never establish an equality that is enough for them.

No matter how hard a people tries, it will never succeed in making conditions perfectly equal within its borders. And if it had the misfortune of achieving this absolute and complete leveling, there would still remain the inequality of intelligence, which, coming directly from God, will always escape the laws.

No matter how democratic the social conditions and political constitution of a people may be, you can count on each of its citizens always seeing several points above him that dominate him, and you can predict that he will stubbornly fix his gaze in that direction alone. When inequality is the common rule of a society, the greatest inequalities don't catch the eye; when everything is roughly level, the slightest ones wound. That is why the desire for equality becomes ever more insatiable as equality increases.

Among democratic peoples, people easily achieve a certain equality; but they can never reach the one they desire. It retreats before them every day without ever disappearing from their sight, and as it withdraws, it draws them in pursuit. They ceaselessly believe they're about to grasp it, and it ceaselessly escapes their embrace. They see it close enough to know its charms; they don't get close enough to enjoy it, and they die before having fully savored its sweetness.

It's to these causes that we must attribute the singular melancholy that the inhabitants of democratic countries so often display in the midst of their abundance, and the weariness with life that sometimes seizes them in the middle of a comfortable and tranquil existence.

In France, people complain that the number of suicides is growing; in America, suicide is rare, but people say that insanity is more common there than anywhere else.

These are different symptoms of the same disease.

Americans don't kill themselves, no matter how agitated they are, because religion forbids it, and among them materialism essentially doesn't exist, even though the passion for material comfort is universal.

Their will holds firm, but their reason often buckles.

In democratic times, pleasures are more vivid than in aristocratic ages, and above all, the number of people who taste them is infinitely greater. But on the other hand, we must recognize that hopes and desires are more often disappointed, souls are more stirred up and more restless, and cares are more bitter.

CHAPTER XIV.

How the Taste for Material Pleasures Combines Among Americans with the Love of Liberty and Attention to Public Affairs.

When a democratic state turns into an absolute monarchy, the energy that previously went into both public and private affairs suddenly concentrates on the latter alone. For a while this produces great material prosperity, but soon the momentum slows and the development of production stalls.

I don't know if you can name a single manufacturing and trading people, from the Tyrians to the Florentines to the English, that wasn't a free people. There is therefore a tight link and a necessary connection between these two things: liberty and industry.

This is generally true of all nations, but especially of democratic ones.

I showed earlier how people living in ages of equality had a constant need for association to obtain nearly all the goods they desire, and I also showed how broad political freedom perfects and popularizes the art of association among them. In these ages, liberty is therefore particularly useful for the production of wealth. Despotism, by contrast, is particularly hostile to it.

The nature of absolute power in democratic ages is neither cruel nor savage, but it is petty and meddlesome. A despotism of this kind, though it doesn't trample on humanity, is directly opposed to the spirit of commerce and the instincts of industry.

So people in democratic times need to be free in order to more easily obtain the material pleasures they ceaselessly long for.

It sometimes happens, however, that the excessive taste they develop for these same pleasures delivers them to the first master who comes along. The passion for comfort then turns against itself and, without realizing it, pushes away the very thing it covets.

There is, in fact, a very dangerous passage in the life of democratic peoples.

When the taste for material pleasures develops among a people faster than education and the habits of freedom, there comes a moment when people are swept away, almost beside themselves, at the sight of the new goods they're about to seize. Consumed with the sole concern of making their fortune, they can no longer see the tight link between each person's private fortune and the prosperity of all. You don't need to snatch rights away from such citizens -- they let them slip away voluntarily. Performing their political duties strikes them as an annoying interruption that distracts them from their business. Choosing their representatives, lending support to the authorities, handling public matters together -- they have no time for it. They can't afford to waste such precious time on useless tasks. These are games for idle people, unfit for serious men occupied with the real business of life. These people think they're following the doctrine of self-interest, but they have only a crude notion of it, and in order to better attend to what they call their business, they neglect the most important business of all, which is to remain masters of themselves.

Since the working citizens refuse to think about public affairs, and the class that could take charge of them to fill its leisure time no longer exists, the seat of government is left virtually empty.

If, at this critical moment, a clever ambitious man seizes power, he finds the road to every kind of usurpation wide open.

Let him just make sure that all material interests prosper, and people will happily let him off the hook for the rest. Let him above all guarantee good order. People with a passion for material pleasures usually discover how the disturbances of liberty trouble their comfort long before they perceive how liberty helps them secure it. And at the slightest sound of public passions penetrating the little pleasures of their private lives, they snap to attention and grow uneasy. For a long time, the fear of anarchy keeps them in perpetual suspense, always ready to throw themselves out of freedom at the first sign of disorder.

I'll readily agree that public peace is a great good. But I don't want to forget that it's through the path of good order that all peoples have arrived at tyranny. That certainly doesn't mean peoples should scorn public peace, but it shouldn't be enough for them. A nation that asks of its government nothing but the maintenance of order is already a slave at the bottom of its heart -- a slave to its own comfort -- and the man who will chain it may appear at any moment.

The despotism of factions is no less to be feared than the despotism of a single man.

When the mass of citizens wants to concern itself only with private affairs, even the smallest parties shouldn't give up hope of seizing control of public ones.

It's not rare to see then, on the vast stage of the world -- just as on our theaters -- a multitude represented by a handful of men. Those men alone speak in the name of an absent or inattentive crowd; they alone act amid the universal stillness; they dispose of everything according to their whims, change the laws, and tyrannize customs and values at will. And you're astonished to see the few weak and unworthy hands into which a great people can fall.

So far, the Americans have successfully avoided all the dangers I've just outlined, and in this they truly deserve admiration.

There is perhaps no country on earth where you'll find fewer idle people than in America, and where everyone who works is more fired up in the pursuit of comfort. But if the Americans' passion for material pleasures is intense, at least it isn't blind, and reason, though powerless to moderate it, does guide it.

An American attends to his private interests as if he were alone in the world, and a moment later throws himself into public affairs as if he'd forgotten all about them. He seems at one moment driven by the most selfish greed and at the next by the most vivid patriotism. The human heart can't really divide itself this way. The inhabitants of the United States alternately display such a strong and similar passion for their comfort and their freedom that you have to believe these passions merge and blend somewhere in their souls. Americans see in their liberty, in fact, the best instrument and the greatest guarantee of their comfort. They love these two things because of each other. They don't think getting involved in public life is none of their business. On the contrary, they believe their primary business is to secure for themselves a government that lets them acquire the goods they desire and doesn't stop them from peacefully enjoying the ones they've already acquired.

CHAPTER XV.

How Religious Beliefs From Time to Time Turn the Souls of Americans Toward Spiritual Pleasures.

In the United States, when the seventh day of each week arrives, the commercial and industrial life of the nation seems suspended. All noise ceases. A deep rest -- or rather a kind of solemn meditation -- takes its place. The soul regains possession of itself and contemplates.

During this day, the places of business are deserted. Each citizen, surrounded by his children, goes to a house of worship. There, he hears strange discourses that seem poorly suited to his ear. He's told about the countless evils caused by pride and greed. He's spoken to about the need to control his desires, the delicate pleasures attached to virtue alone, and the true happiness that accompanies it.

Back at home, you don't see him rush to his business ledgers. He opens the book of Holy Scripture. There he finds sublime or touching depictions of the greatness and goodness of the Creator, of the infinite magnificence of God's works, of the high destiny reserved for humanity, of our duties, and of our right to immortality.

It is in this way that the American from time to time escapes from himself, and by tearing himself away for a moment from the petty passions that agitate his life and the passing interests that fill it, he suddenly enters an ideal world where everything is grand, pure, and eternal.

I investigated elsewhere in this work the causes responsible for the survival of American political institutions, and religion struck me as one of the main ones. Now that I'm looking at individuals, I find it again and I see that it is no less useful to each citizen than to the state as a whole.

Americans show by their practice that they feel the full necessity of moralizing democracy through religion. What they think about this with regard to themselves is a truth that every democratic nation should take deeply to heart.

I have no doubt that a people's social and political constitution predisposes it toward certain beliefs and certain tastes that it then embraces without difficulty, while those same causes steer it away from certain opinions and certain tendencies, without any effort on its part and almost without its knowing it.

The whole art of the legislator consists in discerning in advance the natural inclinations of human societies, in order to know where to support the citizens' efforts and where it would be better to slow them down. For the legislator's obligations differ with the times. Only the goal toward which the human race should always strive is fixed; the means of getting there change constantly.

If I had been born in an aristocratic age, among a nation where the hereditary wealth of some and the hopeless poverty of others alike turned people away from the idea of improvement, and kept their souls in a kind of numbness as they contemplated another world, I would want to find ways to stimulate that people's sense of needs. I would look for faster and easier ways to satisfy the new desires I'd created. And by directing the greatest efforts of the human mind toward physical sciences, I would try to spur it toward the pursuit of comfort.

If it happened that some people became recklessly inflamed in the pursuit of wealth and showed an excessive love of material pleasures, I wouldn't be alarmed. These individual traits would soon disappear into the common character.

The legislators of democracies have different concerns.

Give democratic peoples education and freedom, and leave them alone. They'll manage without difficulty to extract from this world all the goods it can offer. They'll perfect every useful art and make life more comfortable, more pleasant, more easy every day. Their social conditions naturally push them in that direction. I'm not worried they'll stop.

But while people take pleasure in this honest and legitimate pursuit of comfort, there's a danger that they may ultimately lose the use of their most sublime faculties, and that in trying to improve everything around them, they'll end up degrading themselves. That is where the danger lies, and nowhere else.

The legislators of democracies, and all the honest and educated people who live in them, must therefore work ceaselessly to lift souls and keep them directed toward heaven. Everyone who cares about the future of democratic societies must unite and make continuous efforts to spread throughout these societies a taste for the infinite, a feeling for greatness, and a love of spiritual pleasures.

And if, among the opinions of a democratic people, there are some of those harmful theories that tend to make people believe everything perishes with the body, consider the men who profess them as the natural enemies of that people.

There is much that offends me about materialists. Their doctrines strike me as pernicious and their pride revolts me. If their system could be of any use to humanity, it would seem to be by giving people a modest opinion of themselves. But that's not what happens. When they think they've sufficiently established that they're nothing but brutes, they show themselves as proud as if they'd proved they were gods.

Materialism is a dangerous disease of the human mind in every nation, but it must be especially feared among democratic peoples, because it combines wonderfully with the vice of heart most familiar to those peoples.

Democracy favors the taste for material pleasures. If that taste becomes excessive, it soon leads people to believe everything is nothing but matter. And materialism, in turn, carries them with insane fervor toward those same pleasures. This is the fatal circle into which democratic nations are driven. It's good for them to see the danger and hold themselves back.

Most religions are simply general, simple, and practical means of teaching people the immortality of the soul. That is the greatest benefit a democratic people derives from religious beliefs, and what makes them more necessary to such a people than to any other.

So when any religion has taken deep root within a democracy, be careful not to uproot it. Preserve it instead, with the greatest care, as the most precious inheritance from aristocratic ages. Don't try to tear away people's old religious beliefs to substitute new ones, for fear that during the passage from one faith to another, the soul might find itself for a moment empty of belief, and the love of material pleasures might rush in to fill it entirely.

Certainly, the transmigration of souls is no more rational than materialism. But if a democracy absolutely had to choose between the two, I wouldn't hesitate, and I would judge that its citizens risk less degradation by thinking their soul will pass into the body of a pig than by believing it is nothing at all.

The belief in an immaterial and immortal principle temporarily united with matter is so necessary to human greatness that it still produces beautiful effects even when you don't add the doctrine of rewards and punishments, and when you simply believe that after death the divine principle contained within us is absorbed into God or goes on to animate another creature.

Even those who hold such beliefs view the body as the secondary and inferior part of our nature, and they scorn it even as they submit to its influence. At the same time, they feel a natural esteem and a secret admiration for the immaterial part of man, even when they sometimes refuse to submit to its authority. That alone is enough to give an elevated turn to their ideas and tastes, and to make them tend, without self-interest and almost of their own accord, toward pure sentiments and great thoughts.

It's not certain that Socrates and his school had very firm opinions about what would happen to man in the next life. But the one belief on which they were settled -- that the soul has nothing in common with the body and survives it -- was enough to give Platonic philosophy the kind of sublime momentum that distinguishes it.

When you read Plato, you see that in the times before him and in his own time, there were many writers who championed materialism. Those writers have not come down to us, or have come down only in very incomplete form. The same has been true in nearly every age: most of the great literary reputations have been allied with spiritualism. The instinct and taste of the human race sustain this doctrine; they often save it in spite of people themselves, and keep afloat the names of those who embrace it. So we should never believe that in any age, whatever the political conditions may be, the passion for material pleasures and the opinions attached to it could be enough for an entire people. The human heart is vaster than we suppose. It can hold at once the taste for the goods of this earth and the love of heavenly ones. Sometimes it seems to give itself madly to one of the two, but it never goes long without thinking of the other.

If it's easy to see that in democratic times especially it matters to make spiritualist views prevail, it's not easy to say how those who govern democratic peoples should go about making them prevail.

I don't believe in the success or the durability of official philosophies, and as for state religions, I've always thought that while they might sometimes temporarily serve the interests of political power, they always sooner or later prove fatal to the church.

Nor am I among those who think that to elevate religion in the eyes of peoples and honor the spiritualism it professes, it's a good idea to indirectly grant its ministers a political influence that the law denies them.

I feel so keenly the nearly inevitable dangers that beliefs face when their interpreters get involved in public affairs, and I'm so convinced of the need to maintain Christianity at all costs within the new democracies, that I would rather chain priests inside the sanctuary than let them leave it.

What means, then, are left to the authorities for leading people back to spiritualist views, or for keeping them in the religion that suggests such views?

What I'm about to say will certainly hurt me in the eyes of politicians. I believe the only effective means governments can use to honor the dogma of the immortality of the soul is to act every day as if they believed in it themselves. And I think it is only by scrupulously conforming to religious morality in great affairs that they can hope to teach citizens to know it, love it, and respect it in small ones.

CHAPTER XVI.

How an Excessive Love of Comfort Can Harm Comfort Itself.

There is a closer connection than you might think between the perfection of the soul and the improvement of material goods. You can keep these two things separate in your mind and consider each one in turn, but you can't fully divide them without eventually losing sight of both.

Animals have the same senses as we do and roughly the same appetites. There is no material passion we don't share with them, and whose seed can't be found in a dog just as well as in ourselves.

So why is it that animals can only meet their most basic and crudest needs, while we endlessly vary our pleasures and keep increasing them?

What makes us superior to animals in this respect is that we use our souls to discover the material goods that instinct alone leads them to. In man, the angel teaches the brute the art of satisfaction. It's because man is capable of rising above material goods, of scorning life itself -- something animals can't even conceive of -- that he knows how to multiply those same goods to a degree they could never imagine either.

Everything that elevates, enlarges, and expands the soul makes it more capable of succeeding even in those endeavors that have nothing to do with the soul.

Everything that weakens, diminishes, or brings the soul low enfeebles it for all things, the greatest and the smallest alike, and threatens to make it almost as powerless for the one as for the other. So the soul must remain great and strong, if only so that from time to time it can put its strength and greatness in the service of the body.

If people ever managed to be satisfied with material goods alone, they would probably lose little by little the art of producing them, and would end up enjoying them without discernment and without progress, like animals.

CHAPTER XVII.

How, in Times of Equality and Doubt, It Matters to Push Back the Horizon of Human Actions.

In ages of faith, people place the ultimate goal of life beyond life itself.

People in those times naturally accustom themselves -- almost without meaning to -- to fixing their gaze for long years on a single, unchanging object toward which they ceaselessly advance. Through imperceptible progress, they learn to suppress a thousand little passing desires in order to better satisfy the great and permanent desire that torments them. When those same people turn to the affairs of this world, those habits reassert themselves. They readily set for their earthly actions a general and definite goal toward which all their efforts point. You don't see them giving in to some new experiment every day; they have settled plans that they never tire of pursuing.

This explains why religious peoples have often accomplished such enduring things. It turned out that by concerning themselves with the next world, they had discovered the great secret of succeeding in this one.

Religions foster the general habit of acting with the future in mind. In this, they are no less useful to happiness in this life than to the felicity of the next. That is one of their greatest political aspects.

But as the light of faith grows dim, people's vision narrows, and it seems as though the horizon of human action draws closer to them every day.

Once people have grown accustomed to no longer thinking about what will happen after their lives, you see them easily fall back into that complete and brutish indifference to the future that is all too consistent with certain instincts of the human species. As soon as they've lost the habit of placing their main hopes in the long term, they're naturally inclined to want to fulfill their slightest desires without delay. And it seems that the moment they despair of living for eternity, they're disposed to act as if they had only a single day to exist.

In ages of unbelief, it is therefore always to be feared that people will surrender ceaselessly to the day-to-day whims of their desires, and that by entirely giving up on attaining what can only be won through long effort, they will build nothing great, nothing peaceful, and nothing lasting.

If it happens that among a people so disposed the social conditions become democratic, the danger I'm describing only grows.

When everyone is constantly trying to change their position, when an immense competition is open to all, when wealth is accumulated and dissipated in moments amid the tumult of democracy, the idea of a sudden and easy fortune, of great wealth easily won and lost, and the image of chance in all its forms, fill the human mind. The instability of the social order feeds the natural instability of desires. Amid these perpetual fluctuations of fate, the present looms large; it hides the future, which fades away, and people want to think only about tomorrow.

In those countries where, by an unfortunate combination, irreligion and democracy meet, philosophers and rulers must devote themselves ceaselessly to pushing back the horizon of human actions in people's eyes -- that is their great task.

The moralist must work within the spirit of his age and country, and learn to defend himself there. He must strive every day to show his contemporaries how, even amid the perpetual movement that surrounds them, it is easier than they suppose to conceive and carry out long-term projects. He must make them see that although the face of humanity has changed, the methods by which people can achieve prosperity in this world have remained the same, and that among democratic peoples, as elsewhere, it is only by resisting a thousand little everyday passions that you can satisfy the great general passion for happiness that torments.

The task of rulers is no less clearly laid out.

In all times, it matters that those who lead nations act with the future in view. But this is even more necessary in democratic and skeptical ages than in any others. By acting this way, the leaders of democracies not only make public affairs prosper but also teach private individuals, by their example, the art of managing private ones.

They must above all strive to banish chance from the political world as much as possible.

The sudden and undeserved elevation of a courtier produces only a fleeting impression in an aristocratic country, because the overall framework of institutions and beliefs normally forces people to advance slowly along paths they cannot leave.

But nothing is more pernicious than such examples held up before the eyes of a democratic people. They complete the process of hurling its heart down a slope where everything already pulls it. It is therefore especially in times of skepticism and equality that we must take care to prevent the favor of the people or the prince -- which chance gives or takes away -- from standing in for knowledge and service. Every advancement should appear to be the fruit of effort, so that there are no easy paths to greatness and ambition is forced to fix its gaze long on the goal before reaching it.

Governments must work to give people back the taste for the future that is no longer inspired by religion and the social order, and they must teach citizens every day, in practice and without preaching, that wealth, fame, and power are the rewards of work; that great successes are found at the end of long desires; and that nothing lasting is achieved except what is won with difficulty.

When people have grown accustomed to foreseeing from very far off what will happen to them here below, and to nourishing themselves on hopes, it becomes difficult for them to always stop their minds at the precise boundaries of life, and they are quite ready to look beyond them.

So I have no doubt that by accustoming citizens to think about the future in this world, you would gradually bring them closer, without their even knowing it, to religious beliefs.

Thus the very means that allows people to do without religion to a certain degree is perhaps, after all, the only means we have left for leading the human race back to faith by a long detour.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Why, Among Americans, All Honest Professions Are Considered Honorable.

Among democratic peoples, where there is no hereditary wealth, everyone works for a living, or has worked, or was born to people who worked. The idea of work as a necessary, natural, and honorable condition of humanity presents itself to the human mind from every direction.

Not only is work not dishonored among these peoples -- it is honored. The prejudice isn't against it; it's in its favor. In the United States, a wealthy man feels he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some commercial operation, some business venture, or some public duties. He would consider himself disreputable if he used his life for nothing but living. It's to escape this obligation to work that so many rich Americans come to Europe, where they find the remnants of aristocratic societies in which idleness is still honored.

Equality doesn't just rehabilitate the idea of work -- it elevates the idea of work done for profit.

In aristocracies, it isn't precisely work that people look down on; it's work done for gain. Work is glorious when ambition or virtue alone inspires it. Under aristocracy, though, it constantly happens that a man who works for honor is not indifferent to the lure of profit. But these two desires meet only in the deepest recesses of his soul. He takes great care to hide from everyone the place where they converge. He willingly hides it even from himself. In aristocratic countries, there's hardly a public official who doesn't claim to serve the state without self-interest. Their salary is a detail they sometimes barely think about, and they always make a show of not thinking about it at all.

Thus the idea of profit remains separate from the idea of work. The two may be joined in fact, but thought keeps them apart.

In democratic societies, these two ideas are, on the contrary, always visibly united. Since the desire for comfort is universal, since fortunes are modest and fleeting, since everyone needs to increase their resources or prepare new ones for their children, everyone sees clearly that profit is -- if not entirely, at least partly -- what drives them to work. Even those who act mainly for glory inevitably come to terms with the thought that they don't act solely for that reason, and they discover, like it or not, that the desire to make a living mingles in them with the desire to distinguish their lives.

From the moment when, on the one hand, work seems to all citizens an honorable necessity of the human condition, and when, on the other, work is always visibly done, in whole or in part, for pay, the immense gap that separated different professions in aristocratic societies disappears. They may not all be alike, but they share at least one common trait.

There is no profession where people don't work for money. The wage that is common to all gives them all a family resemblance.

This helps explain the views Americans hold about different professions.

American servants don't feel degraded because they work, since everyone around them works. They don't feel diminished by the idea that they receive a wage, since the President of the United States also works for a wage. He's paid to lead, just as they are paid to serve.

In the United States, professions are more or less strenuous, more or less profitable, but they are never high or low. Every honest profession is honorable.

CHAPTER XIX.

What Draws Almost All Americans Toward Industrial Professions.

I wonder whether, among all the useful arts, agriculture isn't the one that improves most slowly in democratic nations. It often seems to stand still, simply because several others appear to be racing ahead.

On the contrary, nearly all the tastes and habits that grow out of equality naturally lead people toward commerce and industry.

Picture an active, educated, free, comfortable man, full of desires. He is too poor to live in idleness; he is rich enough to feel above the immediate fear of want; and he is thinking about how to improve his lot. This man has developed a taste for material pleasures; a thousand others are giving in to the same taste before his eyes; he himself has begun to indulge it, and he's burning to increase the means of satisfying it further. Yet life is passing; time is pressing. What will he do?

Farming promises his efforts results that are nearly certain but slow. You only get rich from it gradually and with difficulty. Agriculture is suited only to rich people who already have a great surplus or to poor people who ask only to survive. His choice is made: he sells his field, leaves his home, and throws himself into some risky but profitable profession.

Now, democratic societies are full of people like this, and as equality of conditions increases, their numbers grow.

So democracy doesn't just multiply the number of workers; it pushes people toward one kind of work rather than another. While it turns them away from agriculture, it steers them toward commerce and industry.

It has been observed many times that manufacturers and merchants are possessed by an immoderate taste for material pleasures, and commerce and industry have been blamed for this. I think this is confusing effect with cause. It's not commerce and industry that give people the taste for material pleasures, but rather that taste that drives people toward commercial and industrial careers, where they hope to satisfy it more completely and more quickly. If commerce and industry increase the desire for comfort, that's because every passion grows stronger the more you indulge it, and intensifies with every effort you make to satisfy it. All the causes that make the love of worldly goods predominate in the human heart promote commerce and industry. Equality is one of those causes. It favors commerce not directly, by giving people a taste for business, but indirectly, by strengthening and spreading in their souls the love of comfort.

This spirit is visible even among the richest citizens themselves.

In democratic countries, a man, however wealthy you may suppose him, is almost always dissatisfied with his fortune because he finds himself less rich than his father and fears that his sons will be less rich than him. Most of the wealthy in democracies are therefore constantly dreaming of ways to acquire more wealth, and they naturally turn their eyes toward commerce and industry, which seem to them the quickest and most powerful means of getting it. They share the instincts of the poor on this point without sharing their needs -- or rather, they are driven by the most imperious need of all: the need not to fall.

In aristocracies, the rich are also the rulers. The constant attention they give to great public affairs diverts them from the petty concerns that commerce and industry demand. If one of them does happen to turn toward business, the will of the group immediately blocks his path. For no matter how much you rebel against the power of numbers, you never fully escape their yoke, and even within those aristocratic bodies that most stubbornly refuse to recognize the rights of the national majority, a particular internal majority forms that governs.

See the note at the end of the volume.

In democratic countries, where money doesn't lead its possessor to power but often keeps him away from it, the rich don't know what to do with their leisure. The restlessness and scale of their desires, the extent of their resources, the taste for the extraordinary that almost all those who rise above the crowd feel -- however they've risen -- press them to act. The only road open to them is commerce. In democracies, nothing is grander or more brilliant than commerce; it's what attracts public attention and fills the crowd's imagination. All the most energetic passions are directed toward it. Nothing can stop the rich from throwing themselves into it -- neither their own prejudices nor anyone else's. The rich in democracies never form a class with its own customs and values and its own self-policing. The particular ideas of their class don't hold them back, and the general ideas of their country push them forward. Since the great fortunes found within a democratic people almost always have a commercial origin, many generations must pass before their possessors have entirely lost the habits of business.

Squeezed into the narrow space that politics leaves them, the rich in democracies throw themselves into commerce on all sides. There they can spread out and use their natural advantages. And it's by the very boldness and scale of their industrial enterprises that you should judge how little they would have thought of industry if they'd been born into an aristocracy.

The same observation applies, moreover, to all people in democracies, whether poor or rich.

Those who live amid democratic instability constantly have the image of chance before their eyes, and they end up loving every enterprise in which chance plays a role.

They are therefore all drawn to commerce, not only because of the profit it promises them, but out of love for the excitement it gives them.

The United States of America emerged only half a century ago from the colonial dependence in which England held them. The number of great fortunes there is very small, and capital is still scarce. Yet there is no people on earth that has made progress in commerce and industry as rapid as the Americans. Today they are the second maritime nation in the world, and although their manufactures must contend with nearly insurmountable natural obstacles, they don't stop developing every day.

In the United States, the greatest industrial enterprises are carried out with ease, because the entire population is involved in industry, and the poorest citizen as well as the richest willingly join their efforts in this. You're astonished every day to see the immense undertakings accomplished effortlessly by a nation that contains, so to speak, no rich people at all. The Americans arrived only yesterday on the soil they inhabit, and they've already turned the entire order of nature upside down for their benefit. They've linked the Hudson to the Mississippi, and connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico across more than five hundred leagues of continent separating those two seas. The longest railroads built anywhere in the world to date are in America.

But what strikes me most in the United States is not the extraordinary size of some industrial enterprises; it's the innumerable multitude of small ones.

Nearly all American farmers have combined some commerce with agriculture; most have turned agriculture itself into a business.

It's rare for an American farmer to settle permanently on the land he works. In the new provinces of the West especially, people clear a field to sell it, not to harvest it. They build a farm in the expectation that the state of the country will soon change with the growth of its population, and they'll be able to get a good price for it.

Every year, a swarm of inhabitants from the North descends toward the South and settles in the regions where cotton and sugar cane grow. These men cultivate the land with the goal of making it produce enough to enrich them in a few years, and they already foresee the moment when they'll be able to return to their homeland to enjoy the comfort they've acquired. Americans thus bring the spirit of commerce into agriculture, and their industrial passions show up there as everywhere else.

Americans make immense progress in industry because everyone is involved in it at the same time; and for this very same reason, they're subject to very unexpected and very formidable industrial crises.

Since everyone is in business, commerce among them is subject to so many numerous and complicated influences that it's impossible to predict in advance what difficulties may arise. Since everyone is more or less involved in industry, at the slightest shock to business, all private fortunes stumble at the same time, and the state itself totters.

I believe that the recurrence of industrial crises is an endemic disease of democratic nations in our time. You can make it less dangerous, but you can't cure it, because it's not caused by an accident but by the very temperament of these peoples.

CHAPTER XX.

How Aristocracy Could Emerge from Industry.

I've shown how democracy promotes the development of industry and multiplies the number of industrialists beyond measure. We'll now see by what roundabout path industry could, in turn, lead people back toward aristocracy.

It's been recognized that when a worker occupies himself every day with the same single detail, the overall product is turned out more easily, more quickly, and more economically.

It's also been recognized that the larger the scale on which an industry is undertaken -- with greater capital and greater credit -- the cheaper its products.

These truths were glimpsed long ago, but they've been demonstrated in our time. Already they're being applied to several very important industries, and one after another, even the smallest ones are adopting them.

I see nothing in the political world that should concern the legislator more than these two new axioms of industrial science.

When an artisan devotes himself ceaselessly and exclusively to making a single object, he ends up performing this work with singular dexterity. But at the same time, he loses the general ability to apply his mind to the direction of work. He becomes more skillful every day and less resourceful, and you could say that the man degrades as the worker improves.

What should you expect from a man who has spent twenty years of his life making the heads of pins? And to what can that powerful human intelligence, which has often shaken the world, now apply itself in him, except to finding the best way to make pin heads!

When a worker has consumed a considerable portion of his existence in this way, his thought has forever fixed itself near the daily object of his labors. His body has contracted certain fixed habits that he can no longer break free from. In a word, he no longer belongs to himself but to the profession he has chosen. In vain have laws and customs taken care to break down every barrier around this man and open a thousand different paths to fortune in every direction. An industrial theory more powerful than customs and laws has chained him to a trade, and often to a place, that he cannot leave. It has assigned him a certain position in society from which he cannot escape. In the midst of universal movement, it has made him immobile.

As the principle of the division of labor receives fuller application, the worker becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent. The craft advances; the craftsman falls behind. On the other side, as it becomes ever more apparent that industrial products are better and cheaper when the factory is larger and the capital greater, very rich and very educated men step forward to exploit industries that had previously been left to ignorant or struggling artisans. The scale of effort required and the immensity of results to be achieved attract them.

Thus, at the same time that industrial science continually lowers the class of workers, it raises the class of masters.

While the worker increasingly narrows his intelligence to the study of a single detail, the master surveys a vaster whole every day, and his mind expands in proportion as the other's contracts. Soon the worker will need nothing but physical strength without intelligence; the master will need knowledge, and almost genius, to succeed. The one increasingly resembles the administrator of a vast empire, and the other a brute.

The master and the worker have nothing in common here, and they differ more with each passing day. They are connected only like the two extreme links of a long chain. Each occupies a place made for him from which he does not move. One is in a continual, narrow, and necessary dependence on the other, and seems born to obey, as the other seems born to command.

What is this, if not aristocracy?

As conditions become more and more equal across the body of the nation, the need for manufactured goods becomes more widespread and more intense, and the low prices that put these goods within reach of modest fortunes become an ever greater factor in success.

So each day you find wealthier and more educated men devoting their riches and knowledge to industry, and by opening large workshops and strictly dividing labor, they seek to satisfy the new desires springing up on every side.

Thus, even as the mass of the nation trends toward democracy, the particular class involved in industry becomes more aristocratic. People look more and more alike in the one and more and more different in the other, and inequality increases within the small society in proportion as it decreases in the large one.

This is how, when you trace things back to their source, aristocracy seems to emerge by a natural effort from the very heart of democracy.

But this aristocracy bears no resemblance to those that came before it.

You'll notice first that, applying only to industry and to just a few industrial professions, it's an exception -- a monstrosity within the overall social order.

The small aristocratic societies that certain industries form in the midst of the immense democracy of our time contain, like the great aristocratic societies of old, some very wealthy men and a very wretched multitude. These poor have few means of escaping their condition and becoming rich, but the rich constantly become poor, or quit business after taking their profits. So the elements that make up the class of the poor are more or less fixed, but the elements that compose the class of the rich are not. In truth, although there are rich people, the rich as a class does not exist, because these rich have no common spirit or goals, no shared traditions or hopes. There are members, but no body.

Not only are the rich not firmly united with one another, but there is no real bond between the poor man and the rich man. They are not permanently fixed near each other. At any moment, interest brings them together and pulls them apart. The worker depends in general on masters, but not on any particular master. These two men see each other at the factory and don't know each other anywhere else. While they touch at a single point, they remain far apart in every other way. The manufacturer asks the worker for nothing but his labor, and the worker expects from him nothing but his wages. One doesn't commit to protect, nor does the other commit to defend, and they are bound to each other permanently by neither habit nor duty. The aristocracy that commerce creates almost never settles in the midst of the industrial population it directs. Its goal is not to govern that population, but to use it.

An aristocracy so constituted can have no great hold over those it employs. And even if it manages to seize them for a moment, they soon escape its grasp. It doesn't know how to will, and it cannot act.

The landed aristocracy of past ages was obligated by law, or believed itself obligated by custom, to come to the aid of its servants and to relieve their miseries. But the manufacturing aristocracy of our time, after having impoverished and brutalized the men it uses, abandons them in times of crisis to public charity to be fed. This follows naturally from what I've said. Between the worker and the master, contacts are frequent, but there is no real bond between them.

I think that, all things considered, the manufacturing aristocracy we see rising before our eyes is one of the harshest that has ever appeared on earth. But it is also one of the most limited and least dangerous.

Nevertheless, it is in this direction that the friends of democracy should ceaselessly and anxiously turn their gaze. For if permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy ever again enter the world, it is safe to predict that they will come in through this door.

END OF VOLUME THREE.

NOTE, PAGE 316.

There are, however, aristocracies that have pursued commerce with ardor and cultivated industry with success. The history of the world offers several striking examples. But in general, it must be said that aristocracy is not favorable to the development of industry and commerce. Only money-based aristocracies are the exception to this rule.

In those aristocracies, there is hardly any desire that doesn't need wealth for its satisfaction. The love of wealth becomes, so to speak, the main highway of human passions. All others lead to it or cross it.

The taste for money and the thirst for status and power then become so blended in the same souls that it becomes difficult to tell whether men are greedy out of ambition or ambitious out of greed. This is what happens in England, where people want to be rich in order to attain honors, and where they desire honors as a display of wealth. The human mind is then seized from every side and pulled toward commerce and industry, which are the shortest roads to opulence.

This, however, seems to me an exceptional and transitory state of affairs. When wealth has become the sole sign of aristocracy, it's very hard for the rich to maintain their hold on power and exclude everyone else.

Aristocracy of birth and pure democracy are the two extremes of the social and political conditions of nations. Money-based aristocracy sits in between. It resembles aristocracy of birth in that it confers great privileges on a small number of citizens; it connects to democracy in that those privileges can be successively acquired by anyone. It often forms a natural transition between the two, and you can't tell whether it's ending the reign of aristocratic institutions or already opening the new era of democracy.

CHAPTER I.

How customs soften as social conditions become more equal.

For several centuries now, we can see that social conditions have been growing more equal, and at the same time we discover that customs have been growing gentler. Are these two things merely happening at the same time, or is there some hidden connection between them — so that one cannot advance without pulling the other along?

There are many causes that can work together to make a people's customs less harsh. But among all of these, the most powerful seems to me to be the equality of social conditions. The equalizing of conditions and the softening of customs are therefore, in my view, not just contemporary events — they are linked phenomena.

When fable-writers want us to care about the actions of animals, they give those animals human thoughts and passions. Poets do the same when they talk about spirits and angels. There is no misery so deep, no happiness so pure, that it can capture our attention and grip our hearts — unless we are shown ourselves in disguise.

This applies perfectly to the subject we are now considering.

When all men are permanently ranked according to their profession, their wealth, and their birth within an aristocratic society, the members of each class see themselves as children of the same family and feel a constant, active sympathy for one another — a sympathy that can never be found to the same degree among citizens of a democracy.

But things are very different between the various classes themselves.

In an aristocratic people, each caste has its own opinions, its own feelings, its own rights, its own customs, its own separate existence. The men who belong to it do not resemble everyone else at all; they do not think or feel in the same way, and they barely believe they are part of the same humanity.

They therefore cannot truly understand what others experience, or judge others by their own standards.

You do sometimes see them rushing eagerly to help one another, but this does not contradict what I just said.

Those same aristocratic institutions that had made beings of the same species so different from each other had nonetheless bound them together by a very tight political chain.

Although the serf had no natural concern for the fate of the nobles, he still believed himself duty-bound to sacrifice himself for the one who was his lord. And although the noble believed himself to be of a different nature than the serfs, he nonetheless judged that his duty and his honor compelled him to defend, at the risk of his own life, those who lived on his lands.

It is obvious that these mutual obligations did not spring from natural law, but from political law, and that society was getting more out of people than simple humanity ever could have. It was not the person you felt obligated to support — it was the vassal or the lord. Feudal institutions made people very sensitive to the suffering of certain individuals, but not to the misery of the human race as a whole. They gave generosity to customs rather than gentleness, and although they inspired great acts of devotion, they did not create genuine sympathy — because real sympathy only exists between people who are alike, and in aristocratic centuries, the only people you see as your equals are the members of your own caste.

When the chroniclers of the Middle Ages — all of whom belonged to the aristocracy by birth or habit — report the tragic death of a noble, they express infinite grief. Yet they describe the massacre and torture of common people in a single breath, without flinching.

It is not that these writers felt habitual hatred or systematic contempt for the common people. The war between the different classes of the state had not yet been declared. They were obeying instinct rather than passion. Since they could not form a clear picture of a poor person's suffering, they took little interest in his fate.

The same was true of common people once the feudal bond began to break down. Those same centuries that witnessed so many heroic acts of devotion from vassals toward their lords also saw unspeakable cruelties inflicted, from time to time, by the lower classes upon the upper.

You should not think that this mutual insensitivity came only from a lack of order and education — because traces of it can be found in the centuries that followed, which, though they became more orderly and enlightened, still remained aristocratic.

In 1675, the lower classes of Brittany revolted over a new tax. These unruly movements were crushed with unprecedented savagery. Here is how Madame de Sevigne, an eyewitness to these horrors, described them to her daughter:

Les Rochers, October 3, 1675.

"My God, my dear, how delightful your letter from Aix is! At least reread your letters before you send them. Let yourself be surprised by their charm, and console yourself with that pleasure for the trouble of writing so many. So you have kissed all of Provence? There would not be much pleasure in kissing all of Brittany unless one enjoyed the smell of wine. Would you like some news from Rennes? A tax of a hundred thousand ecus has been levied, and if the sum is not collected within twenty-four hours it will be doubled and enforced by soldiers. They have driven out and banished an entire large street, and forbidden anyone to take in the inhabitants on pain of death — so that all these wretches, women who had just given birth, old people, children, were wandering in tears outside the city without knowing where to go, without food, without a place to sleep. The day before yesterday, they broke on the wheel the fiddler who had started the rioting and the looting of stamped paper; he was quartered, and his four quarters displayed at the four corners of the city. They have arrested sixty citizens, and tomorrow they begin the hangings. This province is a fine example for the others, especially when it comes to respecting governors and their wives, and not throwing stones in their gardens."

To appreciate the wit of this last remark, one must remember that Madame de Grignan, Sevigne's daughter, was the governor's wife of Provence.

"Madame de Tarente was in these woods yesterday in enchanting weather. There is no question of a room or refreshments. She comes in through the gate and goes back the same way..."

In another letter she adds:

"You talk quite amusingly about our miseries. We are not so busy with the wheel anymore — just one every eight days, to keep justice going. The hangings, I must say, now feel like a refreshing change. I have quite a different idea of justice since I have been in this region. Your galley slaves seem to me a society of decent people who have retired from the world to lead a quiet life."

It would be wrong to think that Madame de Sevigne, who wrote these lines, was a selfish and barbaric creature. She loved her children passionately, and she was deeply sensitive to her friends' sorrows. You can even see, when you read her, that she treated her tenants and servants with kindness and patience. But Madame de Sevigne could not clearly imagine what it was like to suffer when one was not a gentleman.

In our own day, the harshest man, writing to the most insensitive person, would not dare to indulge in cold blood in the sort of cruel banter I have just reproduced. Even if his own personal values allowed him to do it, the general values of the nation would forbid it.

Where does this come from? Are we more sensitive than our ancestors? I am not sure. But one thing is certain: our sensitivity extends to more things.

When social ranks are nearly equal among a people, all men having roughly the same way of thinking and feeling, each of them can instantly judge the sensations of all the others. He casts a quick glance at himself, and that is enough. There is no suffering he cannot easily grasp, no misery whose extent a secret instinct does not reveal to him. It does not matter whether the victims are strangers or enemies — his imagination immediately puts him in their place. It mixes something personal into his pity, and makes him suffer himself while another person's body is being torn apart.

In democratic centuries, men rarely sacrifice themselves for one another, but they show a general compassion for all members of the human species. You do not see them inflicting needless harm, and when they can relieve the pain of others without much cost to themselves, they take pleasure in doing so. They are not selfless, but they are gentle.

Although Americans have practically turned self-interest into a social and philosophical theory, they are nonetheless quite open to pity.

There is no country where criminal justice is administered with more leniency than in the United States. While the English seem determined to preserve in their criminal law the bloody traces of the Middle Ages, the Americans have almost eliminated the death penalty from their legal codes.

North America is, I believe, the only region on earth where, for fifty years, not a single citizen has been put to death for political crimes.

What ultimately proves that this remarkable gentleness of Americans comes mainly from their social conditions is the way they treat their slaves.

Perhaps no European colony in the New World, all things considered, treats Black people less harshly in physical terms than the United States. Yet the slaves there still endure terrible suffering and are constantly exposed to very cruel punishments.

It is easy to see that the fate of these unfortunate people inspires little pity in their masters, and that the masters view slavery not only as a fact from which they profit, but as an evil that barely concerns them. So the same man who is full of humanity toward his fellow human beings when they are also his equals becomes insensitive to their pain the moment equality ceases. It is to this equality, then, more than to civilization or education, that we must attribute his gentleness.

What I have just said about individuals applies, to a certain extent, to nations as well.

When each nation has its own separate opinions, beliefs, laws, and customs, it sees itself as constituting the whole of humanity by itself, and is moved only by its own suffering. If war breaks out between two peoples with this mindset, it cannot help but be waged with barbarism.

At the height of their enlightenment, the Romans slaughtered enemy generals after dragging them in triumph behind a chariot, and threw prisoners to wild beasts for the people's entertainment. Cicero, who let out such great cries at the thought of a citizen being crucified, found nothing objectionable about these atrocious abuses of victory. It is clear that in his eyes, a foreigner was not of the same human species as a Roman.

As nations become more similar to one another, on the other hand, they show more mutual compassion for each other's miseries, and the law of nations grows gentler.

CHAPTER II.

How democracy makes the everyday relations of Americans simpler and easier.

Democracy does not forge strong bonds between people, but it makes their everyday interactions easier.

Two Englishmen meet by chance on the other side of the world. They are surrounded by foreigners whose language and customs they barely know.

These two men first study each other with great curiosity and a kind of secret unease. Then they turn away — or if they do approach each other, they take care to speak only with a stiff and distracted air, saying nothing of importance.

Yet there is no hostility between them. They have never met, and each considers the other perfectly respectable. So why do they go to such lengths to avoid each other?

You have to go back to England to understand.

When birth alone — independent of wealth — determines a person's rank, everyone knows precisely where they stand on the social ladder. They do not try to climb, and they do not fear falling. In a society organized this way, people from different castes do not interact much with one another. But when chance brings them together, they engage willingly, with neither hope nor fear of blending into one another. Their interactions are not based on equality, but they are not strained.

When an aristocracy of money replaces an aristocracy of birth, it is a different story entirely.

The privileges of a few are still enormous, but the possibility of acquiring them is open to everyone. It follows that those who have these privileges are constantly anxious about losing them or seeing them shared, while those who do not yet have them want desperately to get them — or, failing that, to appear as though they do, which is not impossible. Since a person's social value is no longer fixed visibly and permanently by blood and varies endlessly according to wealth, ranks still exist, but you can no longer tell at a glance who holds them.

A silent war immediately breaks out among all citizens. Some struggle by a thousand tricks to push their way — in reality or appearance — among those above them; others fight ceaselessly to repel these usurpers of their status. Or rather, the same person does both at once: while trying to break into the sphere above, he fights without rest against the pressure from below.

This is the state of England today, and I think it is mainly to this condition that we should attribute the behavior I described above.

Since aristocratic pride is still very strong among the English, while the boundaries of the aristocracy have become uncertain, everyone fears at every moment that their familiarity might be exploited. Unable to judge at a glance the social position of the people they encounter, they prudently avoid contact altogether. They dread that doing small favors might lead to an ill-matched friendship. They fear acts of kindness, and they dodge the unwanted gratitude of a stranger as carefully as his hostility.

Many people explain this peculiar unsociability and the reserved, taciturn temperament of the English by purely physical causes. I am willing to grant that blood may have something to do with it, but I believe the social order plays a much greater role. The example of the Americans proves the point.

In America, where privileges of birth have never existed and where wealth confers no special rights on its holder, strangers willingly gather in the same places and find neither advantage nor danger in freely sharing their thoughts. If they meet by chance, they neither seek each other out nor avoid each other. Their manner is therefore natural, frank, and open. You can see that they expect and fear almost nothing from one another, and that they make no effort either to display or to conceal the position they hold. While their bearing is often cool and serious, it is never haughty or stiff. And when they do not speak to each other, it is because they are not in the mood to talk — not because they think it is in their interest to stay silent.

In a foreign country, two Americans are instantly friends, simply because they are Americans. There is no prejudice to push them apart, and their shared homeland draws them together. For two Englishmen, the same blood is not enough — the same rank must bring them together.

Americans notice this unsociable temperament of the English among themselves just as clearly as we do, and they find it no less baffling than we do ourselves. And yet Americans are connected to England by origin, religion, language, and partly by customs. They differ only in their social conditions. It is therefore fair to say that English reserve stems from the structure of their country far more than from the character of its citizens.

CHAPTER III.

Why Americans are so easygoing in their own country and so touchy in ours.

Americans have a vengeful temperament, like all serious and reflective peoples. They almost never forget an offense. But it is not easy to offend them, and their resentment is as slow to ignite as it is to die out.

In aristocratic societies, where a small number of individuals run everything, the outward relations between people are governed by more or less fixed conventions. Everyone then believes they know precisely what signs should be used to show respect or express goodwill, and etiquette is a science that no one is supposed to be ignorant of.

The customs of the highest class then serve as a model for all the others, and each of these classes, in turn, develops its own code that all its members are expected to follow.

The rules of politeness thus form a complicated body of law — difficult to master completely, yet impossible to break without risk. As a result, people are constantly exposed to giving or receiving cruel wounds without meaning to.

But as ranks fade, as people of different education and birth mix and mingle in the same places, it becomes almost impossible to agree on the rules of proper behavior. Since the law is uncertain, breaking it is no longer a crime even in the eyes of those who know it. People therefore focus on the substance of actions rather than their form, and they become at once less polite and less quarrelsome.

There are a great many small courtesies that an American does not care about. He judges that they are not owed to him, or he assumes that others do not know they owe them. He either does not notice when someone slights him, or he forgives it. As a result, his manners become less refined, but his social habits become simpler and more robust.

This mutual tolerance that Americans display, and this sturdy confidence they show toward one another, also stems from a deeper, more general cause. I already touched on it in the previous chapter.

In the United States, ranks differ very little in civil society and not at all in the political world. An American therefore does not feel obliged to pay special attention to any of his fellow citizens, nor does it occur to him to demand it for himself. Since he sees no reason to eagerly seek out the company of any particular person, he has a hard time imagining that anyone would reject his. Since he despises no one because of their station, he cannot conceive that anyone would despise him for the same reason. And until he has clearly perceived an insult, he does not believe anyone means to offend him.

The social order naturally disposes Americans not to take offense easily over small things. And the democratic freedom they enjoy goes on to embed this mildness into the national character.

The political institutions of the United States constantly bring citizens of all classes into contact and force them to pursue great enterprises together. People so busy have little time to worry about the details of etiquette, and they have too much interest in getting along to dwell on them. They readily learn to look at the feelings and ideas of those they meet, rather than their manners, and they do not let themselves get worked up over trifles.

I have noticed many times that in the United States, it is not an easy thing to make a man understand that his presence is annoying. Indirect methods are not always enough.

I contradict an American at every turn, hoping to make him feel that his talk bores me. But at every moment he makes new efforts to convince me. I maintain an obstinate silence, and he imagines I am reflecting deeply on the truths he is presenting. When I finally escape his pursuit altogether, he assumes that some urgent business calls me elsewhere. This man will not understand that he is driving me crazy unless I tell him so, and the only way to get rid of him will be to become his mortal enemy.

What seems surprising at first is that this same man, transported to Europe, suddenly becomes extremely fussy and difficult in his dealings — so much so that I often find it as hard not to offend him as I once found it hard to displease him. These two very different effects are produced by the same cause.

Democratic institutions generally give people a grand idea of their country and of themselves. The American leaves his country with his heart swelling with pride. He arrives in Europe and immediately discovers that people there do not care nearly as much as he had imagined about the United States and the great people who inhabit it. This starts to bother him.

He has heard that conditions are not equal in our hemisphere. He sees for himself that among European nations, the traces of rank have not been entirely erased — that wealth and birth still carry uncertain privileges that are as hard to ignore as they are to define. This spectacle surprises and unsettles him, because it is entirely new. Nothing he has seen in his own country helps him understand it. He has no idea what place he should occupy in this half-demolished hierarchy, among classes that are distinct enough to hate and despise each other, yet close enough that he is always in danger of confusing them. He fears placing himself too high, and above all being placed too low. This double danger keeps his mind constantly on edge and makes his actions and words perpetually awkward.

Tradition has taught him that in Europe, ceremony varies endlessly according to social rank. This memory from another age finishes rattling him, and he dreads all the more not receiving the respect due to him, since he does not know exactly what that respect should look like. So he moves about like a man surrounded by traps. Social life is not a relaxation for him but a serious job. He weighs your every move, scrutinizes your expressions, and carefully analyzes everything you say, in case it might contain some hidden slight. I do not think there has ever been a country squire more prickly about matters of etiquette. He tries to obey the smallest rules of protocol himself, and he will not tolerate any being neglected toward him. He is at once full of scruples and full of demands — he wants to do enough, but fears doing too much. And since he does not really know where one ends and the other begins, he retreats into an embarrassed, haughty reserve.

But that is not all — and here is yet another twist of the human heart.

An American talks every day about the admirable equality that prevails in the United States. He is openly proud of it on behalf of his country. But he secretly grieves over it on his own behalf, and he longs to show that, as far as he is concerned, he is an exception to the general order he champions.

You will hardly find an American who does not claim some connection by birth to the earliest founders of the colonies. As for descendants of great English families, America seemed to me to be covered with them.

When a wealthy American arrives in Europe, his first care is to surround himself with every luxury. He is so afraid of being taken for the ordinary citizen of a democracy that he twists himself into a hundred poses to present a new image of his wealth to you each day. He typically lodges in the most fashionable part of town and keeps numerous servants around him at all times.

I heard an American complain that in the finest salons of Paris, the company was too mixed. The taste on display did not seem refined enough for him, and he hinted skillfully that, in his opinion, there was a lack of distinction in manners. He could not get used to seeing intelligence hiding behind such ordinary exteriors.

Such contradictions should not surprise us.

If the traces of old aristocratic distinctions were not so completely erased in the United States, Americans would be less simple and less tolerant in their own country — and less demanding and less awkward in ours.

CHAPTER IV.

Consequences of the three preceding chapters.

When people feel a natural pity for each other's suffering, when easy and frequent interactions bring them closer every day without any touchiness driving them apart, it is easy to see that they will lend each other a hand when the need arises. When an American asks for help from his fellow citizens, it is very rare for them to refuse, and I have often observed that they give it spontaneously and with great eagerness.

If some unexpected accident happens on a public road, people rush from all directions to help the victim. If some sudden misfortune strikes a family, the purses of a thousand strangers open without hesitation. The gifts are modest but very numerous, and they come to the relief of its distress.

It frequently happens in the most civilized nations on earth that an unfortunate person finds himself as isolated in the middle of a crowd as a savage in his forest. That is almost never the case in the United States. Americans, who are always cool in their manners and often rough, are almost never unfeeling. If they do not rush to offer their services, they never refuse to provide them.

None of this contradicts what I said earlier about individualism. In fact, I see these things fitting together rather than clashing.

The equality of conditions, at the same time that it makes people feel their independence, also shows them their weakness. They are free, but exposed to a thousand accidents, and experience soon teaches them that although they do not habitually need other people's help, the moment almost always comes when they cannot do without it.

We see every day in Europe that people in the same profession willingly help each other. They are all exposed to the same hardships, and that is enough for them to try to protect each other from them, however hard or selfish they may be otherwise. So when one of them is in danger, and the others can save him through a small temporary sacrifice or a sudden burst of effort, they do not fail to try. It is not that they care deeply about his fate — because if their efforts to help him happen to fail, they forget him immediately and go back to their own affairs. But a kind of tacit, almost involuntary agreement has formed among them, by which each owes the others a moment of support that he can, in turn, claim for himself.

Extend to an entire people what I am saying about a single class, and you will understand my point.

There does in fact exist among all the citizens of a democracy an agreement similar to the one I am describing. Everyone feels subject to the same weakness and the same dangers, and their interest, as much as their sympathy, makes it a law for them to lend each other mutual assistance when needed.

The more conditions become alike, the more people display this willingness to help each other.

In democracies, where great favors are rarely bestowed, small acts of kindness are constantly being done. It is rare for a person to show great devotion, but everyone is obliging.

CHAPTER V.

How democracy changes the relationship between servant and master.

An American who had traveled extensively in Europe once told me:

"The English treat their servants with a hauteur and an imperious manner that astonish us. But on the other hand, the French sometimes show their servants a familiarity, or treat them with a politeness, that we cannot fathom. It is as if they are afraid to give orders. The proper attitude of superior and inferior is not maintained."

This observation is apt, and I have made it myself many times.

I have always considered England the country where, in our time, the bond of domestic service is tightest, and France the country where it is loosest. Nowhere has the master seemed to me so high or so low as in these two nations.

It is between these two extremes that the Americans place themselves.

That is the surface fact. You have to dig much deeper to find the causes.

No society has ever existed where conditions were so equal that there were no rich and no poor — and consequently no masters and no servants.

Democracy does not prevent these two classes of people from existing, but it changes their spirit and transforms their relationship.

In aristocratic nations, servants form a distinct class that is no more mobile than the class of masters. A fixed order soon develops within it. In the servant class, as in the master class, you soon see a hierarchy, numerous rankings, and marked distinctions, and generations follow one another without the positions changing. These are two societies stacked one on top of the other, always distinct but governed by similar principles.

This aristocratic setup shapes the ideas and customs of servants no less than those of masters, and although the effects are different, it is easy to recognize the same cause.

Both groups form little nations within the larger one. Eventually, certain permanent notions of right and wrong take root among them. The various actions of human life are seen in a particular light that does not change. In the society of servants, just as in the society of masters, people exercise great influence over one another. They recognize fixed rules, and where law is absent, they find a public opinion to guide them. There are established habits, a kind of order.

These men whose destiny is to obey do not, of course, understand glory, virtue, honesty, and honor in the same way as their masters. But they have created a glory, virtues, and honesty of their own as servants, and they have developed — if I may put it this way — a kind of servile honor.

If you examine closely the main opinions that guide these men, the analogy appears even more striking. Among them, just as among the most prideful members of a feudal hierarchy, you find pride of birth, respect for ancestors and descendants, contempt for inferiors, fear of social contact, a taste for etiquette, tradition, and antiquity.

Just because a class is lowly, you should not assume that everyone in it has a lowly heart. That would be a grave mistake. However inferior the class may be, the person who stands at its top — and who has no thought of leaving it — occupies an aristocratic position that inspires elevated feelings, a proud sense of dignity, and a self-respect that makes him capable of great virtues and uncommon actions.

In aristocratic nations, it was not uncommon to find, in the service of great men, noble and vigorous souls who bore their servitude without feeling it and who submitted to their master's will without fearing his anger.

But this was almost never the case in the lower ranks of the servant class. You can see that a person who occupies the lowest rung in a hierarchy of servants is very low indeed.

The French had coined a special word for this lowest of aristocratic servants. They called him the lackey.

The word "lackey" served as the ultimate term — when all others fell short — to represent human degradation. Under the old monarchy, when people wanted to paint a portrait of a vile and debased being in a single stroke, they said he had the soul of a lackey. That alone was enough. The meaning was complete and understood.

The permanent inequality of conditions does not just give servants certain distinctive virtues and vices — it also places them in a distinctive position relative to their masters.

In aristocratic nations, the poor person has been tamed from childhood by the idea of being commanded. Wherever he looks, he immediately sees the image of hierarchy and the face of obedience.

In countries where the permanent inequality of conditions prevails, the master therefore easily obtains from his servants a prompt, complete, respectful, and willing obedience — because they revere in him not just the master, but the class of masters. He weighs upon their will with the full weight of the aristocracy.

He commands their actions; he even directs, to a certain extent, their thoughts. In aristocracies, the master often exercises — without even realizing it — an extraordinary empire over the opinions, habits, and values of those who obey him, and his influence extends much farther than his authority.

In aristocratic societies, not only are there hereditary families of servants just as there are hereditary families of masters, but the same servant families are attached for several generations to the same master families. They are like parallel lines that never merge and never separate. This profoundly transforms the mutual relations of these two classes of people.

Thus, although under aristocracy the master and the servant have no natural resemblance to each other — and fortune, education, opinions, and rights place them at an immense distance on the scale of being — time eventually binds them together. A long shared history attaches them to one another, and however different they are, they grow alike. Meanwhile, in democracies, where they are naturally almost similar, they remain forever strangers to each other.

In aristocratic nations, the master comes to see his servants as a lesser, secondary part of himself, and he often takes an interest in their fate — through a final effort of self-love.

For their part, the servants are not far from viewing themselves in the same light. They sometimes identify so completely with the person of the master that they become, in their own eyes as well as his, nothing more than an appendage.

In aristocracies, the servant occupies a subordinate position that he cannot leave. Beside him stands another man who holds a superior rank that he cannot lose. On one side: obscurity, poverty, obedience — in perpetuity. On the other: glory, wealth, command — in perpetuity. These conditions are always different and always close, and the bond that unites them is as durable as the conditions themselves.

In this extremity, the servant ends up losing interest in himself. He detaches from himself; he deserts himself, in a way. Or rather, he transfers his entire being into his master — that is where he creates an imaginary identity. He adorns himself proudly with the wealth of those who command him; he basks in their glory, elevates himself through their nobility, and feeds endlessly on a borrowed greatness to which he often attaches more value than those who possess it fully and truly.

There is something both touching and ridiculous in this strange merging of two existences.

When the passions of masters are transplanted into the souls of servants, they take on the natural dimensions of the space they now occupy. They shrink and sink. What was pride in the master becomes childish vanity and miserable pretension in the others. The servants of a great man are usually extremely touchy about the respect owed to him, and they care more about his smallest privileges than he does himself.

You still occasionally encounter among us one of these old servants of the aristocracy. He has outlived his kind and will soon disappear with them.

In the United States, I have never seen anyone who resembled him. Americans not only do not know this kind of man — it is very difficult to make them even comprehend his existence. They find it hardly less difficult to imagine him than we find it to picture a Roman slave or a medieval serf. All these men are, in fact — though to different degrees — products of the same cause. They are retreating together from our view and fading each day into the darkness of the past, along with the social order that created them.

The equality of conditions turns both servants and masters into new kinds of beings and establishes new relationships between them.

When conditions are nearly equal, people constantly change places. There is still a class of servants and a class of masters, but it is not always the same individuals — and especially not the same families — who compose them. There is no more permanence in command than in obedience.

Since servants no longer form a separate people, they have no customs, prejudices, or values of their own. You will not find among them a particular way of thinking or a distinctive way of feeling. They know neither the vices nor the virtues of a fixed station, but they share the knowledge, ideas, feelings, virtues, and vices of their contemporaries. They are honest or dishonest in the same way as their masters.

Conditions are no less equal among servants than among masters.

Since you do not find marked ranks or a permanent hierarchy within the servant class, you should not expect to see the degradation and the grandeur that appear in aristocracies of servants just as in all other aristocracies.

I have never seen anything in the United States that could remind me of the elite servant, whose memory we have preserved in Europe. But neither have I found the lackey. The trace of both has been lost.

In democracies, servants are not only equal among themselves — you could say they are, in a sense, the equals of their masters.

This needs some explaining to be properly understood.

At any moment, the servant can become the master, and aspires to do so. The servant is therefore not a different kind of person from the master.

So why does the first have the right to command, and what compels the second to obey? The free, temporary agreement of their two wills. Naturally, they are not inferior to each other; they become so only temporarily, by the effect of the contract. Within the bounds of that contract, one is the servant and the other is the master. Outside it, they are two citizens, two human beings.

What I ask the reader to consider carefully is that this is not merely the notion that servants have formed of their own condition. Masters view domestic service in exactly the same way, and the precise boundaries of command and obedience are as firmly fixed in the mind of one as in the mind of the other.

When the majority of citizens have long since reached a roughly similar condition, and when equality is an old and accepted fact, public opinion — which is never swayed by exceptions — assigns a certain general range to human worth, above or below which it is difficult for anyone to remain for long.

No matter how much wealth and poverty, command and obedience may accidentally place great distances between two people, public opinion — which is based on the ordinary course of things — pulls them back toward the common level, creating between them a kind of imaginary equality despite the real inequality of their conditions.

This all-powerful opinion eventually penetrates into the very souls of those whose interests might arm them against it. It modifies their judgment at the same time that it overpowers their will.

In the depths of their souls, the master and the servant no longer perceive any deep difference between them, and they neither hope nor fear ever finding one. They are therefore without contempt and without anger, and they do not feel either humble or proud when they look at each other.

The master considers the contract to be the sole source of his power, and the servant finds in it the sole cause of his obedience. They do not argue with each other about their respective positions; each sees his own clearly and holds to it.

In our armies, the common soldier is drawn from roughly the same classes as the officers and can rise to the same ranks. Outside the ranks, he considers himself perfectly equal to his commanders — and he is, in fact. But under the flag, he makes no difficulty about obeying, and his obedience, though voluntary and limited, is no less prompt, precise, and ready.

This gives an idea of what happens in democratic societies between servant and master.

It would be foolish to believe that the deep, passionate attachments that sometimes develop within aristocratic domestic service could ever arise between these two people, or that one should expect to see striking examples of devotion.

In aristocracies, the servant and the master only catch sight of each other at long intervals, and they often communicate only through intermediaries. Yet they are usually firmly attached to each other.

In democratic nations, the servant and the master are very close physically. Their bodies are constantly in contact; their souls never mingle. They have shared occupations; they almost never have shared interests.

In these nations, the servant always sees himself as a temporary visitor in his master's household. He did not know their ancestors; he will not see their descendants; he has nothing lasting to expect from them. Why would he merge his existence with theirs, and where would this strange self-abandonment come from? Their respective positions have changed; the relationships must change too.

I would like to support everything I have said with the example of the Americans, but I cannot do so without carefully distinguishing persons and places.

In the South of the Union, slavery exists. So nothing I have just said can apply there.

In the North, most servants are freed slaves or the children of freed slaves. These people occupy a contested position in public opinion. The law brings them to the level of their masters; customs stubbornly push them back down. They themselves cannot clearly see where they stand, and they are almost always either insolent or groveling.

But in those same northern provinces, particularly in New England, you find a fairly large number of white people who agree, in exchange for wages, to temporarily submit to the will of their fellow citizens. I have heard that these servants usually fulfill the duties of their position with precision and intelligence, and that without considering themselves naturally inferior to those who command them, they submit without difficulty to obeying them.

It seemed to me that these men brought into their service some of the robust habits that independence and equality produce. Having once chosen a hard condition, they do not try to escape it by indirect means. They respect themselves enough not to refuse their masters the obedience they have freely promised.

For their part, the masters demand nothing from their servants beyond the faithful and rigorous execution of the contract. They do not ask for deference; they do not claim their love or devotion. It is enough to find them punctual and honest.

It would not be true to say, then, that under democracy the relationship between servant and master is disordered. It is ordered in a different way. The rule is different, but there is a rule.

I need not inquire here whether this new condition I have just described is inferior to the one that preceded it, or merely different. It is enough for me that it is settled and stable — because what matters most among people is not any particular kind of order, but order itself.

But what shall I say about those troubled and turbulent times during which equality establishes itself in the midst of revolutionary upheaval — when democracy, having taken root in the social order, still struggles painfully against old prejudices and customs?

Already the law, and to some extent public opinion, proclaim that there is no natural and permanent inferiority between servant and master. But this new faith has not yet penetrated to the depths of the master's mind — or rather, his heart rejects it. In the secret of his soul, the master still believes he belongs to a separate and superior species, but he does not dare say so, and he allows himself to be drawn toward the common level with a shudder. His authority becomes at once timid and harsh. He no longer feels the protective, benevolent sentiments that long and undisputed power always produces, and he is astonished that, having changed himself, his servant changes too. He wants the servant — who is merely passing through domestic service — to develop regular and permanent habits there; to appear satisfied and proud of a servile position that he will sooner or later leave; to devote himself to a man who can neither protect him nor ruin him; and to bind himself by an eternal bond to beings who resemble him and who last no longer than he does.

In aristocratic nations, it often happens that the condition of domestic service does not degrade the souls of those who submit to it, because they neither know nor imagine any other condition, and because the immense inequality between themselves and the master seems to them the necessary and inevitable result of some hidden law of Providence.

Under democracy, the condition of domestic service has nothing degrading about it, because it is freely chosen and temporarily adopted, because public opinion does not stigmatize it, and because it creates no permanent inequality between servant and master.

But during the passage from one social condition to the other, there almost always comes a moment when people's minds waver between the aristocratic notion of subjection and the democratic notion of obedience.

At that point, obedience loses its moral quality in the eyes of the person who obeys. He no longer sees it as a divine obligation of sorts, and he does not yet see it in its purely human light. In his eyes, it is neither sacred nor just, and he submits to it as something both degrading and useful.

At that moment, the confused and incomplete image of equality presents itself to the servants' minds. They cannot at first tell whether this equality to which they are entitled is to be found within the condition of domestic service or outside it, and they rebel deep in their hearts against an inferiority to which they have submitted themselves and from which they profit. They consent to serve, but they are ashamed to obey. They enjoy the advantages of servitude but not the master — or rather, they are not sure that they should not be the masters themselves, and they are inclined to regard the person who commands them as the unjust usurper of their rights.

It is then that you see within every citizen's household something analogous to the sad spectacle that political society presents. There, a silent, internal war is waged ceaselessly between powers that are always suspicious and hostile: the master is ill-tempered and lenient, the servant is ill-tempered and defiant. The one constantly tries to evade, through dishonest restrictions, his obligation to protect and pay; the other tries to evade his obligation to obey. The reins of household management float between them, and each tries to seize them. The lines dividing authority from tyranny, liberty from license, right from might — all seem tangled and confused in their eyes, and no one knows precisely what he is, what he can do, or what he owes.

Such a state is not democratic, but revolutionary.

CHAPTER VI.

How democratic institutions and customs tend to raise the cost of rent and shorten the length of leases.

What I have said about servants and masters applies, to a certain extent, to landowners and tenant farmers. The subject, however, deserves to be considered on its own.

In America, there are practically no tenant farmers. Every man owns the field he cultivates.

It must be acknowledged that democratic laws have a powerful tendency to increase the number of landowners and decrease the number of tenants. Still, what happens in the United States should be attributed far less to the country's institutions than to the country itself. In America, land is cheap, and everyone can easily become a landowner. The land yields little, and its products could only with difficulty be divided between an owner and a tenant.

So America is unique in this respect, as in many others, and it would be a mistake to take it as a model.

I believe that in democratic countries, just as in aristocratic ones, there will be landowners and tenants — but the landowners and tenants will not be connected in the same way.

In aristocracies, rents are paid not only in money but in respect, affection, and service. In democratic countries, they are paid only in money. When family estates are divided up and change hands, and when the permanent connection between families and the land disappears, it is only chance that brings the landowner and the tenant into contact. They come together briefly to negotiate the terms of the contract, and then they lose sight of each other. They are two strangers brought together by self-interest, and they rigorously haggle over a deal whose sole subject is money.

As property is divided up and wealth is dispersed across the entire surface of the country, the state fills up with people whose old fortunes are declining and with newly rich people whose needs grow faster than their resources. For all of them, the smallest profit matters, and none of them feels inclined to let any advantage slip away or to lose any portion of their income.

As ranks blur, and as very large as well as very small fortunes become rarer, the gap between the landowner's social standing and the tenant's narrows each day. The one has no inherent, undisputed superiority over the other. Now, between two equal and struggling men, what can a lease agreement be about? Nothing but money.

A man who owns an entire district and holds a hundred farms understands that what is at stake is winning the hearts of several thousand men. This seems worth the effort. To achieve such a great object, he readily makes sacrifices.

A man who owns a hundred acres has no such concerns. He does not much care about winning the particular goodwill of his tenant.

An aristocracy does not die in a single day like a man. Its principle slowly decays in people's souls before it is attacked in the laws. Long before war is declared against it, you can see the bond that once tied the upper classes to the lower ones gradually loosening. Indifference and contempt show on one side; jealousy and hatred on the other. Relations between the poor and the rich become rarer and less cordial. Rents go up. This is not yet the result of the democratic revolution, but it is its certain herald — because an aristocracy that has permanently lost its hold on the people's hearts is like a tree that is dead at the roots, and which the winds topple all the more easily because it stands so tall.

Over the past fifty years, the cost of farm rents has risen prodigiously — not only in France, but across most of Europe. The remarkable progress that agriculture and industry have made during the same period does not, in my view, fully explain this phenomenon. We must look to some other, more powerful and more hidden cause. I believe this cause should be sought in the democratic institutions that several European peoples have adopted, and in the democratic passions that agitate all the others to a greater or lesser degree.

I have often heard great English landowners congratulate themselves on the fact that they now draw far more money from their estates than their fathers did.

They may be right to celebrate, but they certainly do not understand what they are celebrating. They think they are making a net profit, but they are only making a trade. They are selling off their influence for cash, and what they gain in money they are about to lose in power.

There is yet another sign by which you can easily recognize that a great democratic revolution is happening or being prepared.

In the Middle Ages, nearly all land was leased in perpetuity, or at least for very long terms. When you study the household economy of that era, you find that ninety-nine-year leases were more common than twelve-year leases are today.

People believed in the immortality of families then. Conditions seemed fixed forever, and the whole of society appeared so immovable that no one imagined anything in it could ever stir.

In centuries of equality, the human mind takes a different turn. It easily imagines that nothing endures. The idea of instability takes hold of it.

In this disposition, the landowner and the tenant himself feel a kind of instinctive horror at long-term commitments. They are afraid of finding themselves trapped one day by a deal that benefits them today. They vaguely expect some sudden, unforeseen change in their circumstances. They are afraid of themselves — afraid that their tastes will change and that they will regret being unable to give up what they once coveted. And they are right to fear this, because in democratic centuries, the most restless thing in the midst of all this restlessness is the human heart.

CHAPTER VII.

Democracy's influence on wages.

Most of the observations I made earlier about servants and masters can also be applied to employers and workers.

As the rules of social hierarchy are less and less observed — as the powerful come down, the humble rise, and poverty as well as wealth ceases to be hereditary — you can see the real and perceived distance between worker and employer shrinking every day.

The worker conceives a higher idea of his rights, his future, and himself. He is filled with new ambition, new desires; new needs press in on him. At every moment he casts covetous glances at the profits of his employer. In order to share in them, he tries to put a higher price on his labor — and he usually succeeds.

In democratic countries, as elsewhere, most industries are run at low cost by men whose wealth and education do not place them above the common level of those they employ. These small business owners are very numerous. Their interests differ, so they cannot easily coordinate with one another or combine their efforts.

On the other hand, workers almost always have some savings that allow them to refuse their services when they are not offered what they consider a fair wage for their labor.

In the continual struggle between these two classes over wages, the forces are therefore fairly evenly matched, and the victories alternate.

In fact, it is likely that over time the workers' interest will prevail, because the higher wages they have already won make them less dependent on their employers each day, and as they become more independent, they can more easily obtain further wage increases.

I will take as an example the industry that in our time is still the most widely practiced among us and in nearly every nation in the world: farming.

In France, most of those who hire out their labor to work the land own small plots themselves — plots that, in a pinch, allow them to survive without working for anyone else. When these men come to offer their services to the large landowner or neighboring tenant farmer, and are refused a certain wage, they retreat to their little plot and wait for another opportunity.

Taking things as a whole, I think we can say that the slow, steady rise in wages is one of the general laws that govern democratic societies. As conditions become more equal, wages rise; and as wages rise, conditions become more equal.

But in our time, there is a great and unfortunate exception to this rule.

I showed in an earlier chapter how aristocracy, driven out of political society, had retreated into certain parts of the industrial world and established its empire there in a different form.

This has a powerful effect on the level of wages.

Since you must already be very rich to undertake the large-scale industries I am talking about, the number of those who enter them is very small. Being few in number, they can easily band together and fix the price of labor however they please.

Their workers, on the other hand, are very numerous, and their numbers keep growing — because from time to time, extraordinary periods of prosperity push wages unusually high and draw the surrounding population into the factories. But once these people have entered this career, we have already seen that they cannot leave it, because they quickly develop physical and mental habits that make them unfit for any other kind of work. These men generally have little education, little resourcefulness, and few savings. They are therefore almost at the mercy of their employer. When competition or other circumstances cause his profits to fall, he can cut their wages almost as he pleases and easily take back from them whatever fortune takes from him.

If they refuse to work collectively, the employer — who is a rich man — can easily wait without being ruined until necessity brings them back to him. But they must work every day to avoid dying, because they have almost no property but their hands. Oppression has long since impoverished them, and the poorer they become, the easier they are to oppress. It is a vicious circle from which they have no way out.

You should not be surprised, then, that wages in these industries — after sometimes rising suddenly — fall permanently, while in other professions the price of labor, which generally rises only gradually, increases without ceasing.

This state of dependence and misery in which a portion of the industrial population now finds itself is an exceptional fact, running counter to everything around it. But for that very reason, it is also among the most serious — and the one that most deserves the particular attention of the lawmaker. It is difficult, when the whole of society is in motion, to keep one class standing still; and when the majority are constantly opening new paths to prosperity, it is hard to make some people bear their needs and desires in peace.

CHAPTER VIII.

Democracy's influence on the family.

I have just examined how, in democratic nations — and in America in particular — the equality of conditions transforms the relations between citizens.

I want to go deeper now and enter into the heart of the family. My aim here is not to discover new truths, but to show how facts that are already known connect to my subject.

Everyone has noticed that in our time, new relationships have developed among the different members of the family — that the distance that once separated the father from his sons has shrunk, and that paternal authority, if not destroyed, has at least been diminished.

Something similar, but even more striking, can be seen in the United States.

In America, the family — in the Roman and aristocratic sense of the word — does not exist. You can only find traces of it in the earliest years after children are born. During that time, the father exercises without opposition the domestic dictatorship that the weakness of his children makes necessary and that their own interest, along with his undeniable superiority, justifies.

But as soon as the young American approaches manhood, the bonds of filial obedience loosen day by day. Master of his thoughts, he soon becomes master of his conduct as well. In America, there is, strictly speaking, no adolescence. As soon as he leaves childhood behind, the man emerges and begins to trace his own path.

It would be wrong to think that this happens through some internal struggle in which the son wrests his freedom from a reluctant father through a kind of moral violence. The same habits and principles that push the one to seize his independence dispose the other to regard its exercise as an undeniable right.

So you do not see in the son any of the bitter, disorderly passions that agitate people long after they have thrown off an established power. Nor does the father experience those regretful feelings, full of bitterness and anger, that usually survive a fallen authority. The father saw from far off the limits where his authority would expire, and when the time brought him to those limits, he abdicated without difficulty. The son foresaw the precise moment when his own will would become his rule, and he seized his freedom without haste and without effort — as something that was owed to him and that no one was trying to take away.

Americans have not yet gone so far as we have in France, however, in stripping fathers of one of the principal elements of their power — by taking away their freedom to dispose of their property after death. In the United States, the power to make a will is unlimited.

In this, as in almost everything else, it is easy to see that while American political legislation is much more democratic than ours, our civil legislation is infinitely more democratic than theirs. This is easy to understand.

Our civil legislation was the work of a man who saw it in his interest to satisfy the democratic passions of his contemporaries in everything that was not directly and immediately hostile to his own power. He was happy to let certain popular principles govern property and families, as long as no one tried to introduce them into the running of the state. While the democratic torrent overflowed into civil law, he hoped to shelter himself comfortably behind political law. This approach was both shrewd and selfish. But such a compromise could not last, because in the long run, political society cannot help becoming the expression and image of civil society. In this sense, there is nothing more political in a nation than its civil legislation.

It is perhaps not useless to show how closely these changes within the family are linked to the social and political revolution that is unfolding before our eyes.

There are certain great social principles that a people either pushes everywhere or allows to exist nowhere.

In aristocratically and hierarchically organized countries, power never addresses the whole body of the governed directly. Since people are bound to one another, you need only lead the first in line and the rest follow. This applies to the family as much as to every other association that has a leader. In aristocratic nations, society really only recognizes the father. It holds the sons only through the father's hands — it governs him, and he governs them. So the father has not merely a natural right; he is given a political right to command. He is the author and the pillar of the family; he is also its magistrate.

In democracies, where the arm of government reaches out to find each individual person in the middle of the crowd and bends him separately to the common laws, no such intermediary is needed. In the eyes of the law, the father is simply a citizen who is older and richer than his sons.

When most conditions are highly unequal and the inequality of conditions is permanent, the idea of the superior grows large in people's imaginations. Even if the law grants him no special privileges, custom and opinion give him some. When, on the contrary, people differ little from one another and do not remain different for long, the general concept of a superior becomes weaker and less clear. No matter how hard the legislator tries to place the person who obeys far below the person who commands, customs pull these two people toward each other and draw them every day toward the same level.

So even if I saw no special privileges granted to the head of the family in the legislation of an aristocratic people, I would still be certain that his power was deeply respected and broader in scope than within a democracy — because I know that whatever the laws may say, the superior will always appear higher and the inferior lower in aristocracies than in democratic nations.

When people live in the memory of what has been, rather than in the concern for what is — when they worry far more about what their ancestors thought than about thinking for themselves — the father is the natural and necessary link between the past and the present, the ring where two chains meet and join. In aristocracies, then, the father is not merely the political head of the family; he is the voice of tradition, the interpreter of custom, the arbiter of values. He is listened to with deference; he is approached only with respect, and the love that people feel for him is always tempered by fear.

As social conditions become democratic and people adopt the general principle that it is good and legitimate to judge everything for yourself — taking old beliefs as information rather than as rules — the father's power of opinion over his sons diminishes, along with his legal power.

The division of estates that democracy brings about contributes perhaps more than anything else to changing the relationship between father and children.

When the head of a family has little property, his son and he live constantly in the same place and work together at the same tasks. Habit and necessity bring them together and force them to communicate with each other constantly. An intimate familiarity inevitably develops between them — one that makes authority less absolute and that sits uneasily with the outward forms of respect.

Now, in democratic nations, the class that possesses these small fortunes is precisely the one that gives power to ideas and direction to customs. It makes its opinions prevail everywhere, along with its will, and even those who are most inclined to resist its commands end up being swept along by its example. I have seen fierce enemies of democracy who let their children address them informally.

Thus, at the very moment when power slips from the aristocracy's hands, the austere, conventional, and legalistic elements of paternal authority disappear as well, and a kind of equality settles around the family hearth.

I am not sure whether, all things considered, society loses by this change. But I am inclined to think the individual gains. I believe that as customs and laws become more democratic, the relationship between father and son becomes more intimate and more tender. Rules and authority are less in evidence; trust and affection are often greater. It seems that the natural bond tightens even as the social bond loosens.

In the democratic family, the father exercises no power beyond what people are pleased to grant to the tenderness and experience of an old man. His orders might perhaps go unheeded, but his advice is usually quite influential. If he is not surrounded by official marks of respect, his sons at least approach him with confidence. There is no recognized formula for addressing him, but people speak to him constantly and willingly consult him every day. The master and the magistrate have disappeared; the father remains.

To judge the difference between the two social conditions on this point, you need only glance through the family correspondence that aristocracies have left us. The style is always correct, ceremonious, rigid, and so cold that the natural warmth of the heart can barely be felt through the words.

In democratic nations, by contrast, everything that a son says to his father has something free, familiar, and tender about it all at once — something that reveals at first glance that new relationships have been established within the family.

A similar revolution transforms the relationships among siblings.

In the aristocratic family, just as in aristocratic society, all positions are assigned. Not only does the father hold a separate rank and enjoy immense privileges — the children themselves are not equal. Age and sex irrevocably fix each one's rank and guarantee certain prerogatives. Democracy overturns or lowers most of these barriers.

In the aristocratic family, the eldest son, inheriting the greater part of the property and nearly all the rights, becomes the head and to a certain extent the master of his brothers. Greatness and power fall to him; mediocrity and dependence to them. Still, it would be wrong to think that among aristocratic peoples, the privileges of the eldest benefited only him and excited nothing but envy and hatred around him.

The eldest usually tries to provide wealth and power to his brothers, because the general luster of the house reflects on the one who represents it. And the younger brothers try to smooth the way for all of the eldest's undertakings, because the greatness and strength of the family's head puts him in an ever better position to elevate all its members.

The various members of the aristocratic family are therefore very closely tied to one another. Their interests are connected, their minds are in harmony — but it is rare for their hearts to be in tune.

Democracy also binds brothers to one another, but it goes about it in a different way.

Under democratic laws, children are perfectly equal and therefore independent. Nothing brings them together by force, but nothing pushes them apart either. Since they share a common origin, grow up under the same roof, receive the same care, and no special privilege distinguishes or separates them, you can easily see the sweet and youthful intimacy of childhood taking root among them. The bond formed at the beginning of life — there are hardly any occasions to break it, because brotherhood brings them closer every day without constraining them.

It is not through shared interests, then, but through shared memories and the free sympathy of opinions and tastes that democracy ties brothers to one another. It divides their inheritance, but it allows their souls to merge.

The gentleness of these democratic family customs is so great that even supporters of aristocracy find themselves won over. After having tasted them for a while, they are not tempted to return to the cold, respectful forms of the aristocratic family. They would gladly keep the domestic habits of democracy, as long as they could reject its social conditions and its laws. But these things are bound together, and you cannot enjoy some of them without enduring the others.

What I have just said about filial love and brotherly affection should be understood to apply to all the passions that spring spontaneously from nature itself.

When a certain way of thinking or feeling is the product of a particular state of humanity, and that state changes, nothing of it remains. This is how the law can bind two citizens very tightly to each other — but once the law is abolished, they part ways. There was nothing tighter than the knot that bound the vassal to the lord in the feudal world. Today, those two men do not even know each other. The fear, the gratitude, and the love that once connected them have vanished without a trace.

But it is not the same with feelings natural to the human species. It is rare for the law — in trying to bend these feelings in a certain direction — not to weaken them; not to take something away from them while trying to add to them; and for them not to be strongest when left to themselves.

Democracy, which destroys or obscures almost all the old social conventions and prevents people from easily settling on new ones, makes most of the sentiments born from those conventions disappear entirely. But it only modifies the others, and often gives them an energy and a gentleness they did not have before.

I think it is possible to sum up the meaning of this chapter — and of several others that precede it — in a single sentence. Democracy loosens social bonds, but it tightens natural ones. It brings family members closer together at the very moment it pushes citizens apart.

CHAPTER IX.

The education of young women in the United States.

There have never been free societies without strong customs, and as I said in the first part of this work, it is women who shape customs. Everything that influences the condition of women — their habits and their opinions — is therefore of great political interest to me.

In nearly all Protestant nations, young women have far more control over their own actions than in Catholic ones.

This independence is even greater in Protestant countries that, like England, have preserved or won the right to govern themselves. Freedom then enters the family through political habits and religious beliefs.

In the United States, the doctrines of Protestantism combine with a very free constitution and a very democratic social order — and nowhere is the young woman more quickly or more completely left to her own devices.

Long before the young American woman reaches marriageable age, she begins to be gradually freed from her mother's supervision. She has not yet fully left childhood behind when she is already thinking for herself, speaking freely, and acting on her own. The great spectacle of the world is constantly spread out before her. Far from trying to hide it from her view, it is uncovered more and more each day, and she is taught to look at it with a steady, calm eye. And so the vices and dangers that society presents are soon revealed to her. She sees them clearly, judges them without illusion, and faces them without fear — because she is full of confidence in her own strength, and that confidence seems to be shared by everyone around her.

You should therefore hardly expect to find in the American girl that virginal innocence in the midst of awakening desires, or those naive and artless graces that usually accompany a European girl's passage from childhood to youth. It is rare for the American girl, whatever her age, to show a childish timidity or ignorance. Like the European girl, she wants to please, but she knows exactly at what cost. If she does not give herself over to evil, she at least knows what evil is. She has pure morals rather than a chaste mind.

I have often been surprised and almost startled by the remarkable skill and happy boldness with which these young American women managed to steer their thoughts and words through the hazards of a lively conversation. A philosopher would have stumbled a hundred times on the narrow path they walked without incident or effort.

It is easy to see, in fact, that even in the midst of the independence of her early youth, the American woman never entirely ceases to be in control of herself. She enjoys every permitted pleasure without abandoning herself to any of them, and her reason never lets go of the reins, even though it often seems to let them float.

In France, where we still mix together the remnants of every age in such a strange way — in our opinions and our tastes alike — we often give women a timid, sheltered, almost cloistered education, as in the days of aristocracy, and then suddenly abandon them, without guidance or support, to the disorders inseparable from a democratic society.

Americans are more consistent with themselves.

They have seen that within a democracy, individual independence is bound to be very great, youth hurried, tastes poorly restrained, customs ever-changing, public opinion often uncertain or powerless, paternal authority weak, and marital power contested.

In this state of affairs, they judged that there was little chance of being able to suppress in women the most tyrannical passions of the human heart, and that it was safer to teach her the art of fighting them herself. Since they could not prevent her virtue from being frequently endangered, they wanted her to know how to defend it, and they counted more on the free exercise of her will than on barriers that were crumbling or already destroyed. Instead of keeping her distrustful of herself, they constantly seek to increase her confidence in her own strength. Having neither the ability nor the desire to keep the young woman in a state of perpetual and complete ignorance, they made haste to give her an early knowledge of all things. Far from hiding the corruptions of the world from her, they wanted her to see them from the start and to train herself to avoid them. They preferred to safeguard her honesty rather than to over-protect her innocence.

Although Americans are a deeply religious people, they have not relied on religion alone to defend a woman's virtue. They have sought to arm her reason as well. In this, as in many other circumstances, they have followed the same method. First, they made incredible efforts to ensure that individual independence would regulate itself; and only when they had reached the very limits of human strength did they finally call upon religion for help.

I know that such an education is not without danger. I also know that it tends to develop judgment at the expense of imagination, and to produce women who are honest and cool-headed rather than tender wives and charming companions. If society is calmer and better regulated as a result, private life often has less charm. But these are secondary drawbacks that a greater interest must make us brave. Having reached the point where we now stand, we no longer have the luxury of choosing. A democratic education is needed to protect women from the dangers with which the institutions and customs of democracy surround them.

CHAPTER X.

How the young woman reappears in the wife.

In America, the independence of women is irretrievably lost within the bonds of marriage. If the young woman is less constrained there than anywhere else, the wife submits to tighter obligations. The one makes the parental home a place of liberty and pleasure; the other lives in her husband's house as in a cloister.

These two very different states are perhaps not as contradictory as one might think, and it is natural that Americans pass through one to arrive at the other.

Religious peoples and industrious nations form a particularly grave idea of marriage. The former consider the regularity of a woman's life as the best guarantee and most certain sign of the purity of her morals. The latter see in it the pledge of order and prosperity in the home.

Americans are at once a Puritan nation and a commercial people. Their religious beliefs as well as their business habits therefore lead them to demand of a woman a self-denial and a continual sacrifice of her pleasures for her duties — a sacrifice that is rarely asked of her in Europe. And so there reigns in the United States an inflexible public opinion that carefully confines women within the narrow circle of domestic interests and duties, and forbids them to step outside it.

When she enters the world, the young American woman finds these ideas firmly established. She sees the rules that flow from them; she is quickly convinced that she cannot depart for a moment from the customs of her time without immediately endangering her peace, her honor, and even her social existence. And she finds in the firmness of her reason and in the robust habits that her education has given her the energy to submit.

You could say that it is through the exercise of her independence that she gained the courage to endure its sacrifice without struggle or complaint when the moment came to impose it on herself.

Moreover, the American woman never falls into the bonds of marriage as into a trap set for her simplicity and ignorance. She has been taught in advance what is expected of her, and it is of her own free will that she places herself under the yoke. She bears her new condition bravely, because she chose it.

Since parental discipline in America is very loose and the marriage bond is very tight, a young woman enters into it only with caution and apprehension. Early marriages are rare there. American women therefore marry only when their reason is trained and mature — whereas in most other countries, women usually do not begin to exercise and develop their reason until after marriage.

I am, moreover, very far from believing that this great change in all the habits of American women, the moment they are married, should be attributed solely to the pressure of public opinion. Often they impose it on themselves by the sheer effort of their own will.

When the time comes to choose a husband, that cool, austere reason — which the open view of the world has sharpened and strengthened — tells the American woman that a frivolous and independent spirit within the bonds of marriage is a source of endless trouble, not pleasure. It tells her that the amusements of the girl cannot become the pastimes of the wife, and that for a woman, the wellsprings of happiness lie in the conjugal home. Seeing clearly and in advance the only path that can lead to domestic happiness, she sets out on it from her first steps, and follows it to the end without looking back.

This same strength of will displayed by young American wives — in bending themselves suddenly and without complaint to the austere duties of their new condition — reappears throughout all the great trials of their lives.

There is no country in the world where private fortunes are more unstable than in the United States. It is not uncommon for the same man, in the course of his lifetime, to rise and fall through every step that separates wealth from poverty.

American women bear these reversals with a calm, indomitable energy. Their desires seem to contract with their fortunes as easily as they expand.

Most of the adventurers who go each year to populate the western wilderness belong, as I said in my first work, to the old Anglo-American stock of the North. Several of these men, who rush so boldly toward wealth, were already comfortable in their home states. They bring their wives with them and make them share the countless dangers and hardships that always mark the beginning of such ventures. I have often encountered, at the very edge of the wilderness, young women who, after being raised amid all the refinements of the great cities of New England, had passed almost without transition from the rich homes of their parents to a drafty cabin in the middle of the woods. Fever, solitude, and boredom had not broken the springs of their courage. Their features seemed worn and faded, but their eyes were firm. They appeared at once sad and resolute.

I have no doubt that these young American women had stored up, through their early education, the inner strength that they were then putting to use.

So it is still the young woman who, in the United States, reappears in the wife. The role has changed, the habits are different, but the spirit is the same.

CHAPTER XI.

How the equality of conditions helps maintain good morals in America.

There are philosophers and historians who have said, or implied, that women's morals were more or less strict depending on how far they lived from the equator. This is an easy way out, and by this logic, all you would need is a globe and a compass to instantly solve one of the most difficult problems humanity presents.

I do not see that this materialist doctrine is supported by the facts.

The same nations have shown themselves chaste or dissolute at different periods of their history. The regularity or disorder of their morals therefore depended on certain changing causes, and not simply on the nature of the land, which did not change.

I will not deny that in certain climates the passions that arise from the mutual attraction of the sexes may be particularly intense. But I believe that this natural intensity can always be excited or restrained by social conditions and political institutions.

Although travelers who have visited North America disagree on many points, they all agree in observing that morals there are infinitely stricter than anywhere else.

It is clear that on this point, the Americans are far superior to their English forebears. A superficial glance at the two nations is enough to prove it.

In England, as in all the other countries of Europe, public gossip endlessly targets the weaknesses of women. You often hear philosophers and statesmen complaining that morals are not strict enough, and literature confirms this impression every day.

In America, all books — novels included — assume that women are chaste, and no one tells stories of romantic adventures.

This great regularity of American morals is no doubt partly due to the land, the race, and religion. But all these causes, which are found elsewhere too, are not enough to explain it. We must look to some additional, particular reason.

That reason, it seems to me, is equality and the institutions that flow from it.

The equality of conditions does not by itself produce strict morals. But there can be no doubt that it facilitates and increases them.

In aristocratic nations, birth and fortune often make men and women such different beings that they can never manage to unite with each other. Passions draw them together, but social conditions and the ideas they generate prevent them from forming a permanent, public bond. The inevitable result is a great number of fleeting, secret liaisons. Nature takes its secret revenge for the constraints the law imposes.

Things are different when the equality of conditions has swept away all the barriers — real or imagined — that once separated men from women. There is then no young woman who does not believe she can become the wife of the man who prefers her, which makes sexual disorder before marriage very difficult. For however credulous passions may be, there is hardly any way for a woman to convince herself that a man loves her when he is perfectly free to marry her and does not.

The same cause operates, though more indirectly, within marriage itself.

Nothing does more to legitimize illicit love — in the eyes of those who feel it, or of the crowd that witnesses it — than forced or random marriages.

It is easy to verify this truth by studying the various literatures of Europe.

When a European writer wants to portray in his fiction some of the great catastrophes that are so common among us within marriage, he takes care to arouse the reader's pity in advance by showing badly matched or constrained couples. Although a long-standing tolerance has already loosened our morals, he would have a hard time getting us to care about these characters' misfortunes if he did not begin by making us excuse their fault. This device rarely fails. The daily spectacle we witness prepares us from afar for indulgence.

American writers could not make such excuses seem plausible to their readers. Their customs and their laws would not allow it. Despairing of making disorder attractive, they simply do not depict it. This is, in part, the reason so few novels are published in the United States.

In a country where a woman always exercises her choice freely, and where education has put her in a position to choose well, public opinion is merciless toward her faults.

The strictness of Americans stems partly from this. They regard marriage as a contract that is often burdensome, but whose terms you are rigorously bound to honor — because you were able to know all of them in advance, and because you enjoyed complete freedom not to commit to anything.

What makes fidelity more obligatory also makes it easier.

In aristocratic countries, the purpose of marriage is to unite fortunes rather than people. So it sometimes happens that the husband is taken from the schoolroom and the wife from the nursery. It is no surprise that the conjugal bond, which keeps these two spouses' fortunes united, lets their hearts wander at will. That follows naturally from the spirit of the contract.

When, on the contrary, each person always chooses his own companion, without any external force guiding or constraining him, it is usually a similarity of tastes and ideas that brings a man and a woman together — and this same similarity holds them and keeps them side by side.

Our ancestors held a peculiar view on the subject of marriage.

Having noticed that the small number of love matches made in their day had almost always ended badly, they firmly concluded that in such matters it was very dangerous to consult your own heart. Chance seemed more clear-sighted to them than choice.

It was not very hard to see, however, that the evidence before their eyes proved nothing.

Let me point out first that when democratic peoples grant women the right to choose their husbands freely, they take care to furnish their minds with the knowledge and their wills with the strength that such a choice may require. Meanwhile, the young women in aristocratic societies who furtively escape their father's authority to throw themselves into the arms of a man they have had neither the time to know nor the capacity to judge are lacking all these safeguards. You should not be surprised that they make poor use of their free will the first time they exercise it, or that they fall into such cruel errors when, without having received a democratic education, they try to follow democratic customs in their marriages.

But there is more.

When a man and a woman try to come together across the inequalities of aristocratic society, they have immense obstacles to overcome. After breaking or loosening the bonds of filial obedience, they must escape — by a final effort — the empire of custom and the tyranny of opinion. And when at last they have reached the end of this grueling enterprise, they find themselves like strangers among their own friends and family. The prejudice they defied now separates them from everyone they know. This situation soon crushes their courage and sours their hearts.

If, then, it happens that spouses united in this way are first unhappy and then unfaithful, the blame should not fall on their having freely chosen each other, but rather on their living in a society that does not accept such choices.

We should also remember that the very effort required to violently break free from a common error almost always carries a person beyond the bounds of reason. To dare to wage even a legitimate war against the ideas of your century and your country, you must have a certain violent and adventurous temperament — and people of that character, whatever direction they take, rarely achieve happiness or virtue. And this is — to say it in passing — what explains why, in the most necessary and sacred revolutions, there are so few revolutionaries who are moderate and honest.

If, in an aristocratic age, a man happens to consult nothing but his personal opinion and taste in his choice of a wife, and if disorder and misery soon follow in his household, you should not be surprised. But when this same behavior is in the natural and ordinary order of things — when social conditions facilitate it, when paternal authority accommodates it, and public opinion endorses it — there can be no doubt that domestic peace will be greater and marital fidelity better preserved.

Nearly all men in democracies pursue a political career or practice a profession, and on the other hand, the modesty of fortunes requires the wife to stay home every day to personally oversee the details of household management.

All these separate and mandatory occupations serve as so many natural barriers that, by keeping the sexes apart, make the advances of one less frequent and less urgent, and the resistance of the other easier.

It is not that equality of conditions will ever succeed in making men chaste. But it does give their lapses a less dangerous character. Since no one any longer has the leisure or the opportunity to attack the virtues of those determined to defend them, you see at once a great number of courtesans and a multitude of virtuous women.

This state of affairs produces deplorable individual suffering, but it does not prevent the social body from being healthy and strong. It does not destroy family bonds or weaken the nation's morals. What endangers society is not great corruption among a few but the loosening of standards among all. From a lawmaker's perspective, prostitution is far less threatening than widespread infidelity.

The tumultuous, endlessly harried life that equality gives to men not only diverts them from love by robbing them of the leisure to pursue it — it also steers them away from it by a more secret but surer path.

All men living in democratic times take on more or less the intellectual habits of the commercial and industrial classes. Their minds take a serious, calculating, practical turn. They willingly turn away from the ideal to pursue some visible, near-at-hand goal that presents itself as the natural and necessary object of their desires. Equality does not destroy the imagination this way, but it limits it and allows it to fly only close to the ground.

There is nothing less dreamy than the citizens of a democracy, and you will hardly find any who are willing to lose themselves in those idle, solitary contemplations that usually precede and produce the great upheavals of the heart.

It is true that they place great value on obtaining that deep, steady, peaceful affection that makes life secure and charming. But they do not willingly chase after violent, capricious emotions that disturb and shorten it.

I know that everything I have said applies fully only to America and cannot, for the moment, be extended in a general way to Europe.

In the half-century during which laws and habits have been pushing several European peoples toward democracy with unparalleled energy, it cannot be said that relations between men and women have become more regulated and more chaste. In some places, the opposite is apparent. Certain classes are better regulated; general morality seems looser. I will not hesitate to make this observation, for I am no more inclined to flatter my contemporaries than to speak ill of them.

This spectacle should be distressing, but not surprising. The beneficial influence that a democratic social order can have on the regularity of habits is something that reveals itself only over time. If the equality of conditions is favorable to good morals, the social upheaval that makes conditions equal is very harmful to them.

For fifty years, France has been transforming itself. We have rarely had freedom, but always disorder. Amid this universal confusion of ideas and this general shaking of opinions — amid this incoherent mixture of the just and the unjust, the true and the false, right and might — public virtue has become uncertain, and private morality unsteady.

But all revolutions, whatever their purpose and their agents, have initially produced similar effects. Even those that ended by tightening the bonds of morality began by loosening them.

The disorders that we are so often witness to therefore do not seem to me a lasting phenomenon. Already there are curious signs pointing to this.

There is nothing more miserably corrupt than an aristocracy that preserves its wealth while losing its power and which, reduced to vulgar pleasures, still possesses immense leisure. The vigorous passions and grand thoughts that once animated it vanish, and all that is left is a swarm of petty, gnawing vices clinging to it like worms to a corpse.

No one disputes that the French aristocracy of the last century was extremely dissolute, while old habits and old beliefs still maintained respect for morality among the other classes.

It will also be easy to agree that in our own time, a certain strictness of principles has appeared among the remnants of that same aristocracy, while moral disorder has seemed to spread into the middle and lower ranks of society — so that the very families that showed themselves the most dissolute fifty years ago are today the most exemplary, and democracy seems to have moralized only the aristocratic classes.

The Revolution, by dividing the wealth of the nobles, by forcing them to attend diligently to their affairs and their families, by confining them under the same roof with their children, by giving their thoughts a more reasonable and serious direction — suggested to them, without their even realizing it, a respect for religious beliefs, a love of order, of peaceful pleasures, of domestic happiness, and of comfort. Meanwhile, the rest of the nation, which naturally shared these same tastes, was being dragged toward disorder by the very effort required to overthrow political laws and customs.

The old French aristocracy suffered the consequences of the Revolution without having felt the revolutionary passions or shared the often anarchic fervor that produced it. It is easy to see why it experienced the beneficial moral influence of this revolution before the very people who made it.

It is therefore fair to say — though the thing seems surprising at first — that in our time, the most anti-democratic classes of the nation best display the kind of morality that it is reasonable to expect from democracy.

I cannot help believing that when we have obtained all the effects of the democratic revolution — after we have emerged from the turmoil it has produced — what is true today of only a few will gradually become true of everyone.

CHAPTER XII.

How Americans Understand Equality Between Men and Women.

I have shown how democracy destroys or modifies the various inequalities that society creates. But is that all? Doesn't democracy ultimately act on that great inequality between men and women, which has seemed, up to our own time, to have its eternal foundations in nature itself?

I believe that the social movement bringing sons and fathers, servants and masters, and in general inferiors and superiors closer to the same level also elevates women, and must increasingly make them the equals of men.

But here more than ever, I feel the need to be clearly understood — because there is no subject on which the crude and undisciplined imagination of our age has given itself freer rein.

There are people in Europe who, confusing the distinct attributes of the sexes, want to make men and women not only equal beings but identical ones. They assign both the same functions, impose the same duties, and grant the same rights. They mix them together in everything — work, pleasure, business. It is easy to see that by striving to equalize the sexes in this way, you degrade them both, and that from this crude blending of nature's works, nothing can ever come but weak men and dishonorable women.

This is not how Americans have understood the kind of democratic equality that can be established between women and men. They have concluded that, since nature established such great differences between the physical and moral constitution of men and women, its clearly intended purpose was to put their different capacities to different uses. And they have judged that progress does not consist in making dissimilar beings do roughly the same things, but in ensuring that each of them performs their own task as well as possible. Americans have applied to the two sexes the great principle of political economy that dominates industry in our time. They have carefully divided the functions of men and women, so that the great work of society might be better accomplished.

America is the country in the world where the most sustained effort has been made to draw clearly separate lines of action for the two sexes — and where both have been expected to walk at an equal pace, but always on different paths. You never see American women managing the external affairs of the family, running a business, or entering the political sphere. But neither do you find any who are forced to perform the hard labor of farming, or any of the strenuous physical work that demands the development of bodily strength. There are no families so poor that they make exceptions to this rule. If the American woman cannot escape the peaceful circle of domestic occupations, she is never, on the other hand, forced out of it.

This is why American women, who often display a masculine reasoning and a thoroughly virile energy, generally maintain a very delicate appearance and always remain women in their manners, even though they sometimes show themselves to be men in mind and heart.

Nor have Americans ever imagined that the consequence of democratic principles should be to overturn marital authority and introduce confusion of powers within the family. They have concluded that every association, to be effective, must have a leader, and that the natural leader of the conjugal association is the man. They do not deny him the right to direct his partner, and they believe that in the small society of husband and wife, as in the large political society, the purpose of democracy is to regulate and legitimize necessary powers — not to destroy all power.

This view is not held by one sex and contested by the other.

I did not notice that American women regarded marital authority as a fortunate usurpation of their rights, nor that they believed it was degrading to submit to it. On the contrary, I seemed to see that they took a kind of pride in the voluntary surrender of their will, and that they found their dignity in bending themselves to the yoke rather than escaping it. This, at least, is the feeling expressed by the most virtuous among them; the others stay silent, and in the United States you do not hear adulterous wives loudly demanding the rights of women while trampling on their most sacred duties.

It has often been observed that in Europe a certain contempt lurks even in the midst of the flattery that men lavish on women. Though the European man often makes himself the slave of a woman, one can see that he never sincerely believes her to be his equal.

In the United States, women are rarely praised — but every day, they are shown to be respected.

Americans constantly display complete confidence in the reason of their partner and a deep respect for her freedom. They judge that her mind is as capable as a man's of discovering the naked truth, and her heart firm enough to follow it; and they have never sought to shelter the virtue of one sex any more than the other behind prejudice, ignorance, or fear.

It seems that in Europe, where men so easily submit to the despotic power of women, they nevertheless deny them some of the greatest attributes of the human species, treating them as seductive but incomplete beings. And what is most astonishing is that women themselves end up seeing themselves the same way, and that they are not far from considering it a privilege to be allowed to appear frivolous, weak, and fearful. American women do not claim such rights.

On the other hand, it seems that when it comes to morals, we have granted men a kind of peculiar immunity — so that there is, as it were, one standard of virtue for men and another for women, and according to public opinion, the same act can alternately be a crime or merely a fault.

Americans do not recognize this unjust division of duties and rights. Among them, the seducer is as dishonored as his victim.

It is true that Americans rarely show women the eager courtesies that people in Europe take pleasure in surrounding them with. But their conduct always shows that they consider women to be virtuous and refined, and they have such great respect for women's moral freedom that in their presence, everyone carefully watches their speech, for fear that women might be forced to hear language that offends them. In America, a young woman undertakes a long journey alone and without fear.

The legislators of the United States, who have softened nearly every provision of the penal code, punish rape with death, and there is no crime that public opinion pursues with more inexorable zeal. This is easily explained: since Americans can conceive of nothing more precious than a woman's honor and nothing more respectable than her independence, they believe no punishment is too severe for those who take these from her against her will.

In France, where the same crime is punished with much lighter sentences, it is often difficult to find a jury that will convict. Is this contempt for modesty, or contempt for women? I cannot help believing it is both.

So Americans do not believe that men and women have the duty or the right to do the same things. But they show the same respect for the role of each, and they regard them as beings of equal value, even though their destinies differ. They do not give the courage of women the same form or the same application as that of men, but they never doubt her courage. And if they believe that a man and his partner should not always use their intelligence and reason in the same way, they judge at least that the reason of the one is as sound as that of the other, and her intelligence as clear.

Americans, who have allowed women's social inferiority to persist, have therefore raised her with all their power in the intellectual and moral world to the level of man. And in this, they seem to me to have admirably understood the true meaning of democratic progress.

As for me, I will not hesitate to say it: although in the United States women rarely leave the domestic circle, and are in some respects quite dependent within it, nowhere has their position seemed higher to me. And if, now that I am approaching the end of this book — in which I have shown so many remarkable things accomplished by Americans — I were asked what I think is the main reason for the singular prosperity and growing strength of this people, I would answer that it is the superiority of its women.

CHAPTER XIII.

How Equality Naturally Divides Americans Into a Multitude of Small Private Groups.

You might be tempted to believe that the ultimate consequence and necessary effect of democratic institutions is to merge citizens together in private life just as in public life, and to force them all to lead a shared existence.

This is a very crude and tyrannical way of understanding the equality that democracy produces.

No social order and no laws can make people so alike that education, wealth, and personal tastes do not create some differences among them. And if different people can sometimes find it in their interest to do the same things together, you can be sure they will never find it enjoyable. No matter what you do, they will always slip through the legislator's grasp. Escaping at some point from the circle in which you try to confine them, they will establish, alongside the great political society, small private societies bound together by similarities in social conditions, habits, and values.

In the United States, citizens have no precedence over one another. They owe each other neither obedience nor deference. They administer justice together and govern the state, and in general they all come together to handle the affairs that affect their common destiny. But I have never heard of anyone trying to make them all amuse themselves in the same way or enjoy themselves together in the same places.

Americans, who mingle so easily within the walls of political assemblies and courtrooms, divide themselves with great care into very distinct small associations when it comes to enjoying the pleasures of private life. Each of them willingly acknowledges all his fellow citizens as his equals, but he never admits more than a very small number of them as his friends or guests.

This seems very natural to me. As the circle of public society expands, we should expect the sphere of private relationships to contract. Rather than imagining that citizens of modern societies will end up living in common, I am quite afraid they may end up forming nothing but very small cliques.

In aristocratic nations, the different classes are like vast enclosures that you cannot leave and cannot enter. The classes do not communicate with each other; but within each one, people necessarily deal with one another every day. Even when they would not naturally get along, the general suitability of belonging to the same class brings them together.

But when neither law nor custom takes charge of establishing frequent and habitual connections between certain people, it is the accidental resemblance of opinions and inclinations that decides. This is what creates an infinite variety of private groups.

In democracies, where citizens never differ much from one another and naturally find themselves so close together that at any moment they might all merge into a common mass, a multitude of artificial and arbitrary classifications are created, by which everyone tries to set themselves apart for fear of being swept against their will into the crowd.

This will always be the case. You can change human institutions, but not human nature. Whatever general effort a society makes to render its citizens equal and alike, the individual pride of each person will always seek to escape the common level and will create some inequality from which to profit.

In aristocracies, people are separated from each other by high, immovable barriers. In democracies, they are divided by a multitude of tiny, nearly invisible threads, which are constantly broken and constantly moved to new positions.

So whatever progress equality makes, a great number of small private associations will always form within democratic nations, alongside the larger political society. But none of them will resemble, in their customs, the upper class that rules in aristocracies.

CHAPTER XIV.

Some Reflections on American Manners.

Nothing seems less important at first glance than the outward form of human actions, and nothing do people care about more. They can get used to anything except living in a society that does not share their manners. The influence that social and political conditions exert on manners is therefore well worth serious examination.

Manners generally emerge from the depths of a society's customs and values, and sometimes they also result from arbitrary conventions among certain people. They are, at the same time, both natural and acquired.

When people realize that they are indisputably first in rank, with no effort required; that they have great matters before their eyes every day while leaving the details to others; and that they live surrounded by a wealth they did not earn and do not fear losing — you can easily see how they would feel a kind of superb disdain for the petty concerns and material cares of life, and how their thoughts would take on a natural grandeur that their words and manners reveal.

In democratic countries, manners generally lack grandeur, because private life is very small. They are often vulgar, because thought rarely has occasion to rise above the preoccupation with domestic concerns.

The true dignity of manners consists in always appearing in one's proper place — neither above nor below it. This is within reach of the peasant as well as the prince. In democracies, everyone's place seems uncertain, which is why manners there are often proud but rarely dignified. Moreover, they are never well regulated or refined.

People living in democracies are too fluid for any group among them to establish a code of etiquette and enforce compliance. Everyone therefore acts more or less as they please, and there is always a certain incoherence in their manners — because these conform to each individual's feelings and ideas rather than to some ideal model offered in advance for everyone's imitation.

This is far more noticeable, however, right after an aristocracy has fallen than when it has been long destroyed.

New political institutions and new social habits then bring together in the same places, and often force into shared lives, people whose education and habits still make them profoundly different from one another. This produces constantly visible clashes. People still remember that a precise code of politeness used to exist, but they no longer know what it contained or where to find it. They have lost the common law of manners and have not yet resigned themselves to doing without one. Instead, each person tries to fashion, from the debris of the old customs, some arbitrary and shifting personal rule — so that manners have neither the regularity and grandeur often found in aristocratic nations nor the simple, free character sometimes seen in democracy. They are at once stiff and casual.

This is not the normal state of things.

When equality is complete and long-established, all people having roughly the same ideas and doing roughly the same things, they have no need to agree or copy each other in order to act and speak in the same way. You constantly notice small differences in their manners, but you do not see great ones. They never resemble each other perfectly, because they have no common model; they are never very different, because they share the same condition. At first glance, you would say that all Americans have exactly the same manners. Only by looking very closely do you notice the small ways in which they differ.

The English have had great fun at the expense of American manners. And what is particularly amusing is that most of those who have painted such an entertaining picture for us belonged to the English middle classes — to whom the same picture is entirely applicable. So these merciless critics typically exhibit exactly what they criticize in the United States; they do not realize they are mocking themselves, to the great delight of their own country's aristocracy.

Nothing harms democracy more than the outward form of its customs. Many people could happily live with its flaws but cannot tolerate its manners.

I cannot agree, however, that there is nothing to praise in the manners of democratic nations.

In aristocratic nations, everyone near the upper class usually tries to imitate it, which produces very ridiculous and flat imitations. If democratic nations do not have among them a model of fine manners, at least they are spared the obligation of seeing bad copies of them every day.

In democracies, manners are never as refined as among aristocratic nations, but neither are they ever as coarse. You hear neither the crude language of the common people nor the noble and carefully chosen expressions of the great lords. There is often triviality in democratic customs, but not brutality or baseness.

I said that no precise code of etiquette can take shape in democracies. This has its drawbacks and its advantages. In aristocracies, the rules of propriety impose the same appearance on everyone; they make all members of the same class look alike, regardless of their individual inclinations; they dress up the natural self and hide it. In democratic nations, manners are neither as polished nor as regular, but they are often more sincere. They form a kind of light, loosely woven veil, through which each person's true feelings and individual ideas are easily seen. The form and substance of human actions are therefore often intimately connected, and if the great tableau of humanity is less decorated, it is more truthful. In this sense, one can say that the effect of democracy is not exactly to give people certain manners but to prevent them from having manners at all.

One can sometimes find in a democracy the feelings, passions, virtues, and vices of aristocracy — but not its manners. Those are lost and vanish beyond recovery once the democratic revolution is complete.

It seems that nothing is more durable than the manners of an aristocratic class — for it preserves them long after losing its wealth and power — and nothing so fragile — for the moment they have disappeared, you can no longer find any trace of them, and it becomes hard to say what they were once they are no more. A change in social conditions works this miracle; a few generations are enough.

The main features of aristocracy remain engraved in history after the aristocracy is destroyed, but the delicate, light forms of its customs vanish from human memory almost immediately after its fall. People cannot even conceive of them once they no longer have them before their eyes. They slip away without being seen or felt. For to experience the refined pleasure that comes from distinction and care in manners, one's heart must have been prepared by habit and education, and the taste for it is easily lost along with the practice.

So democratic nations not only cannot have aristocratic manners — they cannot even conceive of or desire them. They cannot imagine them; it is as if those manners had never existed.

We should not attach too much importance to this loss, but we are allowed to regret it.

I know that it has more than once happened that the same people had very distinguished manners and very vulgar feelings; the interior of courts has shown often enough that great outward display could conceal very base hearts. But while aristocratic manners did not create virtue, they sometimes adorned virtue itself. It was no ordinary spectacle — an entire class, numerous and powerful, where all the outward acts of life seemed to reveal at every moment a natural elevation of feeling and thought, a delicacy and regularity of taste, an urbanity of custom.

The manners of the aristocracy created beautiful illusions about human nature. And though the picture was often a lie, there was a noble pleasure in looking at it.

CHAPTER XV.

On the Seriousness of Americans, and Why It Does Not Prevent Them From Often Acting Rashly.

People living in democratic countries do not care for the kinds of naive, rowdy, and coarse amusements that common people enjoy in aristocracies; they find them childish or dull. They show little more taste for the intellectual and refined pleasures of the aristocratic classes. They need something productive and substantial in their enjoyments; they want to mix real gains with their fun.

In aristocratic societies, ordinary people willingly give themselves over to bursts of wild and noisy gaiety that suddenly tear them away from contemplating their miseries. The inhabitants of democracies do not like to feel so violently wrenched out of themselves, and they always regret losing sight of themselves. Instead of these frivolous outbursts, they prefer serious, quiet relaxations that resemble business and do not let them entirely forget their affairs.

There are Americans who, instead of going out to dance joyfully in the public square during their leisure time — as people in their profession still do in much of Europe — retreat alone to the back of their homes to drink. This man enjoys two pleasures at once: he thinks about his business and he gets respectably drunk with his family.

I used to think the English were the most serious nation on earth, but I saw the Americans and changed my mind.

I do not mean to say that temperament does not play a large role in the character of the inhabitants of the United States. I think, however, that political institutions contribute even more.

I believe that the seriousness of Americans comes partly from their pride. In democratic countries, even the poorest person has a high opinion of his own worth. He contemplates himself with satisfaction and readily believes that others are watching him. In this frame of mind, he carefully monitors his words and actions and does not let his guard down for fear of revealing his shortcomings. He imagines that to appear worthy, he must remain serious.

But I see another more intimate and more powerful cause that instinctively produces in Americans the seriousness that strikes me.

Under despotism, people occasionally burst into fits of wild joy; but generally they are gloomy and withdrawn, because they are afraid.

In absolute monarchies tempered by custom and tradition, people often display an even and cheerful disposition, because having some liberty and considerable security, they are spared the most pressing cares of life. But all free peoples are serious, because their minds are habitually absorbed by the contemplation of some dangerous or difficult undertaking.

This is especially true of free peoples who are constituted as democracies. In such societies, every class contains an infinite number of people who are constantly preoccupied with the serious business of government; and those who are not thinking about directing public affairs are entirely consumed with the task of increasing their private fortunes. Among such a people, seriousness is no longer peculiar to certain individuals — it becomes a national habit.

People talk about the small democracies of antiquity, whose citizens went to the public square wearing garlands of roses and spent most of their time in dances and spectacles. I no more believe in such republics than in Plato's; or if things really did happen as we are told, I do not hesitate to say that these supposed democracies were made of very different elements from ours and had nothing in common with modern democracies but the name.

We should not conclude, however, that people living in democracies consider themselves to be pitied despite all their labors. Quite the opposite. There are no people more attached to their condition than they are. They would find life flavorless if you relieved them of the cares that torment them, and they are more attached to their worries than aristocratic peoples are to their pleasures.

I ask myself why these same democratic peoples, who are so serious, sometimes behave so recklessly.

Americans, who almost always maintain a composed bearing and a cool demeanor, nevertheless often let themselves be carried far beyond the bounds of reason by a sudden passion or a half-formed opinion, and they end up solemnly doing remarkably foolish things.

This contrast should not surprise us.

There is a kind of ignorance that is born of excessive publicity. In despotic states, people do not know how to act because they are told nothing. In democratic nations, they often act at random because people have tried to tell them everything. The first group does not know; the second forgets. The main features of each situation are lost to them amid the multitude of details.

People are amazed at all the reckless things a public figure sometimes says in free states, and especially in democratic ones, without being ruined by them — while in absolute monarchies, a few words that slip out by chance are enough to expose and destroy him forever.

This is explained by what I have just said. When you speak in the middle of a great crowd, many words go unheard or are immediately erased from the memory of those who hear them. But in the silence of a mute and motionless crowd, the faintest whispers reach every ear.

In democracies, people are never fixed in place. A thousand accidents keep them constantly moving, and there is almost always something unexpected, something improvised, in their lives. They are therefore often forced to do things they have barely learned, to speak about things they scarcely understand, and to throw themselves into work for which no long apprenticeship has prepared them.

In aristocracies, each person has only a single goal that they pursue relentlessly. But among democratic peoples, a person's existence is more complicated. It is rare that the same mind does not embrace several objects at once — often objects that have very little to do with each other. Since no one can know all of them well, people easily settle for imperfect notions.

When the inhabitant of a democracy is not pressed by his needs, he is at least pressed by his desires. Among all the good things that surround him, he sees none that is entirely out of reach. So he does everything in haste, settles constantly for "good enough," and never pauses for more than a moment to consider any of his actions.

His curiosity is at once insatiable and cheaply satisfied — because he cares more about knowing a lot quickly than about knowing well.

He has little time, and he soon loses the taste for going deep.

So democratic peoples are serious because their social and political conditions constantly draw them into serious matters; and they act rashly because they give little time or attention to any one of them.

The habit of inattention must be considered the greatest flaw of the democratic mind.

CHAPTER XVI.

Why American National Vanity Is More Restless and Quarrelsome Than That of the English.

All free peoples are proud of themselves, but national pride does not manifest itself the same way everywhere.

In their dealings with foreigners, Americans seem impatient with the slightest criticism and insatiable for praise. The faintest compliment pleases them, and the most lavish rarely satisfies them. They badger you at every moment to win your approval; and if you resist their entreaties, they praise themselves. You would think that, doubting their own merit, they constantly need to see the evidence of it before their eyes. Their vanity is not merely greedy — it is restless and envious. It grants nothing while constantly demanding. It is both needy and quarrelsome.

I tell an American that the country he lives in is beautiful. He replies: "That's true — there's none like it in the world!" I admire the freedom its inhabitants enjoy, and he answers: "Freedom is a precious gift! But very few peoples are worthy of it." I remark on the purity of morals that prevails in the United States. "I can see," he says, "why a foreigner who has been struck by the corruption on display in every other nation would be astonished by the spectacle here." I finally abandon him to his self-contemplation; but he comes back to me and will not leave until he has gotten me to repeat everything I just said. It is impossible to imagine a more inconvenient and more talkative form of patriotism. It exhausts even those who respect it.

The English are not like this at all. An Englishman calmly enjoys the real or imaginary advantages that his country possesses in his eyes. If he grants nothing to other nations, he asks nothing for his own either. The criticism of foreigners does not move him, and their praise barely flatters him. He stands before the entire world in a reserve full of disdain and ignorance. His pride needs no nourishment; it feeds on itself.

That two peoples who recently came from the same stock should show themselves so opposite to each other in their way of feeling and speaking — this is remarkable.

In aristocratic countries, the great possess immense privileges, on which their pride rests without seeking to feed itself on the minor advantages that come with them. Since these privileges came to them by inheritance, they regard them as a kind of part of themselves, or at least as a natural and inherent right. They therefore have a peaceful sense of their superiority; they do not think of boasting about prerogatives that everyone can see and no one denies them. They are not astonished enough by their privileges to talk about them. They remain motionless in the midst of their solitary grandeur, confident that the whole world sees them there without their needing to put themselves on display, and that no one will try to dislodge them.

When an aristocracy conducts public affairs, its national pride naturally takes on this reserved, nonchalant, and haughty form, and all the other classes of the nation imitate it.

When, on the contrary, social conditions differ little, the smallest advantages take on importance. Since everyone sees a million people around them who possess similar or comparable advantages, pride becomes demanding and jealous; it latches onto trifles and defends them stubbornly.

In democracies, conditions being highly fluid, people have almost always recently acquired the advantages they possess — which is why they take infinite pleasure in displaying them, to show others and prove to themselves that they really enjoy them. And since these advantages might slip away at any moment, they are constantly on alert, striving to show that they still hold them. People living in democracies love their country the same way they love themselves, and they transfer the habits of their personal vanity to their national vanity.

The restless, insatiable vanity of democratic peoples is so closely tied to equality and the fragility of social conditions that even members of the proudest nobility display exactly the same passion in the small portions of their existence where something is unstable and contested.

An aristocratic class always differs profoundly from the other classes of the nation in the extent and permanence of its privileges. But it sometimes happens that some of its members differ among themselves only in small, fleeting advantages that they can lose and acquire every day.

We have seen the members of a powerful aristocracy, gathered in a capital or a court, fiercely compete for frivolous privileges that depended on the whims of fashion or the master's will. They then showed toward one another precisely the same childish jealousies that drive the people of democracies — the same eagerness to seize the smallest advantages that their equals disputed, and the same need to display to all eyes those they possessed.

If courtiers ever took it upon themselves to feel national pride, I have no doubt they would show exactly the same kind as the peoples of democracies.

CHAPTER XVII.

How the Appearance of Society in the United States Is Both Restless and Monotonous.

It would seem that nothing could be more apt to excite and sustain curiosity than the spectacle of the United States. Fortunes, ideas, and laws are constantly changing. You would think that immovable nature itself had become mobile, so much does it transform each day under the hand of man.

In the long run, however, the sight of this agitated society begins to seem monotonous, and after contemplating this ever-moving picture for a while, the spectator grows bored.

In aristocratic nations, each person is more or less fixed in their sphere, but people are enormously different from one another. They have passions, ideas, habits, and tastes that are fundamentally diverse. Nothing moves, but everything differs.

In democracies, by contrast, everyone is alike and does roughly the same things. They are subject, it is true, to great and constant fluctuations; but since the same successes and the same setbacks keep recurring, only the names of the actors change — the play is the same. The appearance of American society is restless because people and things are constantly changing; and it is monotonous because all the changes are alike.

People living in democratic times have many passions, but most of their passions lead to the love of wealth or spring from it. This is not because their souls are smaller, but because the importance of money is genuinely greater at such times.

When all citizens are independent and indifferent to one another, you can obtain anyone's cooperation only by paying for it — which multiplies the uses of wealth infinitely and increases its value.

The prestige that once attached to old things having vanished, birth, rank, and profession no longer distinguish people, or barely do. The only thing left that creates very visible differences between them — and that can set a few apart from the rest — is money. The distinction that comes from wealth grows as all other distinctions disappear or diminish.

In aristocratic nations, money leads only to a few points on the vast circumference of desires. In democracies, it seems to lead to all of them.

You therefore usually find the love of wealth, as either the main motive or a secondary one, at the bottom of everything Americans do. This gives all their passions a family resemblance and quickly makes the picture tiresome to look at.

This perpetual recurrence of the same passion is monotonous; the particular methods this passion uses to satisfy itself are equally so.

In a settled and peaceful democracy like the United States, where you cannot get rich through war, public office, or political confiscation, the love of wealth mainly drives people toward industry. Now, industry — which often produces great upheavals and great disasters — cannot prosper except through very regular habits and a long succession of very uniform small actions. Habits become more regular and actions more uniform as the passion grows more intense. You could say that it is the very violence of their desires that makes Americans so methodical. It disturbs their souls but organizes their lives.

What I say about America applies, moreover, to almost everyone in our time. Variety is disappearing from within the human race. The same ways of acting, thinking, and feeling are found in every corner of the world. This is not only because all peoples interact more and copy each other more faithfully, but because in every country, people are increasingly departing from the ideas and feelings peculiar to a caste, a profession, or a family, and arriving simultaneously at what lies closest to the basic constitution of human nature — which is the same everywhere. They thus become alike without having imitated each other. They are like travelers scattered through a great forest, all of whose paths lead to the same point. If they all notice the central point at the same time and head in that direction, they gradually draw closer to one another without looking for each other, without seeing each other, and without knowing each other, and they will be surprised to find themselves gathered in the same place. All peoples who take as the object of their study and imitation not this or that particular person but humanity itself will end up converging on the same customs — like those travelers at the clearing.

CHAPTER XVIII.

On Honor in the United States and in Democratic Societies.

The word "honor" is not always used in the same sense in French. First, it means the esteem, glory, and regard that one obtains from others — as in "to win honor." Second, it also means the set of rules by which one obtains that glory, esteem, and regard — as in "a man has always strictly followed the laws of honor" or "he has forfeited his honor." In writing this chapter, I have always used the word "honor" in this second sense.

It seems that people use two very different methods in the public judgments they make about the actions of others. Sometimes they judge according to the simple notions of right and wrong that are found all over the earth; sometimes they evaluate actions using very particular standards that belong only to one country and one era. Often these two standards differ; sometimes they conflict. But they never entirely merge, nor do they destroy each other.

Honor, at the height of its power, rules the will more than belief. Even when people submit without hesitation or complaint to its commands, they still feel, through a kind of dim but powerful instinct, that there exists a more general, more ancient, and more sacred law, which they sometimes disobey without ceasing to recognize it. There are actions that have been judged simultaneously honest and dishonorable. Refusing a duel has often been such a case.

I believe these phenomena can be explained differently than by the whims of certain individuals and peoples, as has been done until now.

The human race experiences permanent and universal needs, which have given rise to moral laws. To the violation of these laws, all people, in all places and at all times, have naturally attached the ideas of blame and shame. They have called it "doing wrong" to evade them, and "doing right" to obey them.

Beyond this, within the vast association of humanity, smaller associations called nations are established, and within these nations, still smaller ones called classes or castes.

Each of these associations forms something like a separate species within the human race. Although it does not differ essentially from the mass of humanity, it stands somewhat apart and experiences needs of its own. These special needs are what modify, in certain ways and in certain countries, the way people view human actions and the esteem they attach to them.

The general and permanent interest of the human race is that people should not kill each other. But it may happen that the particular and temporary interest of a nation or a class is, in certain cases, to excuse or even to honor homicide.

Honor is nothing other than this particular rule, founded on a particular condition, by which a nation or a class distributes blame and praise.

There is nothing more unproductive for the human mind than an abstract idea. So I will hurry toward the facts. An example will illuminate my thinking.

I will choose the most extraordinary species of honor that has ever appeared in the world, and the one we know best: the aristocratic honor born within feudal society. I will explain it using what I have just said, and I will explain what I have just said using it.

I need not investigate here when and how the aristocracy of the Middle Ages came into being, why it separated itself so profoundly from the rest of the nation, or what established and consolidated its power. I find it standing, and I try to understand why it viewed most human actions in such a peculiar light.

What strikes me first is that in the feudal world, actions were not always praised or blamed according to their intrinsic value. Rather, it sometimes happened that they were valued solely in relation to who performed them or who was affected by them — which offends the general conscience of the human race. Certain acts were therefore indifferent when committed by a commoner that would have dishonored a nobleman; others changed character depending on whether the person who suffered them belonged to the aristocracy or lived outside it.

When these different standards first arose, the nobility formed a separate body in the midst of the people, dominating from the inaccessible heights to which it had withdrawn. To maintain this special position, which was the source of its power, it needed not only political privileges — it needed virtues and vices of its own.

That a particular virtue or vice should belong to the nobility rather than the common people; that a particular action should be a matter of indifference when a commoner was its object but condemnable when a nobleman was involved — this was often arbitrary. But that honor or shame should be attached to a person's actions according to their social condition — this followed from the very structure of an aristocratic society. This has been the case in every country that has had an aristocracy. As long as even a trace of one remains, these peculiarities persist: seducing a woman of color barely hurts an American's reputation; marrying her dishonors him.

In certain cases, feudal honor prescribed vengeance and stigmatized the forgiveness of injuries. In others, it imperiously commanded people to master themselves and ordered self-forgetfulness. It did not make a law of kindness or gentleness, but it praised generosity. It valued liberality more than charity. It allowed people to enrich themselves through gambling or war, but not through work. It preferred great crimes to small gains. Greed revolted it less than miserliness. Violence often pleased it, while cunning and treachery always seemed contemptible to it.

These strange notions were not born solely from the whims of those who conceived them.

A class that has managed to place itself at the head of and above all others, and that makes constant efforts to maintain itself at that supreme rank, must particularly honor the virtues that have grandeur and brilliance and that can easily combine with pride and the love of power. It does not hesitate to disturb the natural order of conscience in order to place those virtues above all others. One can even understand how it would readily elevate certain bold and brilliant vices above quiet and modest virtues. It is more or less compelled to do so by its condition.

Above all the virtues, and in the place of a great many of them, the nobles of the Middle Ages put military courage.

This, too, was a singular opinion that necessarily arose from the singularity of the social order.

The feudal aristocracy was born by war and for war. It had found its power in arms and maintained it by arms. Nothing, then, was more necessary to it than military courage, and it was natural for it to glorify that quality above all else. Everything that manifested it outwardly — even at the expense of reason and humanity — was therefore approved and often commanded by the aristocracy. Only in the details did individual caprice enter in.

That a man should regard it as an enormous insult to be struck on the cheek, and should be obliged to kill the person who lightly slapped him in single combat — that was arbitrary. But that a nobleman could not peacefully accept an insult, and was dishonored if he let himself be struck without fighting back — this followed from the very principles and needs of a military aristocracy.

It was therefore true, up to a point, to say that honor had capricious ways. But the caprices of honor were always contained within certain necessary limits. This particular rule that our ancestors called honor is so far from seeming to me an arbitrary law that I would readily undertake to trace even its most incoherent and bizarre prescriptions back to a small number of fixed and invariable needs of feudal societies.

If I followed feudal honor into the field of politics, I would have no more difficulty explaining its workings.

The social order and political institutions of the Middle Ages were such that the national government never directly governed its citizens. It practically did not exist in their eyes. Each person knew only one particular man whom he was obliged to obey. It was through that man that, without knowing it, one was connected to all the others. In feudal societies, the entire public order therefore rested on the feeling of personal loyalty to one's lord. Once that was destroyed, anarchy immediately followed.

Loyalty to the political leader was, moreover, a feeling whose value every member of the aristocracy could see every day, for each of them was simultaneously lord and vassal, and had to command as well as obey.

To remain faithful to one's lord, to sacrifice oneself for him if necessary, to share his fortunes good or bad, to help him in his ventures whatever they might be — these were the first commandments of feudal honor in political matters. The betrayal of a vassal was condemned by public opinion with extraordinary severity. A particularly infamous name was coined for it: it was called "felony."

In the Middle Ages, by contrast, you find few traces of a passion that was the lifeblood of ancient societies. I am speaking of patriotism. The very word "patriotism" is not an ancient one in our language.

The word "patrie" (fatherland) itself is not found in French writers until the sixteenth century.

Feudal institutions hid the fatherland from view and made love of country less necessary. They made people forget the nation by making them passionate for a single man. And so we see that feudal honor never made a strict law of remaining faithful to one's country.

This is not to say that love of country did not exist in the hearts of our ancestors, but it formed only a kind of weak and obscure instinct — one that became clearer and stronger as classes were destroyed and power was centralized.

This is clearly revealed by the contradictory judgments that the peoples of Europe have passed on various events in their history, depending on which generation is doing the judging. What mainly dishonored the Constable de Bourbon in the eyes of his contemporaries was that he took up arms against his king. What mainly dishonors him in our eyes is that he made war against his country. We condemn him as strongly as our ancestors did, but for different reasons.

I chose feudal honor to illustrate my point because feudal honor has more sharply defined and better-known features than any other. But I could have taken my example from elsewhere and arrived at the same conclusion by a different route.

Although we know the Romans less well than our own ancestors, we know that they had particular opinions about glory and dishonor that did not derive solely from general notions of good and evil. Many human actions were viewed differently depending on whether the person involved was a citizen or a foreigner, a free man or a slave. They glorified certain vices and elevated certain virtues above all others.

"Now in those days," says Plutarch in his Life of Coriolanus, "prowess was honored and prized at Rome above all other virtues. This is shown by the fact that they called it virtus — using the name of virtue in general for this particular species. So that virtue in Latin meant the same thing as valor." Who does not recognize here the particular need of that singular association formed for the conquest of the world?

Every nation will lend itself to similar observations. For as I said above, whenever people gather into a particular society, an honor immediately establishes itself among them — that is, a set of opinions peculiar to them about what should be praised or blamed. And these particular rules always have their source in the special habits and special interests of the association.

This applies, to a certain extent, to democratic societies as well as to others. We are about to find the proof among the Americans.

I am speaking here of Americans who live in areas where slavery does not exist. They are the only ones who can present the complete picture of a democratic society.

Scattered among American opinions, you can still find some detached remnants of the old aristocratic honor of Europe. These traditional notions are very few in number; they have little root and little power. It is a religion whose temples are still standing, but in which no one believes anymore.

In the midst of these half-erased notions of an exotic honor, some new opinions appear that constitute what might be called, in our time, American honor.

I have shown how Americans are ceaselessly driven toward commerce and industry. Their origins, their social conditions, their political institutions, the very land they inhabit — all of these irresistibly pull them in that direction. They form, at present, an almost exclusively industrial and commercial association, placed within a new and immense country that it has as its main purpose to develop. This is the defining characteristic that most clearly distinguishes the American people from all others today.

All the peaceful virtues that tend to give a regular course to the social body and to promote commerce must therefore be especially honored among this people; and they cannot be neglected without falling into public contempt.

All the turbulent virtues that often bring brilliance but even more often bring disorder to society occupy, by contrast, a subordinate place in the opinion of this same people. You can neglect them without losing the esteem of your fellow citizens, and you might even risk losing that esteem by cultivating them.

Americans make no less arbitrary a ranking among vices.

There are certain inclinations that are condemnable in the eyes of general reason and universal conscience but that happen to align with the particular and temporary needs of the American association — and it condemns them only weakly, sometimes even praises them. I will cite in particular the love of wealth and the secondary inclinations connected to it. To clear, cultivate, and transform this vast uninhabited continent that is their domain, Americans need the daily support of an energetic passion. That passion can only be the love of wealth. The passion for riches is therefore not stigmatized in America, and provided it does not exceed the limits that public order assigns to it, it is honored. What the American calls noble and worthy ambition, our ancestors of the Middle Ages called servile greed — just as he gives the name of blind and barbarous fury to the conquering spirit and warlike temper that threw them into new battles every day.

In the United States, fortunes are destroyed and rebuilt with ease. The country is boundless and full of inexhaustible resources. The people have all the needs and appetites of a growing organism, and no matter how hard they try, they are always surrounded by more wealth than they can seize. What is to be feared in such a people is not the ruin of a few individuals, which is quickly repaired, but the inactivity and softness of everyone. Boldness in industrial ventures is the primary cause of its rapid progress, its strength, its greatness. Industry is for them like a vast lottery in which a small number of people lose every day but the nation always wins. Such a people must therefore look favorably on boldness in industry and honor it. Now, every bold venture puts at risk the fortune of the person who undertakes it and the fortunes of all those who trust him. Americans, who make commercial daring a kind of virtue, cannot in any case stigmatize the daring.

This is why such remarkable indulgence is shown in the United States toward a merchant who goes bankrupt: his honor does not suffer from such an accident. In this, Americans differ not only from European nations but from all the commercial nations of our time — because they also differ from all of them in their position and their needs.

In America, all vices that tend to corrupt the purity of morals and to destroy the marriage bond are treated with a severity unknown in the rest of the world. This contrasts strangely, at first glance, with the tolerance shown on other points. It is surprising to find in the same people a morality both so relaxed and so austere.

These things are not as inconsistent as one might suppose. Public opinion in the United States only weakly restrains the love of wealth, which serves the nation's industrial greatness and prosperity. But it particularly condemns bad morals, which distract the human mind from the pursuit of well-being and disrupt the internal order of the family, so necessary to business success. To earn the esteem of their fellow citizens, Americans are thus compelled to adopt regular habits. In this sense, one can say that they make it a point of honor to be chaste.

American honor agrees with the old honor of Europe on one point. It places courage at the head of the virtues and makes it the greatest moral necessity for a man. But it does not view courage in the same light.

In the United States, military valor is not highly prized. The kind of courage that is best known and most esteemed is the kind that lets you brave the fury of the ocean to reach port sooner; that lets you endure without complaint the miseries of the wilderness and the solitude that is crueler than all miseries; the courage that makes you nearly insensible to the sudden collapse of a fortune painfully acquired, and that immediately inspires new efforts to build another one. This kind of courage is principally necessary for the maintenance and prosperity of the American association, and it is particularly honored and glorified. You cannot be seen to lack it without disgrace.

I find one last trait that will complete the picture of this chapter.

In a democratic society like that of the United States, where fortunes are small and insecure, everyone works, and work leads to everything. This has turned the point of honor around and directed it against idleness.

I have sometimes met in America rich young men who were temperamentally hostile to all strenuous effort, yet who were forced to take up a profession. Their nature and their fortune would have allowed them to remain idle; public opinion imperiously forbade it, and they had to obey. In European nations, on the other hand, where the aristocracy still struggles against the current that is sweeping it away, I have seen men whose needs and desires constantly spurred them on, yet who remained idle rather than lose the esteem of their peers, submitting more easily to boredom and want than to work.

Who cannot see in these two contrary obligations two different rules, both of which nonetheless spring from honor?

What our ancestors called honor par excellence was really only one of its forms. They gave a generic name to what was merely one species. Honor is therefore found in democratic centuries as well as in aristocratic times. But it will not be hard to show that in the former it presents a different face.

Not only are its prescriptions different — we will see that they are fewer and less clear, and that its laws are more loosely followed.

A caste is always in a much more particular position than a nation. There is nothing more exceptional in the world than a small society always composed of the same families — like the medieval aristocracy, for example — whose purpose is to concentrate and retain exclusively and hereditarily within itself education, wealth, and power.

Now, the more exceptional a society's position, the greater its special needs — and the more the notions of its honor, which correspond to those needs, multiply.

The prescriptions of honor will therefore always be fewer among a people not divided into castes than among one that is. And if nations should arise in which it becomes difficult to find even classes, honor will be limited to a small number of precepts, and these precepts will move increasingly closer to the moral laws adopted by humanity in general.

Thus, the prescriptions of honor will be less bizarre and less numerous in a democratic nation than in an aristocracy.

They will also be more obscure — this follows necessarily from what I have just said.

Since the defining traits of honor are fewer and less distinctive, it must often be difficult to discern them.

There are still other reasons.

In the aristocratic nations of the Middle Ages, generations succeeded one another in vain; each family was like an immortal, perpetually motionless being. Ideas changed hardly more than conditions.

Each person therefore always had the same objects before his eyes, which he viewed from the same angle. His gaze gradually penetrated into the smallest details, and his perception could not help but eventually become clear and distinct. So not only did people of feudal times have very extraordinary opinions that constituted their honor, but each of these opinions was painted in their minds with a sharp and precise outline.

This could never be the case in a country like America, where all citizens are in motion; where society, modifying itself every day, changes its opinions along with its needs. In such a country, people can glimpse the rule of honor, but they rarely have the leisure to fix their gaze on it steadily.

Even if society were standing still, it would be hard to determine the meaning that should be given to the word "honor."

In the Middle Ages, each class having its own honor, the same opinion was never shared by a very large number of people at once — which made it possible to give it a fixed and precise form, especially since all those who held it, being in a perfectly identical and very exceptional position, were naturally disposed to agree on the prescriptions of a law made for them alone.

Honor thus became a complete and detailed code, where everything was foreseen and ordered in advance, and which presented a fixed and always visible rule for human actions. In a democratic nation like the American people, where ranks are blurred and the entire society forms a single mass whose elements are all similar without being identical, it would never be possible to agree in advance on exactly what is permitted and forbidden by honor.

There do exist, within such a people, certain national needs that give rise to shared opinions about honor. But such opinions never present themselves at the same time, in the same way, and with equal force to the minds of all citizens. The law of honor exists, but it often lacks interpreters.

The confusion is even greater in a democratic country like our own, where the different classes that composed the old society are beginning to mingle without yet having merged — importing into one another, every day, their diverse and often contradictory notions of honor; where each person, following his own whims, abandons some of his ancestors' opinions and retains others — so that amid all these arbitrary standards, no common rule can ever establish itself. It is almost impossible then to say in advance which actions will be honored and which stigmatized. These are miserable times, but they do not last.

In democratic nations, honor — being poorly defined — is necessarily less powerful, because it is difficult to apply with certainty and firmness a law that is imperfectly known. Public opinion, the natural and sovereign interpreter of the law of honor, not seeing clearly which way blame and praise should fall, delivers its verdict only with hesitation. Sometimes it contradicts itself; often it stands still and lets things happen.

The relative weakness of honor in democracies has several other causes as well.

In aristocratic countries, the same honor is shared by only a limited number of people, always separated from the rest of their fellow citizens. In the minds of these people, honor easily mingles and merges with the idea of everything that distinguishes them. It appears to them as the defining feature of who they are; they apply its various rules with all the passion of personal interest, and they bring, if I may say so, real passion to obeying it.

This truth is clearly seen when you read the legal customs of the Middle Ages, especially on the subject of judicial duels. The nobles were required to use lance and sword in their quarrels, while commoners used the cudgel, "since," the customs add, "commoners have no honor." This did not mean, as one might imagine today, that these men were contemptible. It meant only that their actions were not judged by the same rules as those of the aristocracy.

What is surprising at first glance is that when honor reigns with its full power, its prescriptions are generally very strange — so that people seem to obey it better the more it seems to depart from reason. From this, some have concluded that honor was strong precisely because of its extravagance.

These two things do indeed have the same origin, but they do not derive from each other.

Honor is bizarre in proportion to the degree that it represents more particular needs felt by a smaller number of people; and it is because it represents needs of this kind that it is powerful. Honor is not powerful because it is bizarre; rather, it is bizarre and powerful from the same cause.

I will make one more observation.

In aristocratic nations, all ranks differ, but all ranks are fixed. Each person occupies a place in their sphere from which they cannot escape, and lives surrounded by others who are attached in the same way. In such nations, no one can hope or fear to go unseen. There is no person so lowly placed that they do not have their stage, and none who can escape, through their obscurity, from blame or praise.

In democratic states, on the contrary, where all citizens are mingled in the same crowd and constantly moving about, public opinion has nothing to hold onto; its object disappears at every instant and escapes it. Honor will therefore always be less commanding and less pressing there — because honor acts only in view of the public, unlike simple virtue, which lives on its own and is satisfied by its own testimony.

If the reader has fully grasped all of the above, he will have understood that there exists between inequality of conditions and what we have called honor a close and necessary connection — one that, if I am not mistaken, had not been clearly identified until now. I must therefore make one last effort to bring it into full light.

A nation sets itself apart within the human race. Beyond certain general needs inherent to the human species, it has its own particular interests and needs. Immediately, a set of opinions about blame and praise arises within it that are proper to it alone, and that its citizens call honor.

Within this same nation, a caste forms that in turn separates itself from all other classes and develops particular needs — and these needs in turn give rise to special opinions. The honor of this caste, a bizarre compound of the particular notions of the nation and the even more particular notions of the caste, will diverge as far as one can imagine from the simple and general opinions of humanity. We have reached the extreme point; let us now come back down.

Ranks are mixed, privileges abolished. The people who make up the nation having become alike and equal once more, their interests and needs merge, and one sees all the singular notions that each caste used to call honor vanish one by one. Honor now flows only from the particular needs of the nation itself; it represents its individuality among peoples.

If we were finally allowed to suppose that all races were blended together and that all the peoples of the world reached the point of having the same interests, the same needs, and of no longer being distinguishable from one another by any characteristic trait — people would entirely cease to attach conventional value to human actions. Everyone would view them in the same light. The general needs of humanity, which conscience reveals to every person, would become the common standard. Then, the only notions found in this world would be the simple and general notions of good and evil, to which the ideas of praise and blame would be attached by a natural and necessary bond.

So, to finally compress all my thinking into a single formula: it is the differences and inequalities among people that created honor. Honor weakens as those differences fade, and it would disappear along with them.

CHAPTER XIX.

Why There Are So Many Ambitious People in the United States but So Few Great Ambitions.

The first thing that strikes you in the United States is the countless number of people who are trying to rise above their original condition; and the second is the small number of great ambitions that stand out amid this universal movement of ambition. There is no American who does not appear consumed by the desire to rise. But you see almost none who seem to nourish very vast hopes or to aim very high. Everyone wants to constantly acquire property, reputation, and power; few envision any of these things on a grand scale. And this is surprising at first. Since there is nothing in America's customs or laws that should limit desires or prevent them from taking flight in every direction.

It seems difficult to attribute this singular state of affairs to equality of conditions — because at the very moment when this same equality was established among us in France, it immediately gave rise to ambitions that were almost without limit. I believe, however, that the principal cause is to be found in the social conditions and democratic customs of Americans.

Every revolution enlarges the ambition of men. This is especially true of a revolution that overthrows an aristocracy.

When the old barriers that once separated the crowd from fame and power suddenly come down, there is an impetuous and universal surge upward toward those long-envied heights, whose enjoyment is at last permitted. In this first exaltation of triumph, nothing seems impossible to anyone. Not only are desires boundless, but the power to fulfill them is nearly so. Amid this sudden and sweeping renewal of customs and laws, in this vast confusion of all people and all rules, citizens rise and fall with incredible speed, and power passes so quickly from hand to hand that no one need despair of seizing it in turn.

One must also remember that the people who destroy an aristocracy have lived under its laws. They have seen its splendors, and they have been penetrated, without knowing it, by the feelings and ideas it conceived. At the moment an aristocracy dissolves, then, its spirit still hovers over the masses, and people retain its instincts long after they have defeated it.

Ambitions therefore always run very high as long as the democratic revolution lasts; and they will remain so for some time after it ends.

The memory of the extraordinary events people have witnessed does not vanish from human memory in a day. The passions the revolution inspired do not disappear with it. The feeling of instability persists amid the new order. The idea that success comes easily survives the strange upheavals that created it. Desires remain vast even as the means of satisfying them shrink with each passing day. The taste for great fortunes persists, even though great fortunes become rare, and everywhere you see ambitions — disproportionate and unhappy — that burn in secret and without result in the hearts that contain them.

Gradually, however, the last traces of the struggle fade; the remnants of the aristocracy finish disappearing. The great events that accompanied its fall are forgotten; the calm of peace replaces the turmoil of war, the rule of order is reborn in the new world; desires adjust to the available means; needs, ideas, and feelings fall into a chain; people finish leveling out — and democratic society is finally settled.

If we consider a democratic people that has reached this permanent and normal state, it will present a very different spectacle from the one we have just been observing, and we can easily see that while ambition grows large as conditions are being equalized, it loses that character once they are equal.

Since great fortunes have been divided up and knowledge has spread, no one is entirely without education or resources. The privileges and incapacities of class having been abolished, and people having shattered forever the bonds that once held them immobile, the idea of progress presents itself to every mind. The desire to rise is born in every heart at once. Ambition becomes the universal feeling.

But if equality of conditions gives every citizen some resources, it prevents any of them from having very extensive ones — which necessarily confines desires within fairly narrow limits. In democratic nations, then, ambition is passionate and constant, but it cannot usually aim very high. Life is ordinarily spent eagerly coveting small things that seem within reach.

What chiefly diverts people in democracies from great ambition is not the smallness of their fortune but the violent effort they make every day to improve it. They force their souls to spend all their energy on mediocre things — which cannot help but soon limit their vision and circumscribe their power. They could be much poorer and remain greater.

The small number of wealthy citizens in a democracy does not constitute an exception to this rule. A man who rises by degrees toward wealth and power develops, in this long labor, habits of prudence and restraint that he cannot subsequently abandon. You do not gradually enlarge your soul as you do your house.

A similar observation applies to the children of such a man. They were born, it is true, in an elevated position. But their parents were humble. They grew up surrounded by feelings and ideas that are later difficult to escape, and it is reasonable to believe they will inherit their father's instincts along with his property.

The poorest scion of a powerful aristocracy, by contrast, may display vast ambition, because the traditional opinions of his race and the general spirit of his caste sustain him for some time above his fortune.

What also prevents people in democratic times from easily pursuing great ambitions is the time they foresee must elapse before they are in a position to attempt them. "It is a great advantage to be of high birth," Pascal once said, "for it puts an eighteen- or twenty-year-old man in a position that another might reach only at fifty — thirty years gained without effort." Those thirty years are usually missing for the ambitious in democracies. Equality, which gives everyone the ability to reach anything, prevents anyone from rising fast.

In a democratic society, as elsewhere, there are only a certain number of great fortunes to be made. And since the paths that lead to them are open indiscriminately to every citizen, the progress of each must inevitably slow. Since the candidates all appear roughly equal, and it is hard to choose among them without violating the principle of equality — which is the supreme law of democratic societies — the first idea that occurs is to make them all advance at the same pace and subject them all to the same tests.

As people become more alike and the principle of equality penetrates more peacefully and deeply into institutions and customs, the rules for advancement become more inflexible; advancement slows; the difficulty of quickly reaching any degree of greatness increases.

Out of hatred for privilege and difficulty in choosing, people end up forcing all men, whatever their stature, through the same filter. They subject them all indiscriminately to a multitude of small preliminary exercises, in the course of which their youth is lost and their imagination extinguished — so that they despair of ever fully enjoying the things they are offered, and by the time they are finally in a position to do extraordinary things, they have lost the taste for them.

In China, where equality of conditions is very great and very old, no man passes from one public office to another without submitting to an examination. This test occurs at every step of his career, and the idea is so deeply embedded in the culture that I recall reading a Chinese novel whose hero, after many trials, finally wins the heart of his beloved by passing a good exam. Great ambitions do not breathe easily in such an atmosphere.

What I say about politics extends to everything. Equality produces the same effects everywhere. Where the law does not take charge of regulating and slowing the movement of people, competition suffices.

In a well-established democratic society, then, great and rapid rises are rare; they are exceptions to the common rule. It is their singularity that makes people forget how few they are.

People in democracies eventually perceive all these things. They see that the legislator has opened before them a limitless field in which everyone can easily take a few steps, but no one can flatter himself that he will cross it quickly. Between themselves and the vast and final object of their desires, they see a multitude of small intermediate barriers that must be surmounted slowly. This sight wears out their ambition in advance and discourages it. They therefore give up those distant and doubtful hopes in order to seek out closer pleasures, less lofty and more accessible. The law does not limit their horizon, but they narrow it themselves.

I said that great ambitions are rarer in democratic centuries than in aristocratic ones. I will add that when they do arise, despite these natural obstacles, they have a different character.

In aristocracies, the field of ambition is often wide, but its limits are fixed. In democratic countries, it usually moves within a narrow field; but should it break out of that field, it seems as though nothing can contain it any longer. Since people there are weak, isolated, and shifting; since precedents have little authority and laws little permanence, resistance to novelty is soft, and the social body never appears very upright or very steady. So when ambitious people once have power in hand, they believe they can dare anything; and when it slips away, they immediately think of overturning the state to recapture it. This gives great political ambition a violent and revolutionary character that is rarely seen to the same degree in aristocratic societies.

A multitude of sensible small ambitions, from whose midst a few great, poorly regulated desires occasionally burst forth — that is typically the picture presented by democratic nations. A proportionate, moderate, and vast ambition is rarely found among them.

I have shown elsewhere how equality makes the passion for material pleasures and the exclusive love of the present predominate in the human heart. These various instincts mingle with the feeling of ambition and color it, so to speak, with their own hues.

I think that the ambitious in democracies care less than anyone about the interests and judgments of the future: the present moment alone occupies and absorbs them. They rapidly complete many projects rather than building a few very durable monuments. They love success far more than glory. What they demand above all from other people is obedience. What they want above all is power. Their customs have almost always remained less elevated than their station — which means they very often bring vulgar tastes into extraordinary positions, and seem to have risen to supreme power only to more easily procure petty and coarse pleasures for themselves.

I believe that in our time it is very necessary to purify, regulate, and proportion the feeling of ambition, but that it would be very dangerous to try to impoverish or compress it beyond measure. We should try to set extreme boundaries in advance that it will never be allowed to cross; but we should be careful not to restrict its flight too much within those permitted limits.

I confess that what I fear far less for democratic societies is the audacity of desires than their mediocrity. What seems most to be feared is that, amid the small incessant occupations of private life, ambition will lose its energy and its grandeur; that human passions will both quiet down and lower themselves; so that each day the pace of the social body becomes more tranquil and less lofty.

I therefore think that the leaders of these new societies would be wrong to try to lull their citizens into a happiness that is too smooth and too peaceful, and that it would be good to give them difficult and dangerous tasks from time to time, in order to raise ambition and give it a stage.

Moralists constantly complain that the favorite vice of our time is pride.

This is true in a certain sense: indeed, there is no one who does not believe himself better than his neighbor, or who consents to obey a superior. But it is very false in another sense — for this same man, who can tolerate neither subordination nor equality, nevertheless holds himself in such low esteem that he believes himself made only for vulgar pleasures. He willingly settles into mediocre desires without daring to approach great enterprises; he can barely even imagine them.

Far from believing, then, that we should recommend humility to our contemporaries, I wish we would try to give them a grander idea of themselves and of their species. Humility is not healthy for them. What they lack most, in my opinion, is pride. I would gladly trade several of our small virtues for that one vice.

CHAPTER XX.

On the Pursuit of Government Jobs in Certain Democratic Nations.

In the United States, as soon as a citizen has some education and some resources, he tries to get rich through commerce and industry — or he buys a piece of forested land and becomes a pioneer. All he asks of the state is to not interfere with his labors and to protect what he earns.

Among most European peoples, when a man begins to feel his strength and to expand his desires, the first idea that occurs to him is to obtain a government job. These different effects, arising from the same cause, deserve a moment's consideration.

When public offices are few in number, poorly paid, and insecure, while at the same time industrial careers are numerous and productive, it is toward industry and not toward government that the new and impatient desires born of equality are directed from every quarter.

But if, at the same time that social ranks are becoming equal, people's education remains incomplete or their minds timid, and commerce and industry — constrained in their development — offer only difficult and slow means of making a fortune, then citizens, despairing of improving their lot on their own, rush headlong toward the head of state and demand his help. To live more comfortably at the expense of the public treasury seems to them, if not the only path available, at least the easiest and most open path for escaping a condition that no longer satisfies them. The pursuit of government jobs becomes the most popular of all industries.

This is bound to be especially true in the large centralized monarchies, where the number of paid positions is immense and the security of civil servants fairly well assured — so that no one despairs of obtaining a post and enjoying it peacefully, as though it were a patrimony.

I will not say that this universal and immoderate desire for public office is a great social evil; that it destroys the spirit of independence in every citizen and spreads a servile and venal disposition throughout the entire national body; that it stifles manly virtues. Nor will I observe that an industry of this kind creates only unproductive activity and agitates the country without enriching it. All of that is easily understood.

But I do want to point out that a government that encourages such a tendency risks its own stability and puts its very existence in great danger.

I know that in a time like ours, when love and respect for power are gradually fading, it may seem necessary for rulers to bind each person more tightly through their self-interest, and that it may seem convenient to use people's own passions to keep them orderly and quiet. But things cannot go on this way for long, and what may appear for a certain period to be a source of strength inevitably becomes, over time, a great cause of trouble and weakness.

Among democratic peoples, as among all others, the number of public jobs has a limit. But among these same peoples, the number of ambitious people has none. It grows by a gradual and irresistible movement as conditions become more equal; it has no limit until there are no more people.

So when ambition has no outlet except the government alone, the government inevitably ends up facing permanent opposition — for its task is to satisfy, with limited means, desires that multiply without limit. One must be deeply convinced that of all peoples in the world, the most difficult to contain and to govern is a people of office-seekers. Whatever their leaders do, they can never satisfy them, and there is always reason to fear that they will eventually overthrow the country's constitution and change the face of the state, simply out of a need to create job openings.

The rulers of our time, who strive to draw toward themselves alone all the new desires that equality creates and to satisfy them, will therefore end up, if I am not mistaken, regretting having embarked on such an enterprise. They will discover one day that they have endangered their power by making it so indispensable, and that it would have been more honorable and safer to teach each of their subjects the art of providing for themselves.

CHAPTER XXI.

Why Great Revolutions Will Become Rare.

A people that has lived for centuries under a regime of castes and classes does not arrive at a democratic social order except through a long series of more or less painful transformations, by means of violent efforts, and after numerous upheavals during which property, opinions, and power rapidly change hands.

Even after this great revolution is over, the revolutionary habits it created persist for a long time, followed by deep agitation.

Since all of this happens at the same time that conditions are becoming equal, people conclude that there exists a hidden connection and a secret link between equality itself and revolutions — so that one cannot exist without the others arising.

On this point, reasoning seems to agree with experience.

In a nation where social ranks are roughly equal, no visible bond unites people or holds them in place. None of them has a permanent right or the power to command, and none is bound by their condition to obey. Instead, each person, finding himself equipped with some education and some resources, can choose his own path and walk independently of everyone else.

The same causes that make citizens independent of one another push them every day toward new and restless desires, and spur them on constantly.

It seems natural, then, to believe that in a democratic society, ideas, things, and people must eternally change their forms and positions, and that democratic centuries will be times of rapid and ceaseless transformation.

Is this really the case? Does equality of conditions habitually and permanently drive people toward revolutions? Does it contain some disruptive principle that prevents society from settling down and disposes citizens to ceaselessly remake their laws, doctrines, and customs? I do not think so. The subject is important; I ask the reader to follow me closely.

Nearly all the revolutions that have changed the face of nations have been made either to establish or to destroy inequality. Set aside the secondary causes that have produced the great upheavals of humanity, and you will almost always arrive at inequality. It is the poor who have wanted to seize the wealth of the rich, or the rich who have tried to chain the poor. If, then, you can create a social order in which each person has something to keep and little to take, you will have done much for the peace of the world.

I am well aware that in a great democratic people, there will always be very poor citizens and very rich ones. But the poor, instead of forming the overwhelming majority of the nation as they always do in aristocratic societies, are few in number, and the law has not bound them together by the ties of irremediable and hereditary misery.

The rich, for their part, are scattered and powerless. They have no privileges that attract attention; their wealth itself, no longer being incorporated into the land and represented by it, is elusive and practically invisible. Just as there are no longer hereditary races of the poor, there are no longer hereditary races of the rich. The rich emerge from the crowd every day and return to it constantly. They do not form a distinct class that can be easily defined and stripped. And since they are connected by a thousand secret threads to the mass of their fellow citizens, the people could hardly strike at them without hitting themselves. Between these two extremes of democratic societies, there stands an innumerable multitude of people who are nearly alike — neither precisely rich nor poor — who possess enough property to want order but not enough to provoke envy.

These people are naturally the enemies of violent upheaval. Their stillness holds in place everything above and below them, and steadies the social body.

It is not that they are satisfied with their present fortune or that they feel a natural horror for revolution whose spoils they would share without suffering its consequences. On the contrary, they desire to get rich with an unequaled passion. But the difficulty is knowing whom to take from. The same social order that constantly suggests desires to them also confines those desires within necessary limits. It gives people more liberty to change and less interest in changing.

Not only do people in democracies not naturally desire revolutions — they fear them.

There is no revolution that does not threaten, more or less, property that has been acquired. Most people in democratic countries are property owners. And they are not merely property owners; they live in the condition where people attach the most value to their property.

If you look carefully at each of the classes that make up society, it is easy to see that there is none in which the passions that property creates are sharper and more tenacious than among the middle classes.

The poor often do not care much about what they possess, because they suffer far more from what they lack than they enjoy the little they have. The rich have many other passions to satisfy besides the passion for wealth, and besides, the long and burdensome management of a great fortune eventually makes them almost insensible to its pleasures.

But people who live in a comfort equally distant from opulence and from poverty place an immense value on their possessions. Since they are still very close to poverty, they see its harshness up close and they dread it. Between them and poverty there is nothing but a small estate on which they immediately fix all their fears and hopes. With every passing moment they grow more interested in it through the constant worries it gives them, and they become more attached to it through the daily efforts they make to increase it. The idea of giving up even the smallest part of it is unbearable to them, and they consider its total loss as the worst of all misfortunes. Now, it is the number of these passionate and restless small property owners that equality of conditions constantly increases.

So in democratic societies, the majority of citizens do not clearly see what they might gain from a revolution, and they feel at every moment and in a thousand ways what they might lose.

I said elsewhere in this work how equality of conditions naturally pushes people toward industrial and commercial careers, and how it increases and diversifies property. I showed how it inspires in everyone a passionate and constant desire to improve their well-being. There is nothing more contrary to revolutionary passions than all of these things.

It may be that a revolution, in its ultimate result, serves industry and commerce; but its first effect will almost always be to ruin industrialists and merchants, because it cannot help but immediately change the general state of consumption and momentarily overturn the proportion between production and demand.

Besides, I know of nothing more opposed to revolutionary habits than commercial habits. Commerce is naturally the enemy of all violent passions. It loves moderation, delights in compromise, and carefully avoids anger. It is patient, flexible, insinuating, and it resorts to extreme measures only when absolute necessity compels it. Commerce makes people independent of one another; it gives them a high idea of their individual worth; it leads them to want to manage their own affairs and teaches them how to succeed at it. It therefore disposes them toward liberty but steers them away from revolutions.

In a revolution, owners of movable property have more to fear than anyone else. On the one hand, their property is often easy to seize; on the other, it can disappear completely at any moment — which is less of a worry for landowners who, even while losing the income from their land, can at least hope to keep the land itself through all the upheavals. So we see that the former are far more frightened than the latter at the prospect of revolutionary movements.

Peoples are therefore less disposed to revolution as movable property multiplies and diversifies among them, and as the number of those who possess it grows.

Whatever profession people embrace, moreover, and whatever kind of property they enjoy, one trait is common to all.

No one is fully satisfied with their present fortune, and all strive every day, by a thousand different means, to increase it. Consider any of them at any point in their lives, and you will find them preoccupied with some new plan whose object is to improve their well-being. Do not talk to them about the interests and rights of the human race; that small domestic project absorbs all their thoughts for the moment and makes them wish to postpone public disturbances to another time.

This not only prevents them from making revolutions but deters them from wanting to. Violent political passions have little hold on people who have thus attached their entire soul to the pursuit of well-being. The passion they bring to small affairs calms them about great ones.

It is true that from time to time, enterprising and ambitious citizens arise in democratic societies whose immense desires cannot be satisfied by following the common path. These people love revolutions and call for them; but they have great difficulty bringing them about without the aid of extraordinary events.

You cannot fight with advantage against the spirit of your time and your country. However powerful a man may be, he has a hard time getting his contemporaries to share feelings and ideas that run against the whole current of their desires and sentiments. One must not believe, therefore, that once equality of conditions — having become an old and uncontested fact — has stamped its character on the culture, people will let themselves be easily led into danger by a reckless leader or a bold innovator.

It is not that they resist him openly, through clever stratagems, or even by a premeditated decision to resist. They do not fight him with energy; they even applaud him sometimes. But they do not follow him. Against his passion, they quietly set their inertia; against his revolutionary instincts, their conservative interests; their stay-at-home tastes against his adventurous passions; their common sense against the flights of his genius; their prose against his poetry. He rouses them for a moment with a thousand efforts, but soon they slip away from him and, as though pulled down by their own weight, they fall back. He exhausts himself trying to animate this indifferent and distracted crowd, and he finds himself at last reduced to impotence — not because he has been defeated, but because he is alone.

I do not claim that people living in democratic societies are naturally immobile. On the contrary, I believe that an eternal movement reigns within such a society, and that no one there knows rest. But I believe that people move between certain limits that they rarely exceed. They vary, alter, or renew secondary things every day; they take great care not to touch the fundamental ones. They love change, but they dread revolutions.

Although Americans are constantly modifying or repealing some of their laws, they are far from showing revolutionary passions. It is easy to see — from the speed with which they stop and calm down when public agitation starts to become threatening, at the very moment when passions seem most excited — that they dread revolution as the greatest of misfortunes, and that each of them is inwardly resolved to make great sacrifices to avoid one. There is no country in the world where the feeling for property is more active and more anxious than in the United States, and where the majority shows less inclination toward doctrines that threaten to alter the constitution of property in any way.

I have often observed that theories that are revolutionary in their nature — in that they can only be realized through a complete and sometimes sudden change in the state of property and persons — are infinitely less popular in the United States than in the great monarchies of Europe. If a few people profess them, the mass rejects them with a kind of instinctive horror.

I am not afraid to say that most of the maxims commonly called "democratic" in France would be outlawed by the democracy of the United States. This is easily understood. In America, they have democratic ideas and passions; in Europe, we still have revolutionary ideas and passions.

If America ever experiences great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of Black people on the soil of the United States — which is to say that it will not be equality of conditions but, on the contrary, their inequality that will produce them.

When conditions are equal, each person willingly isolates himself and forgets the public. If the legislators of democratic peoples did not try to correct this dangerous tendency — or even encouraged it, on the theory that it diverts citizens from political passions and thereby from revolutions — they might in the end produce the very evil they seek to avoid. A moment might come when the disorderly passions of a few, aided by the unintelligent selfishness and pusillanimity of the greater number, would force the social body to undergo strange upheavals.

In democratic societies, it is generally only small minorities that desire revolutions; but minorities can sometimes bring them about.

I am not saying, then, that democratic nations are safe from revolutions. I am saying only that the social conditions of these nations do not lead them toward revolution but rather push them away from it. Democratic peoples, left to themselves, do not easily embark on great adventures. They are drawn into revolutions only without knowing it. They sometimes endure them, but they do not make them. And I will add that when they have been allowed to acquire education and experience, they do not let them happen either.

I know well that in this matter, public institutions themselves can do a great deal: they favor or constrain the instincts that arise from the social order. I am therefore not arguing, let me repeat, that a people is safe from revolutions simply because conditions are equal within it. But I believe that, whatever the institutions of such a people, great revolutions will always be infinitely less violent and rarer than is generally supposed; and I can easily foresee a political state that, combined with equality, would make society more static than it has ever been in our part of the West.

What I have just said about facts applies in part to ideas.

Two things are surprising in the United States: the great mobility of most human actions, and the singular fixity of certain principles. People move constantly; the human mind seems almost motionless.

Once an opinion has spread across American soil and taken root, you would think no power on earth could uproot it. In the United States, the general doctrines of religion, philosophy, morality, and even politics do not change — or at least they are modified only through a hidden and often imperceptible process. Even the crudest prejudices are effaced only with an inconceivable slowness, amid the thousandfold repeated friction of things and people.

I hear it said that it is in the nature and habits of democracies to constantly change their feelings and thoughts. That may be true of small democratic nations, like those of antiquity that could be gathered entirely in a public square and then whipped into a frenzy by an orator. I have seen nothing of the sort in the great democratic people that occupies the opposite shores of our ocean. What struck me in the United States was how difficult it is to dislodge the majority from an idea it has adopted, or to detach it from a man it has embraced. Neither writing nor speeches can easily accomplish this; only experience succeeds — and sometimes it must be repeated.

This is surprising at first glance; a closer look explains it.

I do not believe it is as easy as people imagine to uproot the prejudices of a democratic people, to change its beliefs, to substitute new religious, philosophical, political, and moral principles for those that have once been established — in a word, to produce great and frequent revolutions in its ideas. It is not that the human mind is idle there; it is constantly in motion. But it exercises itself more in endlessly varying the consequences of known principles and discovering new ones than in searching for new principles. It turns nimbly on itself rather than leaping forward in a rapid and direct effort. It gradually extends its sphere through small, continuous, and rapid movements; it does not suddenly shift it.

People equal in rights, in education, in fortune — in a word, people of similar condition — necessarily have needs, habits, and tastes that are not very different. Since they see things from the same angle, their minds naturally incline toward similar ideas. And though each of them may diverge from his contemporaries and fashion beliefs of his own, they all end up, without knowing it and without wanting it, converging on a certain number of shared opinions.

The more closely I examine the effects of equality on the mind, the more I am convinced that the intellectual anarchy we are witnessing is not, as many suppose, the natural state of democratic peoples. I believe it should rather be considered a peculiar accident of their youth — one that appears only during the transitional period when people have already broken the old bonds that attached them to one another but still differ enormously in origin, education, and customs. So that, having retained very diverse ideas, instincts, and tastes, nothing any longer prevents them from displaying them. The leading opinions of people become alike as conditions come to resemble one another. This seems to me the general and permanent fact; everything else is incidental and fleeting.

I believe it will rarely happen, within a democratic society, that someone conceives all at once a system of ideas very far removed from the one adopted by his contemporaries. And if such an innovator did appear, I imagine he would first have great difficulty getting a hearing, and even greater difficulty getting people to believe him.

When conditions are nearly alike, a person does not let himself be easily persuaded by another. Since they all see one another up close, have learned the same things, and lead the same life, they are not naturally disposed to take one of their own as a guide and follow him blindly. You do not easily believe your fellow or your equal on their word alone.

It is not only that confidence in the intelligence of certain individuals weakens in democratic nations, as I said elsewhere; the general idea that any person whatsoever could achieve intellectual superiority over all others is itself soon obscured.

As people come to resemble one another more, the dogma of the equality of minds gradually insinuates itself into their beliefs, and it becomes harder for any innovator, whoever he may be, to acquire and exercise great power over the minds of a people. In such societies, sudden intellectual revolutions are therefore rare. For if we look at the history of the world, we see that it is much less the force of an argument than the authority of a name that has produced the great and rapid changes in human opinion.

Note, moreover, that since people in democratic societies are not bound to one another by any tie, each of them must be individually convinced. Whereas in aristocratic societies, it is enough to be able to influence the minds of a few; all the others follow. If Luther had lived in a century of equality and had not had lords and princes for his audience, he might have found it much harder to change the face of Europe.

If I were to ask which social condition is most favorable to the great revolutions of the mind, I would find that it lies somewhere between complete equality of all citizens and the absolute separation of classes. Under a caste system, generations succeed one another without people changing place; some expect nothing more, and others hope for nothing better. The imagination falls asleep amid this universal silence and immobility, and the very idea of movement no longer occurs to the human mind. When classes have been abolished and conditions have become nearly equal, all people are in constant motion, but each of them is isolated, independent, and weak. This latter state differs enormously from the former; yet it resembles it in one respect: great revolutions of the human mind are very rare in it as well. But between these two extremes of the history of nations, there is an intermediate age — a glorious and troubled era — when conditions are no longer fixed enough for the mind to slumber, and yet unequal enough for people to exercise very great power over one another's thinking, and for some to be able to modify the beliefs of all. It is then that powerful reformers arise and that new ideas suddenly change the face of the world.

It is not that people in democracies are naturally very convinced of the certainty of their opinions or very firm in their beliefs. They often have doubts that no one, in their eyes, can resolve. It sometimes happens in such times that the human mind would willingly change its position; but since nothing pushes it powerfully or guides it, it oscillates on itself and does not move.

Even when you have won the confidence of a democratic people, getting its attention is still a great challenge. It is very difficult to make yourself heard by people living in democracies when you are not talking to them about themselves. They do not listen to what is being said because they are always deeply preoccupied with what they are doing.

Indeed, there are few idle people in democratic nations. Life there is spent amid movement and noise, and people are so busy acting that they have little time left to think. What I want to especially note is that not only are they occupied, but their occupations excite them. They are perpetually in action, and each of their actions absorbs their soul: the fire they bring to their affairs prevents them from catching fire over ideas.

I think it is very difficult to excite the enthusiasm of a democratic people for any theory that does not have a visible, direct, and immediate connection to the daily practice of their lives. Such a people does not easily abandon its old beliefs. For it is enthusiasm that propels the human mind off the beaten path and that produces great intellectual revolutions as well as great political ones.

So democratic peoples have neither the leisure nor the taste for pursuing new opinions. Even when they come to doubt the opinions they hold, they keep them nonetheless — because it would take too much time and effort to change them. They maintain their beliefs not as certain but as established.

There are still other and more powerful reasons that resist any great change in the doctrines of a democratic people. I already indicated this at the beginning of this book.

If, within such a people, individual influences are weak and almost nonexistent, the power exercised by the mass over each individual's mind is very great. I have given the reasons elsewhere. What I want to say at this moment is that it would be wrong to believe this depends solely on the form of government, and that the majority would lose its intellectual empire along with its political power.

In aristocracies, people often have a grandeur and a strength that are their own. When they find themselves at odds with the majority of their fellows, they withdraw into themselves, sustain themselves, and console themselves. This is not the case among democratic peoples. For them, public favor seems as necessary as the air they breathe, and to be at odds with the mass is, so to speak, not to live. The majority does not need laws to bend those who do not think as it does. Its disapproval is enough. The feeling of their isolation and their powerlessness immediately crushes and overwhelms them.

Whenever conditions are equal, the general opinion weighs with immense force on each individual's mind. It envelops, directs, and oppresses it. This has much more to do with the very constitution of society than with its political laws. The more people resemble one another, the weaker each feels in the face of all. Finding nothing that raises him far above them or distinguishes him from them, he distrusts himself the moment they oppose him. Not only does he doubt his strength, but he comes to doubt his right, and he is very close to admitting he is wrong when the majority says so. The majority does not need to force him; it convinces him.

However you organize and balance the powers of a democratic society, it will therefore always be very difficult to believe what the mass rejects, and to profess what it condemns.

This marvelously favors the stability of beliefs.

When an opinion has taken hold among a democratic people and established itself in the minds of the majority, it then sustains and perpetuates itself without effort, because no one attacks it. Those who initially rejected it as false eventually accept it as general, and those who continue to oppose it in their hearts show nothing of it — taking care not to engage in a dangerous and useless struggle.

It is true that when the majority of a democratic people changes its opinion, it can produce, at will, strange and sudden revolutions in the world of ideas. But it is very difficult for its opinion to change, and almost as difficult to determine that it has changed.

It sometimes happens that time, events, or the solitary individual effort of minds, gradually shakes or destroys a belief without any outward sign. It is not openly challenged. People do not join together to make war on it. Its followers leave it one by one and without fanfare; but each day some abandon it, until at last it is shared by only a small number.

In this state, it still reigns.

Since its enemies continue to keep quiet, or communicate their thoughts only in secret, they themselves go a long time without being able to tell that a great revolution has taken place. In their uncertainty, they remain motionless. They watch and keep silent. The majority no longer believes, but it still looks as though it believes, and this empty phantom of a public opinion is enough to freeze the innovators and keep them in silence and respect.

We live at an era that has seen the most rapid changes take place in the minds of men. Yet it may well be that the principal opinions of humanity will soon become more stable than they have been in the preceding centuries of our history. That time has not yet come, but perhaps it is approaching.

The more closely I examine the natural needs and instincts of democratic peoples, the more I am persuaded that if equality were ever established in a general and permanent way throughout the world, great intellectual and political revolutions would become much more difficult and rarer than is generally supposed.

Because people in democracies always seem excited, uncertain, breathless, ready to change their will and their location, people imagine they are about to suddenly abolish their laws, adopt new beliefs, and embrace new customs. They do not consider that while equality pushes people toward change, it also creates interests and tastes that need stability in order to be satisfied. It drives them forward and at the same time holds them back; it spurs them on and ties them to the ground; it inflames their desires and limits their powers.

This is not obvious at first: the passions that push citizens apart in a democracy make themselves known on their own. But you do not see at first glance the hidden force that holds them together and brings them back.

Dare I say it amid the ruins that surround me? What I most fear for the generations to come is not revolutions.

If citizens continue to shut themselves up more and more tightly within the circle of small domestic interests, and to agitate restlessly within it, there is reason to fear that they may end up becoming virtually inaccessible to those great and powerful public emotions that disturb peoples but that also develop and renew them. When I see property becoming so mobile, and the love of property so anxious and so passionate, I cannot help fearing that people may reach the point of regarding every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a troublesome disturbance, every social advance as a first step toward revolution — and that they may refuse to move at all for fear of being swept away. I tremble — I confess it — that they may at last let themselves be so thoroughly possessed by a cowardly love of present pleasures that the interest of their own future and that of their descendants will disappear, and that they would rather follow the gentle current of their destiny than make, when needed, a sudden and energetic effort to set it right.

People believe that new societies are going to change their face every day, and I am afraid that they will end up being too unchangingly fixed in the same institutions, the same prejudices, the same customs — so that the human race will stop and confine itself; that the mind will fold and refold eternally upon itself without producing new ideas; that humanity will exhaust itself in small, solitary, and sterile movements; and that, for all its ceaseless agitation, it will advance no more.

CHAPTER XXII.

Why Democratic Peoples Naturally Desire Peace, and Democratic Armies Naturally Desire War.

The same interests, the same fears, the same passions that steer democratic peoples away from revolutions also steer them away from war: the military spirit and the revolutionary spirit weaken together, and for the same reasons.

The ever-growing number of property owners who want peace, the expansion of movable wealth that war devours so quickly, the gentleness of customs, the softness of heart, that inclination toward pity that equality inspires, the coolness of reason that makes people less susceptible to the poetic and violent emotions born on the battlefield — all these forces combine to extinguish the military spirit.

I think we can take it as a general and constant rule that among civilized peoples, warlike passions will become rarer and less intense as social conditions grow more equal.

War, however, is an accident to which all peoples are subject — democratic peoples just as much as any other. No matter how much these nations love peace, they must still be ready to repel war or, in other words, they must have an army.

Fortune, which has done such remarkable things for the inhabitants of the United States, placed them in the middle of a wilderness where they have, so to speak, no neighbors. A few thousand soldiers are enough for them, but this is an American fact, not a democratic one.

Equality of social conditions, and the customs and institutions that flow from it, do not excuse a democratic people from the obligation of maintaining armies — and those armies always exercise a very great influence on the nation's fate. It is therefore extremely important to examine the natural instincts of the people who make them up.

In aristocratic nations — especially those where birth alone determines rank — the inequality that exists in the nation is replicated in the army. The officer is the nobleman, the soldier is the serf. One is destined to command, the other to obey. In aristocratic armies, therefore, the soldier's ambition is kept within very narrow bounds.

And the ambition of the officers is not unlimited either.

An aristocratic body does not merely belong to a hierarchy; it always contains a hierarchy within itself. Its members are placed one beneath another in a fixed order that never changes. One man is naturally called by birth to command a regiment, another a company. Having reached the outer limits of their expectations, they stop of their own accord and consider themselves satisfied with their lot.

There is, moreover, a powerful reason that, in aristocracies, dampens the officer's desire for advancement.

In aristocratic nations, the officer holds a high rank in society independently of his rank in the army. The first is almost always, in his eyes, merely an accessory to the second. The nobleman who takes up a military career is driven less by ambition than by a kind of duty that his birth imposes on him. He joins the army to put the idle years of his youth to honorable use, and to bring home to his household and his peers a few respectable memories of military life. But his main goal is not to acquire wealth, prestige, and power — since he already possesses these advantages on his own, and enjoys them without ever leaving home.

In democratic armies, every soldier can become an officer, which universalizes the desire for advancement and extends the limits of military ambition to near infinity.

For his part, the officer sees nothing that naturally and necessarily stops him at one rank rather than another, and every rank has immense value in his eyes, because his standing in society depends almost entirely on his standing in the army.

In democratic nations, the officer often has nothing but his pay and can expect no recognition beyond his military honors. Every time he changes positions, he therefore changes his fortune; in a sense, he becomes a different man. What was an accessory to existence in aristocratic armies has become the main thing, the whole thing, existence itself.

Under the old French monarchy, officers were addressed only by their title of nobility. Today, they are addressed only by their military rank. This small change in the forms of language is enough to show that a great revolution has taken place in the structure of both society and the army.

Within democratic armies, the desire for advancement is almost universal. It is ardent, stubborn, and relentless. It feeds on every other desire and only dies with life itself. Now, it is easy to see that of all the armies in the world, the ones where advancement must be slowest in peacetime are democratic armies. The number of ranks is naturally limited, the number of competitors is nearly countless, and the inflexible law of equality weighs on everyone — so no one can advance quickly, and many cannot move at all. The need for advancement is thus greater, and the ability to advance is less, than anywhere else.

Every ambitious person in a democratic army therefore wants war with a passion, because war clears out positions and finally makes it possible to violate the rule of seniority — the only natural privilege in a democracy.

And so we arrive at this striking paradox: of all armies, the ones that most ardently desire war are democratic armies, and of all peoples, the ones that most love peace are democratic peoples. And what makes this truly extraordinary is that equality produces both of these opposite effects at the same time.

Citizens, being equal, develop every day the desire and discover the possibility of improving their condition and increasing their well-being. This disposes them to love peace, which makes industry prosper and lets everyone quietly pursue their small enterprises. On the other hand, this same equality, by increasing the value of military honors in the eyes of those who follow the military career and by making those honors accessible to all, sets soldiers dreaming of the battlefield. On both sides, the restlessness of the heart is the same, the appetite for pleasure is equally insatiable, the ambition is equal — only the means of satisfying it differs.

These opposing inclinations of the nation and the army put democratic societies at serious risk.

When the military spirit abandons a people, the military career immediately ceases to be honored, and soldiers fall to the lowest rank of public servants. They are little esteemed and no longer understood. Then the opposite of what happens in aristocratic centuries occurs. It is no longer the leading citizens who enter the army, but the lowest. People turn to military ambition only when no other is available. This creates a vicious circle that is hard to break. The elite of the nation avoids the military career because it is not honored, and it is not honored because the elite no longer enters it.

It should come as no surprise, then, that democratic armies are often restless, grumbling, and dissatisfied with their lot — even though physical conditions are generally much more comfortable and discipline less rigid than in any other army. The soldier feels he occupies an inferior position, and his wounded pride drives him to crave either war, which would make him necessary, or revolution, through which he hopes to win by force of arms the political influence and personal standing that are denied him.

The composition of democratic armies makes this last danger especially grave.

In a democratic society, nearly every citizen has property to protect. But democratic armies are led, as a rule, by men with nothing. Most of them have little to lose from civil unrest. The general population naturally fears revolutions far more than in aristocratic centuries, but the leaders of the army fear them far less.

Moreover, since in democratic nations — as I have said before — the wealthiest, most educated, and most capable citizens rarely enter the military career, the army as a whole ends up forming a little nation within a nation, where intelligence is less developed and habits are rougher than in the larger society. And this small, uncivilized nation possesses the weapons, and it alone knows how to use them.

What actually increases the danger that the army's militant and turbulent spirit poses to democratic peoples is the peaceful temperament of the citizens. There is nothing as dangerous as an army in the midst of a nation that is not warlike. The citizens' excessive love of tranquility puts the constitution at the mercy of the soldiers every day.

One can therefore say, as a general rule, that while democratic peoples are naturally drawn toward peace by their interests and instincts, they are constantly pulled toward war and revolution by their armies.

Military revolutions, which are almost never to be feared in aristocracies, are always a threat in democratic nations. These dangers must be ranked among the most formidable of all the perils their future holds. Statesmen must apply their attention to this problem relentlessly, searching for a remedy.

When a nation feels itself internally tormented by its army's restless ambition, the first thought that occurs is to give this troublesome ambition an outlet: war.

I have no wish to speak ill of war. War almost always broadens a people's thinking and elevates its heart. There are cases where it alone can arrest the excessive development of certain tendencies that equality naturally breeds, and where it must be considered a necessary cure for certain deep-seated diseases to which democratic societies are prone.

War has great advantages, but we must not flatter ourselves that it diminishes the danger I have just described. It merely suspends it, and the danger returns more terrible afterward — for the army tolerates peace far less patiently after having tasted war. War would only be a remedy for a nation that always desired glory.

I foresee that every warlike prince who rises to power within a great democratic nation will find it easier to win victories with his army than to make it live in peace after the victory. There are two things that a democratic people will always have great difficulty doing: starting a war and ending one.

If, moreover, war has particular advantages for democratic peoples, it also exposes them to certain dangers that aristocracies do not have to fear to the same degree. I will cite only two.

While war satisfies the army, it constrains and often drives to despair the countless citizens whose small passions need peace every day to find satisfaction. War therefore risks creating, in another form, the very disorder it was supposed to prevent.

No prolonged war in a democratic country fails to put liberty at serious risk. It is not that we should fear, exactly, that victorious generals will seize sovereign power by force after each victory, in the manner of Sulla or Caesar. The danger is of a different kind. War does not always hand democratic peoples over to military government, but it invariably and immensely expands the powers of the civilian government. It almost necessarily concentrates in the hands of the state the direction of all people and the use of all things. If it does not lead to despotism all at once through violence, it leads there gently through habits.

Anyone who seeks to destroy liberty within a democratic nation should know that the surest and shortest path to that end is war. That is the first axiom of the science.

One remedy seems to present itself naturally when the ambition of officers and soldiers becomes threatening: increase the number of positions to fill by expanding the army. This relieves the present pain but mortgages the future even more.

Expanding the army can produce a lasting effect in an aristocratic society, because in such societies, military ambition is limited to a single class of people and stops, for each person, at a certain fixed point — so it is possible to more or less satisfy everyone who feels it.

But in a democratic nation, nothing is gained by expanding the army, because the number of ambitious people always grows in exactly the same proportion as the army itself. Those whose demands you satisfied by creating new positions are immediately replaced by a new crowd you cannot satisfy, and the first group itself soon starts complaining again — for the same restlessness of mind that prevails among the citizens of a democracy shows up in the army. What people want is not to reach a certain rank but to keep advancing. If their desires are not vast, they are endlessly renewed. A democratic people that expands its army therefore only softens military ambition for a moment; soon it becomes more threatening, because those who feel it are more numerous.

For my part, I believe that a restless and turbulent spirit is a defect inherent in the very constitution of democratic armies, and we must give up trying to cure it. Lawmakers in democracies should not flatter themselves that they can find a military organization that has the power, in and of itself, to calm and contain soldiers. They would exhaust themselves in futile efforts before achieving it.

The remedy for the army's vices is not to be found in the army, but in the country.

Democratic peoples naturally fear disorder and despotism. The task is simply to transform these instincts into thoughtful, intelligent, and stable convictions. When citizens have finally learned to make peaceful and productive use of liberty and have felt its blessings; when they have developed a robust love of order and have voluntarily submitted to the rule of law — these same citizens, upon entering the military career, bring with them, unconsciously and even against their will, these habits and values. The general spirit of the nation, penetrating the particular spirit of the army, tempers the opinions and desires that military life breeds — or, through the all-powerful force of public opinion, it suppresses them. Give me educated, disciplined, steady, and free citizens, and you will have disciplined and obedient soldiers.

Any law that, in seeking to suppress the army's turbulent spirit, tends to diminish the spirit of civil liberty in the nation or to obscure the idea of rights, would therefore work against its own purpose. It would promote the establishment of military tyranny far more than it would prevent it.

After all, and whatever one does, a large army in the midst of a democratic people will always be a great danger — and the most effective way to reduce this danger will be to reduce the army. But this is a remedy that not every nation is in a position to use.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Which Class in Democratic Armies Is the Most Warlike and the Most Revolutionary.

It is in the nature of a democratic army to be very large relative to the population that supplies it — I will explain why later.

On the other hand, people living in democratic times rarely choose the military career voluntarily.

Democratic peoples are therefore soon forced to give up voluntary recruitment and turn to compulsory enlistment. The necessities of their situation compel them to adopt this approach, and one can easily predict that all of them will.

Since military service is compulsory, the burden is shared equally and without distinction among all citizens. This, too, follows necessarily from the conditions of these peoples and their ideas. The government can do more or less whatever it wants there, as long as it applies the same rules to everyone at once — it is inequality of burden, not the burden itself, that usually provokes resistance.

Now, since military service is shared by all citizens, it obviously follows that each of them serves under the flag for only a few years.

It is therefore in the nature of things that the soldier is only passing through the army, whereas in most aristocratic nations, military service is a trade that the soldier takes up — or has imposed on him — for life.

This has major consequences. Among the soldiers who make up a democratic army, some become attached to military life, but the great majority — brought under the flag against their will and always ready to return home — do not consider themselves seriously committed to the military career and think only of getting out.

These men do not develop the needs, and never fully share the passions, that this career breeds. They submit to their military duties, but their souls remain attached to the interests and desires that filled their civilian lives. They do not adopt the spirit of the army; rather, they bring the spirit of society into the army and keep it alive there. In democratic nations, it is the ordinary soldiers who remain the most like citizens. It is on them that national habits maintain the strongest hold and public opinion the greatest power. It is through the soldiers that one can best hope to instill in a democratic army the love of liberty and the respect for rights that have been inspired in the people themselves. The opposite is true in aristocratic nations, where soldiers end up having nothing in common with their fellow citizens and living among them like strangers — and often like enemies.

In aristocratic armies, the conservative element is the officer, because the officer alone has maintained close ties with civil society and never abandons the intention of eventually returning to take his place in it. In democratic armies, it is the ordinary soldier — and for entirely similar reasons.

It often happens, on the contrary, that in these same democratic armies, the officer develops tastes and desires entirely separate from those of the nation. This makes sense.

In democratic nations, a man who becomes an officer breaks all the ties that bound him to civilian life. He leaves it for good, and he has no interest in going back. His true homeland is the army, since he is nothing except through the rank he holds in it. He follows the army's fortunes, rises or falls with it, and directs all his hopes toward it alone. Since the officer's needs are sharply different from those of the country, he may passionately desire war or work toward a revolution at the very moment the nation most yearns for stability and peace.

There are, however, forces that temper his warlike and restless temperament. While ambition is universal and constant in democratic nations, we have seen that it is rarely grand. A man who has risen from the lower classes of society through the lower ranks of the army to become an officer has already taken an immense step. He has gained a foothold in a sphere above the one he occupied in civilian life, and has acquired rights that most democratic nations will always consider inalienable.

The officer's position is, in fact, far more secure in democratic nations than in others. The less the officer is in his own right, the more comparatively valuable his rank becomes, and the more the lawmaker finds it just and necessary to guarantee his enjoyment of it.

He stops willingly after this great effort and thinks about enjoying his conquest. The fear of jeopardizing what he already has begins to soften in his heart the desire to acquire what he does not. Having cleared the first and greatest obstacle blocking his progress, he resigns himself with less impatience to the slowness of his advance. This cooling of ambition grows as he rises in rank and finds more to lose in the gambles of fortune. If I am not mistaken, the least warlike and least revolutionary part of a democratic army will always be its leadership.

What I have just said about officers and soldiers does not apply to a large class that, in every army, occupies the middle ground between them: I am talking about the non-commissioned officers.

This class of non-commissioned officers, which had not appeared on the stage of history before the present century, is destined from now on, I believe, to play a major role.

Like the officer, the non-commissioned officer has mentally severed all ties binding him to civilian life. Like the officer, he has made the military his career, and even more than the officer, perhaps, he has directed all his desires in this single direction. But he has not yet reached, like the officer, a high and stable point where he can pause and breathe easy while waiting to climb higher.

By the very nature of his duties — which cannot change — the non-commissioned officer is condemned to lead an obscure, narrow, uncomfortable, and precarious existence. He still sees only the dangers of military life. He knows nothing of it but its deprivations and its obedience — harder to bear than the dangers themselves. He suffers all the more from his present miseries because he knows that the structure of both society and the army allows him to escape them. From one day to the next, he can become an officer. Then he commands; he has honors, independence, rights, and pleasures. Not only does this object of his hopes seem immense to him, but until he grasps it, he is never sure of reaching it. His rank has nothing irrevocable about it; he is entirely at the mercy of his superiors every day. The requirements of discipline make it imperative that this be so. A minor infraction, a caprice, can always cost him in an instant the fruit of several years of labor and effort. Until he reaches the rank he covets, he has accomplished nothing. Only there does he truly seem to enter his career. In a man constantly goaded this way by his youth, his needs, his passions, the spirit of his times, his hopes, and his fears, a desperate ambition cannot fail to ignite.

The non-commissioned officer therefore wants war — wants it always and at any price. And if war is denied him, he wants revolutions, which suspend the authority of the rules and in the midst of which he hopes, amid the confusion and political passions, to drive out his officer and take his place. And it is not impossible that he will actually start them, because he wields great influence over the soldiers through their shared origins and habits, even though he differs from them greatly in passions and desires.

It would be wrong to think that these different dispositions of the officer, the non-commissioned officer, and the soldier belong to a particular time or country. They will appear in every era and in every democratic nation.

In every democratic army, it will always be the non-commissioned officer who least represents the country's peaceful and orderly spirit, and the ordinary soldier who best represents it. The soldier will bring into the military career the strength or the weakness of national culture. He will present a faithful image of the nation. If the nation is ignorant and weak, he will let himself be dragged into disorder by his leaders, unknowingly or against his will. If it is educated and energetic, he himself will keep them in line.

CHAPTER XXIV.

What Makes Democratic Armies Weaker Than Other Armies at the Start of a Campaign, and More Formidable When the War Goes On.

Every army that enters a campaign after a long peace risks being defeated; every army that has been at war for a long time has a good chance of winning. This truth applies especially to democratic armies.

In aristocracies, the military profession is a privileged career and is honored even in peacetime. Men of great talent, great education, and great ambition embrace it. The army is, in every respect, on the same level as the nation — and often surpasses it.

We have seen how, by contrast, in democratic nations, the elite of the country gradually drifts away from the military career to seek prestige, power, and above all wealth by other paths. After a long peace — and in democratic times, peace tends to be long — the army is always inferior to the country itself. This is the state in which war finds it, and until war has transformed it, there is danger for both the country and the army.

I have shown how, in democratic armies during peacetime, the rule of seniority is the supreme and inflexible law of advancement. This does not stem only, as I have said, from the structure of these armies, but from the very structure of the people, and it will always be so.

Moreover, since in these nations the officer is someone in the country only through his military position, and draws all his prestige and comfort from it, he does not retire or get removed from the army until the very end of his life.

These two causes combine to produce the result that when a democratic people finally takes up arms after a long rest, all the leaders of its army turn out to be old men. I am speaking not only of the generals but of the junior officers, most of whom have either stayed in place or advanced only step by step. If you look at a democratic army after a long peace, you see with surprise that all the soldiers are close to childhood and all the leaders are in decline — so that the former lack experience and the latter lack vigor.

This is a major cause of defeat, for the first condition for conducting war well is to be young. I would not have dared to say this if the greatest captain of modern times had not said it first.

These two causes do not operate the same way in aristocratic armies.

Since advancement there depends on birth far more than on seniority, there are always, at every rank, a certain number of young men who bring to war all the fresh energy of body and mind.

Moreover, since men who pursue military honors in an aristocratic nation have a secure position in civilian society, they rarely wait for the approach of old age to overtake them in the army. After devoting the most vigorous years of their youth to the military career, they retire of their own accord and go spend the rest of their mature years at home.

A long peace does not just fill democratic armies with old officers; it also gives all the officers habits of body and mind that make them poorly suited for war. A man who has lived for a long time in the peaceful and tepid atmosphere of democratic customs adapts only with difficulty to the harsh labors and austere demands that war imposes. If he does not completely lose the taste for arms, he at least acquires ways of living that prevent him from winning.

In aristocratic nations, the softness of civilian life exerts less influence on military habits, because in these nations it is the aristocracy that leads the army. And an aristocracy, however steeped it may be in luxury, always has several passions besides the desire for comfort, and it will readily sacrifice its comfort for the moment to better satisfy those other passions.

I have shown how, in democratic armies during peacetime, the slowness of advancement is extreme. Officers endure this state of things with impatience at first; they fret, grow anxious, and despair. But eventually most of them resign themselves. Those with the most ambition and resources leave the army. The rest, finally adjusting their tastes and desires to the modesty of their situation, end up viewing military service from a civilian perspective. What they value most is the comfort and stability that come with it. On the security of this small fortune they build their entire picture of the future, and they ask only to enjoy it in peace.

Thus, not only does a long peace fill democratic armies with old officers, but it often gives the instincts of old men even to those who are still in the prime of life.

I have also shown how, in democratic nations during peacetime, the military career is little honored and poorly followed.

This public disfavor weighs very heavily on the army's spirit. Souls are bent under it, as it were, and when war finally comes, they cannot recover their elasticity and vigor in an instant.

No similar cause of moral weakening exists in aristocratic armies. Officers there never find themselves diminished in their own eyes or in the eyes of their peers, because their greatness rests on who they are in themselves, independent of their military rank.

Even if peace affected both armies in the same way, the results would still be different.

When the officers of an aristocratic army have lost their warlike spirit and their desire to advance through arms, they still retain a certain respect for the honor of their order and an old habit of being first and setting the example. But when the officers of a democratic army no longer love war and have lost their military ambition, nothing remains.

I therefore believe that a democratic people going to war after a long peace runs a much greater risk of defeat than any other. But it must not let itself be easily discouraged by setbacks, for its army's chances improve with the very length of the war.

When a prolonged war has finally torn all citizens from their peaceful occupations and wrecked their small enterprises, the same passions that made them value peace so highly turn toward arms. War, after destroying every industry, becomes itself the one great industry, and it is toward war alone that the ardent and ambitious desires born of equality are directed from every quarter. This is why these same democratic nations that are so hard to drag onto the battlefield sometimes do prodigious things once you have finally managed to put weapons in their hands.

As war increasingly draws all eyes to the army, as people see it create great reputations and great fortunes in a short time, the elite of the nation takes up the military career. All the naturally enterprising, proud, and warlike spirits produced not just by the aristocracy but by the entire country are drawn in this direction.

With the number of competitors for military honors being immense, and war ruthlessly pushing each person to his proper place, great generals always end up emerging. A long war does for a democratic army what a revolution does for the people themselves: it breaks the rules and brings all extraordinary individuals to the surface. Officers whose bodies and minds have grown old in peace are swept aside, retire, or die. In their place presses a crowd of young men whom war has already hardened and whose desires it has expanded and inflamed. These men want to grow, at any cost, and to keep growing. After them come others with the same passions and the same desires, and after those, still others — with no limit but the size of the army itself. Equality gives everyone ambition, and death takes care of providing every ambition with its opportunity. Death constantly opens the ranks, clears out positions, closes careers and opens them again.

There is, moreover, a hidden connection between military customs and democratic customs that war reveals.

The people of democracies naturally have a passionate desire to acquire the things they covet quickly and to enjoy them easily. Most of them worship chance and fear death far less than effort. This is the spirit in which they pursue commerce and industry, and this same spirit, carried by them onto the battlefield, leads them to risk their lives willingly in order to secure, in one stroke, the rewards of victory. No form of greatness satisfies the imagination of a democratic people more than military greatness — a brilliant and sudden greatness won without toil, by risking nothing but one's life.

So while self-interest and personal taste keep the citizens of a democracy away from war, the habits of their souls prepare them to wage it well. They easily become good soldiers once you can tear them away from their business and their comfort.

If peace is especially harmful to democratic armies, war therefore gives them advantages that other armies never enjoy — and these advantages, though barely noticeable at first, cannot fail in the long run to give them victory.

An aristocratic people fighting a democratic nation that fails to ruin it in the first campaigns always runs a great risk of being defeated by it.

CHAPTER XXV.

On Discipline in Democratic Armies.

It is a widespread opinion, especially among aristocratic peoples, that the great social equality prevailing in democracies eventually makes the soldier independent of the officer, and thus destroys the bond of discipline.

This is an error. There are in fact two kinds of discipline that should not be confused.

When the officer is the nobleman and the soldier the serf; when one is rich and the other poor; when the first is educated and strong and the second ignorant and weak — it is easy to establish between these two men the tightest possible bond of obedience. The soldier is molded to military discipline before he even enters the army, so to speak — or rather, military discipline is simply a refinement of social servitude. In aristocratic armies, the soldier comes fairly easily to a state of being insensible to everything except the orders of his superiors. He acts without thinking, triumphs without passion, and dies without complaint. In this state he is no longer a man, but he is still a very formidable animal trained for war.

Democratic peoples should give up any hope of ever obtaining from their soldiers the blind, meticulous, resigned, and perfectly uniform obedience that aristocratic peoples impose on theirs without difficulty. The state of their society does not prepare them for it, and they would risk losing their natural advantages by trying to acquire that one artificially. In democratic nations, military discipline should not try to annihilate the free spirit of men; it can only aspire to direct it. The obedience it creates is less exact, but more spirited and more intelligent. It is rooted in the will of the person who obeys; it rests not merely on instinct but on reason. And so it often tightens of its own accord in proportion to the danger that makes it necessary. The discipline of an aristocratic army tends to slacken in war, because that discipline is founded on habits, and war disrupts those habits. The discipline of a democratic army, on the contrary, grows firmer in the face of the enemy, because each soldier then sees very clearly that he must be silent and obey in order to win.

The peoples who have accomplished the greatest things through war have known no other discipline than the one I am describing. Among the ancients, only free men and citizens were admitted into the armies, and these men differed little from one another and were accustomed to treating each other as equals. In this sense, one can say that the armies of antiquity were democratic, even though they emerged from the heart of an aristocracy. And so there reigned in these armies a kind of familiar brotherhood between the officer and the soldier. You become convinced of this by reading Plutarch's lives of the great captains. The soldiers are constantly speaking, quite freely, to their generals, and the generals listen willingly to what the soldiers have to say and respond to them. It was through words and examples, far more than through coercion and punishment, that they led them. They were companions as much as commanders.

I do not know whether Greek and Roman soldiers ever perfected the small details of military discipline to the same degree as the Russians, but that did not prevent Alexander from conquering Asia, or Rome from conquering the world.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Some Thoughts on War in Democratic Societies.

When the principle of equality develops not just within a single nation but simultaneously among several neighboring peoples — as we see happening in Europe today — the inhabitants of these various countries, despite their differences in language, customs, and laws, come to resemble each other in this: they all equally dread war and share the same love of peace.

The fear of war that European peoples display is not due solely to the progress equality has made among them; I do not think I need to point this out to the reader. Independent of this permanent cause, there are several accidental ones that are very powerful. I would cite, above all others, the extreme exhaustion that the wars of the Revolution and the Empire left behind.

In vain does ambition or anger arm the princes; a kind of universal apathy and goodwill calms them in spite of themselves and makes the sword fall from their hands. Wars become rarer.

As equality develops simultaneously in several countries, pushing the people who live in them toward industry and commerce at the same time, not only do their tastes come to resemble each other, but their interests become entangled and intertwined — so that no nation can inflict harm on the others without the damage falling back on itself, and all eventually come to regard war as a calamity nearly as great for the victor as for the vanquished.

Thus, on the one hand, it is very difficult in democratic centuries to draw peoples into fighting each other; on the other hand, it is almost impossible for any two of them to go to war in isolation. The interests of all are so interlaced, their opinions and needs so similar, that none can remain at rest while the others are in turmoil. Wars therefore become rarer, but when they do break out, they sweep across a much wider field.

Neighboring democratic peoples do not merely become similar on a few points, as I have just said — they end up resembling each other in nearly everything.

This is not solely because these peoples share the same social conditions, but because those same social conditions naturally lead people to imitate each other and blend together.

When citizens are divided into castes and classes, not only do they differ from one another, but they have neither the taste nor the desire to resemble each other. Each, on the contrary, seeks more and more to keep his own opinions and habits intact and to remain himself. The spirit of individuality is very much alive.

When a people has a democratic social order — meaning there are no longer castes or classes within it, and all citizens are roughly equal in education and wealth — the human mind moves in the opposite direction. People resemble each other, and what is more, they suffer, in a way, from not resembling each other. Far from wanting to preserve whatever still makes each of them distinctive, they ask only to lose it so they can merge into the common mass, which alone represents, in their eyes, right and power. The spirit of individuality is nearly destroyed.

In aristocratic times, even those who are naturally alike strive to create imaginary differences between themselves. In democratic times, even those who are naturally different want only to become the same and to copy each other — so powerful is the pull of humanity's general current on every individual mind.

Something similar can be observed from nation to nation. Two peoples could share the same aristocratic social order and yet remain quite distinct and very different, because the spirit of aristocracy is to individualize. But two neighboring peoples cannot share the same democratic social order without quickly adopting similar opinions and customs, because the spirit of democracy drives people to assimilate.

Now, this similarity among peoples has very important consequences for war.

When I ask myself why the Swiss Confederation of the fifteenth century made the greatest and most powerful nations of Europe tremble, while today its power is in exact proportion to its population, I find that the Swiss have become like all the people around them, and those people like the Swiss — so that numbers alone make the difference, and victory necessarily belongs to the bigger battalions. One result of the democratic revolution taking place in Europe is therefore to make numerical strength prevail on every battlefield, and to force all small nations either to merge with the large ones or at least to adopt their policies.

Since the decisive factor in victory is numbers, it follows that every nation must strive with all its might to bring as many men as possible onto the battlefield.

When it was possible to enlist a type of soldier superior to all others — like the Swiss infantry or the French knights of the sixteenth century — there was no need to raise very large armies. But this is no longer the case when all soldiers are equal in quality.

The same cause that creates this new need also provides the means to meet it. For, as I have said, when all men are alike, they are all weak. Social power is naturally much stronger in democratic nations than anywhere else. These peoples, at the same time that they feel the desire to call their entire male population to arms, also have the ability to do so — which is why, in ages of equality, armies seem to grow even as the military spirit dies out.

In these same ages, the way of waging war changes too, and for the same reasons.

Machiavelli says in The Prince that "it is far more difficult to subjugate a people led by a prince and barons than a nation governed by a prince and slaves." Let us substitute public officials for slaves, so as to offend no one, and we have a great truth highly applicable to our subject.

It is very difficult for a great aristocratic people to conquer its neighbors or be conquered by them. It cannot conquer them because it can never assemble all its forces and hold them together for long; and it cannot be conquered because the enemy finds small pockets of resistance everywhere that stop him in his tracks. I would compare war in an aristocratic country to war in mountain terrain: the defeated can always find a new position to rally in and hold firm.

The exact opposite is true of democratic nations.

These nations easily bring all their available forces onto the battlefield, and when the nation is rich and populous, it readily becomes a conqueror. But once it has been defeated and its territory invaded, it has few resources left, and if the enemy manages to seize its capital, the nation is lost. This is easily explained: since each citizen is individually very isolated and very weak, no one can defend himself or offer others a rallying point. The only strong thing in a democratic country is the state. Once the state's military strength has been destroyed with the destruction of its army, and its civil power paralyzed by the capture of its capital, the rest is nothing but a mass without order or strength, unable to fight against the organized power attacking it. I know the danger can be reduced by creating provincial liberties and, consequently, provincial centers of power — but this remedy will always be inadequate.

Not only will the population then be unable to continue the war, but there is reason to fear it will not even want to try.

According to the law of nations adopted by civilized peoples, the purpose of wars is not to seize the property of individuals but only to seize political power. Private property is destroyed only incidentally, as a means of achieving the second objective.

When an aristocratic nation is invaded after the defeat of its army, the nobles — who are also the wealthy — prefer to go on fighting individually rather than submit, because if the conqueror remained master of the country, he would strip them of their political power, which they value even more than their property. They therefore prefer combat to conquest, which is for them the greatest of misfortunes — and they easily carry the common people along with them, because the people have long been accustomed to following and obeying them, and in any case have almost nothing to risk in war.

In a nation where equality of conditions prevails, each citizen, by contrast, takes only a small share of political power, and often none at all. On the other hand, everyone is independent and has property to lose. So people fear conquest far less and war far more than in an aristocratic nation. It will always be very difficult to persuade a democratic population to take up arms once war has been brought to its own territory. This is why it is so necessary to give these peoples political rights and a political spirit that suggests to each citizen some of the interests that drive the nobles in aristocracies.

The princes and other leaders of democratic nations must remember this: only the passion and habit of liberty can effectively counter the habit and passion for comfort. I can think of nothing better prepared, in the event of defeat, for conquest than a democratic people without free institutions.

In the old days, armies went on campaign with few soldiers; they fought small battles and conducted long sieges. Now they fight great battles, and as soon as they can march freely ahead, they rush toward the capital to end the war in a single blow.

Napoleon invented this new system, they say. But it did not depend on any single man, no matter who he was, to create such a system. The way Napoleon waged war was suggested to him by the state of the society of his time, and it succeeded because it was perfectly suited to that society and because he was the first to put it into practice. Napoleon was the first to march at the head of an army straight for every capital. But it was the collapse of feudal society that had opened that road for him. One may reasonably believe that if this extraordinary man had been born three hundred years earlier, he would not have reaped the same fruits from his method — or rather, he would have had a different method entirely.

I will add only one more word on the subject of civil wars, for I fear I am trying the reader's patience.

Most of what I have said about foreign wars applies with even greater force to civil wars. People living in democratic countries do not naturally have the military spirit; they sometimes acquire it when they have been dragged onto the battlefield against their will. But to rise up en masse on their own and voluntarily expose themselves to the miseries of war — and especially civil war — is a course of action that no one in a democracy is prepared to take. Only the most adventurous citizens consent to throw themselves into such a gamble; the mass of the population stays put.

Even if the people wanted to act, they would not find it easy, for they have no long-established, well-recognized authorities to rally around, no well-known leaders to gather the discontented, organize them, and lead them, no political powers below the national power to lend effective support to resistance.

In democratic countries, the moral power of the majority is immense, and the material forces at its disposal are out of all proportion to those that can initially be assembled against it. The party that holds the seat of the majority, speaks in its name, and wields its power triumphs instantly and effortlessly over every particular resistance. It does not even give opposition time to be born; it crushes it in the germ.

Those who, in these nations, want to make a revolution by force therefore have no resource other than to seize the entire machinery of government in a surprise strike — something that can be accomplished through a coup rather than a war. For the moment a regular war breaks out, the party representing the state is almost always certain to win.

The only case in which a civil war could arise would be if the army itself split, with one part raising the banner of revolt and the other remaining loyal. An army forms a small, tightly bound, and very resilient society that can sustain itself for a time on its own. The war might be bloody, but it would not be long — for either the rebel army would attract the government to its side through a mere show of force or through its first victory, and the war would be over; or the struggle would begin in earnest, and the portion of the army not backed by the organized power of the state would quickly scatter or be destroyed.

One can therefore accept as a general truth that in ages of equality, civil wars will become much rarer and much shorter.

I am of course speaking here of unified democratic nations, not confederated democratic nations. In confederations, the predominant power always resides — despite the fictions — in the state governments rather than the federal government, and civil wars are really just foreign wars in disguise.

CHAPTER I.

Equality naturally gives people a taste for free institutions.

The equality that makes people independent of one another creates in them the habit and the taste for following no one's will but their own in their private affairs. This total independence, which they constantly enjoy among their equals and in the conduct of their private lives, disposes them to look on all authority with a discontented eye, and soon suggests to them the idea and the love of political liberty. People living in such times are therefore walking along a natural slope that leads them toward free institutions. Take any one of them at random; trace back, if you can, to their most basic instincts: you will discover that among the various forms of government, the one they conceive of first — and prize the most — is the government whose leader they elected and whose actions they control.

Of all the political effects that equality of social conditions produces, this love of independence is the first to catch the eye, and the one that timid minds find most alarming. And they are not entirely wrong to feel that way, because anarchy takes on more frightening features in democratic countries than elsewhere. Since citizens have no influence over one another, the moment the national power that holds them all in place breaks down, it seems as though disorder must instantly reach its peak — each citizen going off in their own direction, the social body suddenly reduced to dust.

I am convinced, however, that anarchy is not the chief evil that democratic ages have to fear — but the least of them.

Equality actually produces two tendencies: one leads people directly toward independence, and can push them all at once into anarchy; the other leads them, by a longer, more hidden, but surer path, toward servitude.

Nations easily see the first tendency and resist it; they let themselves be swept along by the second without seeing it. It is therefore especially important to point it out.

As for me, far from blaming equality for the rebelliousness it inspires, that is precisely what I praise it for. I admire it for planting deep in the mind and heart of every person this vague notion and instinctive inclination toward political independence, thus preparing the remedy for the very disease it creates. It is for this quality that I am attached to it.

CHAPTER II.

The ideas of democratic peoples about government naturally favor the concentration of power.

The idea of intermediate powers, positioned between the sovereign and the subjects, came naturally to the imagination of aristocratic peoples, because within their ranks there were individuals or families whose birth, education, and wealth set them apart and seemed to destine them for command. This same idea is naturally absent from the minds of people in ages of equality, and for opposite reasons; it can only be introduced artificially, and it is retained only with difficulty. Meanwhile, they conceive almost without thinking about it the idea of a single central power that directs all citizens by itself.

In politics, moreover, as in philosophy and religion, the democratic mind takes particular delight in simple and general ideas. Complicated systems repel it, and it likes to imagine a great nation in which all citizens resemble a single model and are directed by a single power.

After the idea of a single central power, the one that arises most spontaneously in the minds of people in ages of equality is the idea of uniform legislation. Since each person sees themselves as hardly different from their neighbors, they have trouble understanding why a rule that applies to one person should not apply equally to all others. The slightest privileges therefore offend their reason. The smallest differences in the political institutions within the same nation grate on them, and legislative uniformity strikes them as the first condition of good government.

I find, on the contrary, that this same notion of a uniform rule, equally imposed on all members of the social body, is essentially foreign to the human mind in aristocratic ages. People either fail to grasp it or reject it.

These opposing intellectual tendencies eventually become, on both sides, such blind instincts and such invincible habits that they continue to govern people's actions in spite of particular facts. In the Middle Ages, despite the immense variety of that era, there were sometimes individuals who were perfectly alike — which did not stop the lawmaker from assigning each of them different duties and different rights. And conversely, in our own time, governments exhaust themselves trying to impose the same customs and the same laws on populations that still bear no resemblance to each other.

As conditions equalize among a people, individuals appear smaller and society seems larger — or rather, each citizen, having become like all the others, is lost in the crowd, and one can no longer make out anything but the vast and magnificent image of the people itself.

This naturally gives people in democratic times a very high opinion of the privileges of society and a very humble idea of the rights of the individual. They readily accept that the interest of the one is everything and the interest of the other is nothing. They willingly grant that the power representing society possesses far more knowledge and wisdom than any of the individuals who compose it, and that its duty, as much as its right, is to take each citizen by the hand and lead them.

If you look closely at our contemporaries and dig down to the root of their political opinions, you will find there some of the ideas I have just described, and you may be surprised to encounter so much agreement among people who wage war on each other so often.

Americans believe that in every state, social power should emanate directly from the people; but once that power is constituted, they set virtually no limits on it. They readily acknowledge that it has the right to do everything.

As for particular privileges granted to cities, families, or individuals, Americans have lost even the idea of them. It has never crossed their minds that the same law might not be applied uniformly to every part of the same state and to every person living in it.

These same opinions are spreading more and more in Europe; they are penetrating even those nations that most violently reject the dogma of popular sovereignty. These nations give power a different origin than the Americans do, but they view power in the same light. Among all of them, the notion of intermediate authority is growing dim and fading. The idea of a right inherent in certain individuals is rapidly disappearing from people's minds; the idea of the all-powerful and essentially unique right of society is rushing in to take its place. These ideas take root and grow as conditions become more equal and people more alike; equality gives them birth, and they in turn accelerate the progress of equality.

In France, where the revolution I am describing has advanced further than among any other people in Europe, these same opinions have completely taken possession of the national mind. Listen carefully to the voice of our various political parties, and you will find that not one of them fails to adopt these ideas. Most think the government acts badly; but all think the government must constantly act and put its hand to everything. Even those who wage the fiercest war against each other agree on this point. The unity, the ubiquity, the omnipotence of social power, the uniformity of its rules — these are the defining features of every political system born in our time. You find them at the bottom of the most bizarre utopias. The human mind still pursues these images even in its dreams.

If such ideas arise spontaneously in the minds of private citizens, they present themselves even more readily to the imagination of rulers.

While the old social order of Europe is breaking down and dissolving, sovereigns are forming new beliefs about their capacities and their duties; they are realizing for the first time that the central power they represent can and should administer, by itself and according to a uniform plan, all affairs and all people. This opinion — which, I dare say, had never been conceived before our time by the kings of Europe — is penetrating to the very depths of these rulers' minds. It holds firm there amid the upheaval of all their other ideas.

People today are therefore far less divided than we imagine; they constantly argue over whose hands sovereignty should be placed in, but they easily agree on the duties and rights of sovereignty itself. All of them conceive of government as a single, simple, providential, and creative power.

All secondary ideas in politics are in flux; this one remains fixed, unalterable, always the same. Political writers and statesmen adopt it; the crowd seizes on it eagerly; the governed and the governors agree in pursuing it with equal fervor. It comes first; it seems innate.

It does not spring, then, from some caprice of the human mind — it is a natural condition of the current state of humanity.

CHAPTER III.

The feelings of democratic peoples agree with their ideas in leading them to concentrate power.

If, in ages of equality, people easily grasp the idea of a great central power, there can be no doubt, on the other hand, that their habits and their feelings predispose them to recognize such a power and to lend it a hand. The demonstration can be made briefly, since most of the reasons have already been given elsewhere.

People who live in democratic countries — having neither superiors, nor inferiors, nor habitual and necessary associates — readily turn inward and consider themselves in isolation. I had occasion to show this at length when discussing individualism.

It is therefore only with effort that these people tear themselves away from their private affairs to attend to public ones; their natural inclination is to leave that work to the sole visible and permanent representative of collective interests, which is the state.

Not only do they lack any natural taste for concerning themselves with public affairs, but they often lack the time to do so. Private life is so busy in democratic times, so restless, so full of desires and work, that hardly any energy or leisure is left for political life.

That such tendencies are not unconquerable — I am certainly not the one to deny that, since my chief purpose in writing this book has been to combat them. I maintain only that, in our time, a hidden force is constantly developing them in the human heart, and that it is enough not to check them for them to fill it entirely.

I also had occasion to show how the growing love of comfort and the unstable nature of property make democratic peoples dread material disorder. The love of public tranquility is often the only political passion that these peoples retain, and among them it becomes more active and more powerful as all other passions weaken and die. This naturally disposes citizens to keep handing new powers to the central government — or to let it take them — since it alone seems to have both the interest and the means to defend them against anarchy by defending itself.

Since in ages of equality no one is obliged to lend their strength to their fellow, and no one has the right to expect much support from them, each person is at once independent and weak. These two conditions, which must never be considered separately or confused with each other, give citizens in democracies very contradictory instincts. Their independence fills them with confidence and pride among their equals, while their weakness makes them feel, from time to time, the need for outside help that they cannot expect from any one of their fellows, since all are equally powerless and cold. In this extremity, they naturally turn their gaze toward that immense being that alone rises above the universal lowliness. Their needs, and above all their desires, constantly bring them back to it, and they end up regarding it as the sole and necessary support of individual weakness.

In democratic societies, only the central power has any stability in its position and any permanence in its undertakings. All citizens are constantly moving and changing. Now, it is in the nature of every government to want to continuously enlarge its sphere. It is therefore very difficult, in the long run, for it not to succeed — since it acts with a fixed purpose and a sustained will upon people whose position, ideas, and desires change every day.

It often happens that citizens work for it without meaning to.

Democratic ages are times of experiments, innovations, and adventures. There is always a multitude of people engaged in some difficult or novel enterprise that they pursue on their own, without worrying about their fellows. Such people readily accept, as a general principle, that public power should not intervene in private affairs; but as an exception, each of them wants it to help with the particular matter that preoccupies them, and seeks to draw the government's action toward their own cause — while wanting to restrict it everywhere else. Since a multitude of people simultaneously hold this particular view on a vast number of different matters, the sphere of central power expands imperceptibly on all sides, even though each of them wishes to limit it.

A democratic government therefore increases its reach by the mere fact of enduring. Time works in its favor; every accident benefits it; individual passions serve it without even knowing it. And one can say that the older a democratic society grows, the more centralized it becomes.

This helps explain what often happens in democratic nations, where people who can barely tolerate superiors will patiently endure a master, showing themselves at once proud and servile.

The hatred that people feel toward privilege grows as privileges become rarer and smaller, so that democratic passions seem to burn hottest at the very moment when they find the least fuel. I have already explained this phenomenon. There is no inequality so great that it offends when all conditions are unequal; but the smallest difference seems shocking amid general uniformity — and the sight of it becomes more unbearable as uniformity grows more complete. It is therefore natural that the love of equality should grow constantly along with equality itself; in satisfying it, you develop it further.

This undying and ever-intensifying hatred that democratic peoples feel toward the slightest privileges remarkably favors the gradual concentration of all political rights in the hands of the sole representative of the state. The sovereign, being necessarily and indisputably above all citizens, excites the envy of none of them, and each one believes they are stripping their equals of every prerogative they grant to the sovereign.

The person of democratic ages obeys their neighbor — who is their equal — only with extreme reluctance; they refuse to acknowledge that this neighbor has greater knowledge than their own; they distrust their neighbor's justice and view their power with jealousy; they fear and despise them; they love to remind their neighbor, at every turn, of the shared dependence they both have on the same master.

Every central power that follows its natural instincts loves equality and favors it; for equality remarkably facilitates the action of such a power, extends it, and secures it.

One can also say that every central government adores uniformity; uniformity spares it from examining an infinity of details that it would otherwise have to deal with, if it had to make the rule fit each person rather than passing all people indiscriminately under the same rule. Thus the government loves what the citizens love, and it naturally hates what they hate. This shared feeling, which in democratic nations constantly unites each individual and the sovereign in a single thought, establishes between them a secret and permanent sympathy. The government is forgiven its faults on account of its tastes; public trust abandons it only reluctantly, even amid its excesses and errors, and returns to it the moment it calls. Democratic peoples often hate those who hold central power; but they always love that power itself.

I have thus arrived at the same conclusion by two different paths. I showed that equality suggests to people the idea of a single, uniform, and strong government. I have just shown that it gives them a taste for one. The nations of our time are therefore heading toward this kind of government. The natural slope of their minds and hearts leads them there, and they need only stop holding themselves back to arrive.

I believe that in the democratic ages that are about to dawn, individual independence and local liberties will always be a product of human effort. Centralization will be the natural form of government.

CHAPTER IV.

Some particular and accidental causes that either lead a democratic people to centralize power or divert them from it.

While all democratic peoples are instinctively drawn toward centralization of power, they tend toward it unequally. This depends on particular circumstances that can develop or restrain the natural effects of their social conditions. These circumstances are very numerous; I will speak of only a few.

Among people who have long lived free before becoming equal, the instincts that liberty gave them fight, to some extent, against the tendencies that equality suggests. And although among them the central power expands its privileges, private individuals never entirely lose their independence.

But when equality develops among a people who have never known freedom — or who have not known it for a long time — as is the case on the European continent, the old habits of the nation suddenly combine, through a kind of natural attraction, with the new habits and doctrines that the social order produces. All powers seem to rush toward the center of their own accord; they accumulate there with astonishing speed, and the state reaches the outer limits of its strength all at once, while private individuals let themselves fall in a single moment to the lowest degree of weakness.

The English who came three centuries ago to found a democratic society in the wilderness of the New World had all grown accustomed in the mother country to taking part in public affairs; they knew the jury system; they had freedom of speech and freedom of the press, individual liberty, the concept of rights, and the habit of invoking them. They transported these free institutions and these vigorous customs to America, and these sustained them against the encroachments of the state.

Among Americans, then, it is liberty that is old; equality is comparatively new. The opposite is the case in Europe, where equality — introduced by absolute power and under the eyes of kings — had already penetrated deep into the habits of the people long before liberty had entered their ideas.

I said that among democratic peoples, people naturally conceive of government only in the form of a single central power, and that the notion of intermediate powers is unfamiliar to them. This is particularly true of democratic nations that have seen the principle of equality triumph through a violent revolution. The classes that used to manage local affairs suddenly vanish in that storm, and the confused mass that remains — having neither the organization nor the habits that would allow it to take the management of those same affairs into its own hands — can see no one but the state itself capable of handling all the details of government. Centralization becomes, in a sense, a necessary fact.

Napoleon should be neither praised nor blamed for having concentrated nearly all administrative powers in his own hands; for after the sudden disappearance of the nobility and the upper bourgeoisie, those powers came to him on their own. It would have been almost as difficult for him to push them away as to seize them. No such necessity was ever felt by the Americans, who — having had no revolution and having governed themselves from the start — never needed to call on the state to serve as their temporary guardian.

Thus centralization develops in a democratic people not only in proportion to the progress of equality, but also according to the manner in which that equality was established.

At the beginning of a great democratic revolution, when the war between classes is just breaking out, the people strive to centralize public administration in the hands of the government, in order to wrest control of local affairs from the aristocracy. Toward the end of that same revolution, on the contrary, it is usually the defeated aristocracy that tries to hand control of all affairs over to the state, because it dreads the petty tyranny of the people, who have become its equals and often its masters.

So it is not always the same class of citizens that works to increase the prerogatives of central power; but as long as the democratic revolution continues, there is always some powerful class in the nation — powerful by numbers or by wealth — that special passions and particular interests drive to centralize public administration, quite apart from the hatred of being governed by one's neighbor, which is a general and permanent feeling among democratic peoples. One may observe that in our time it is the lower classes of England who are working with all their might to destroy local independence and to transfer administration from every point on the circumference to the center, while the upper classes are striving to keep that same administration within its old limits. I dare predict that a day will come when we see the exact opposite.

What I have just said makes it easy to understand why social power must always be stronger and the individual weaker in a democratic people that has arrived at equality through a long and painful social struggle, than in a democratic society where citizens have been equal from the start. The example of the Americans confirms this completely.

The people of the United States have never been separated by any privilege; they have never known the reciprocal relationship of inferior and master, and since they neither fear nor hate one another, they have never felt the need to call on the sovereign to manage the details of their affairs. The Americans' destiny is singular: they borrowed from the aristocracy of England the idea of individual rights and the taste for local liberties, and they were able to preserve both — because they never had to fight an aristocracy.

If at all times education helps people defend their independence, this is especially true in democratic ages. It is easy, when all people are alike, to establish a single all-powerful government; instinct alone is enough for that. But people need a great deal of intelligence, knowledge, and skill to organize and maintain, under the same conditions, secondary powers, and to create — amid the independence and individual weakness of citizens — free associations capable of fighting tyranny without destroying order.

The concentration of power and individual servitude will therefore grow among democratic nations not only in proportion to equality, but in proportion to ignorance as well.

It is true that in poorly educated ages, the government often lacks the knowledge to perfect despotism, just as citizens lack the knowledge to escape it. But the effect is not equal on both sides.

However crude a democratic people may be, the central power that governs them is never entirely without knowledge, because it easily attracts to itself what little exists in the country, and, if necessary, goes looking for it abroad. Among a nation that is ignorant as well as democratic, a prodigious difference must soon appear between the intellectual capacity of the sovereign and that of each individual subject. This makes it easy to concentrate all powers in the sovereign's hands. The administrative power of the state expands unceasingly, because only the state is clever enough to administer.

Aristocratic nations, however little educated one may suppose them to be, never present the same spectacle, because knowledge is distributed fairly evenly between the ruler and the leading citizens.

The pasha who rules Egypt today found that country's population composed of very ignorant and very equal people, and he appropriated Europe's science and intelligence to govern them. The particular knowledge of the sovereign thus combining with the ignorance and democratic weakness of his subjects, the ultimate degree of centralization was achieved without difficulty, and the ruler was able to turn the country into his factory and its inhabitants into his workers.

I believe that extreme centralization of political power ends up weakening society and thus, in the long run, weakening the government itself. But I do not deny that a centralized social power is capable of easily carrying out great enterprises at a given time and on a given point. This is especially true in war, where success depends far more on the ability to rapidly concentrate all resources on a single point than on the sheer size of those resources. It is therefore principally in wartime that peoples feel the desire and often the need to increase the prerogatives of central power. All military geniuses love centralization, which increases their strength, and all centralizing geniuses love war, which forces nations to consolidate all power in the hands of the state. Thus the democratic tendency that leads people to constantly multiply the privileges of the state and restrict the rights of individuals moves much faster and more steadily among democratic peoples who, by their position, are subject to great and frequent wars and whose very existence is often in peril, than among all others.

I said that the fear of disorder and the love of comfort imperceptibly lead democratic peoples to increase the functions of the central government, the only power that seems to them strong, intelligent, and stable enough to protect them from anarchy. I scarcely need to add that all the particular circumstances tending to make a democratic society troubled and precarious strengthen this general instinct, and increasingly drive individuals to sacrifice their rights for the sake of their tranquility.

A people is therefore never so disposed to expand the powers of central government as when it is emerging from a long and bloody revolution that, after tearing property from its former owners, has shaken every belief, filled the nation with furious hatreds, conflicting interests, and opposing factions. The taste for public tranquility then becomes a blind passion, and citizens are prone to conceive a very disordered love of order.

I have just examined several contingent factors that all work together to promote the centralization of power. I have not yet spoken of the most important one.

The first of the accidental causes that, in democratic peoples, may draw all affairs into the sovereign's hands is the origin of that sovereign and its own inclinations.

People living in ages of equality naturally love the central power and willingly extend its privileges; but if it happens that this same power faithfully represents their interests and perfectly mirrors their instincts, their trust in it becomes almost limitless, and they believe they are giving to themselves whatever they give to it.

The pull of administrative powers toward the center will always be less easy and less rapid under kings who still have some connection to the old aristocratic order than under new rulers — self-made men whose birth, prejudices, instincts, and habits seem to bind them indissolubly to the cause of equality. I do not mean to say that rulers of aristocratic origin who live in democratic times do not try to centralize. I believe they work at it just as diligently as anyone else. For them, the only advantage of equality lies in that direction. But their opportunities are fewer, because citizens, instead of naturally anticipating their wishes, often comply only reluctantly. In democratic societies, centralization will always be greater to the extent that the sovereign is less aristocratic — that is the rule.

When an old royal dynasty governs an aristocracy, the natural prejudices of the sovereign perfectly match the natural prejudices of the nobles, and the inherent vices of aristocratic societies develop freely, meeting no corrective. The opposite happens when the heir of a feudal dynasty is placed at the head of a democratic people. The ruler inclines every day, through education, habits, and memories, toward the feelings that inequality of social conditions inspires; and the people constantly tend, through their social conditions, toward the customs and values that equality produces. It often happens then that citizens seek to check the central power, not so much as tyrannical but as aristocratic, and they firmly maintain their independence not only because they want to be free, but above all because they intend to remain equal.

A revolution that overthrows an old royal family to place new men at the head of a democratic people may momentarily weaken central power; but however anarchic it may appear at first, we should not hesitate to predict that its final and necessary result will be to extend and secure the prerogatives of that same power.

The first and, in a sense, the only necessary condition for centralizing public power in a democratic society is to love equality — or to make people believe you do. Thus the science of despotism, once so complicated, is simplified: it comes down, so to speak, to a single principle.

CHAPTER V.

Among the European nations of our time, sovereign power is growing even though the sovereigns themselves are less secure.

If you reflect on what has been said so far, you will be surprised and alarmed to see how, in Europe, everything seems to conspire to expand the prerogatives of central power indefinitely and to make individual existence weaker, more subordinate, and more precarious with each passing day.

The democratic nations of Europe have all the general and permanent tendencies that drive the Americans toward centralization of power, and on top of that, they are subject to a multitude of secondary and accidental causes that the Americans do not experience. You would think that every step these nations take toward equality brings them closer to despotism.

You only need to look around you — and at yourselves — to be convinced.

During the aristocratic centuries that preceded our own, the sovereigns of Europe had been deprived of, or had given up, several of the rights inherent in their power. Not even a hundred years ago, in most European nations, there were private individuals or corporate bodies, nearly independent, who administered justice, raised and maintained soldiers, collected taxes, and sometimes even made or interpreted the law. The state has everywhere reclaimed these natural attributes of sovereign power for itself alone; in everything pertaining to government, it no longer tolerates any intermediary between itself and its citizens, and it directs them by itself in all general affairs. I am far from criticizing this concentration of power; I merely point it out.

At the same period, there existed in Europe a great number of secondary powers that represented local interests and managed local affairs. Most of these local authorities have already disappeared; all of them are rapidly tending to disappear or to fall into utter dependence. From one end of Europe to the other, the privileges of lords, the liberties of cities, and provincial administrations are being destroyed or are about to be.

Europe has experienced, over the past half-century, many revolutions and counter-revolutions that have pulled it in opposite directions. But all these movements resemble each other in one respect: all of them have shaken or destroyed secondary powers. Local privileges that the French nation had not abolished in the countries it conquered were finally crushed by the efforts of the rulers who defeated France. These rulers rejected every innovation that the revolution had introduced among them — except centralization: that is the only thing they consented to keep from it.

What I want to point out is that all these various rights that have been successively torn in our time from classes, corporations, and individuals have not served to raise new secondary powers on a more democratic basis — instead, they have everywhere been concentrated in the hands of the sovereign. Everywhere the state is moving more and more toward directing even the smallest citizens by itself and toward personally managing even the smallest affairs.

This gradual weakening of the individual in the face of society manifests itself in a thousand ways. I will cite one example relating to wills.

In aristocratic countries, people profess deep respect, as a rule, for the last wishes of the dead. Among the ancient peoples of Europe, this sometimes went as far as superstition: far from interfering with the dying person's whims, the social power lent its force to the least of them, ensuring them perpetual authority.

When all the living are weak, the will of the dead is less respected. It is confined within a very narrow circle, and if it ventures beyond that circle, the sovereign annuls or controls it. In the Middle Ages, the power to make a will had virtually no limits. Among the French of our time, you cannot distribute your estate among your children without the state intervening. After having regulated your entire life, it wants to regulate your final act as well.

Almost all the charitable institutions of old Europe were in the hands of private individuals or corporations; they have all fallen more or less under the sovereign's control, and in several countries they are managed directly by the state. It is the state that has taken on, almost single-handedly, the task of giving bread to the hungry, aid and shelter to the sick, and work to the idle; it has made itself the virtually sole repairer of every misery.

Education, like charity, has become in most nations of our time a national affair. The state receives the child — and often takes it — from its mother's arms, to entrust it to its agents. It takes charge of inspiring each generation with certain sentiments and providing it with certain ideas. Uniformity reigns in education as in everything else; diversity, like liberty, is disappearing from it every day.

I would also not hesitate to assert that among nearly all the Christian nations of our time, Catholic and Protestant alike, religion is in danger of falling into the government's hands. Not that sovereigns are particularly eager to fix the dogma themselves; but they are increasingly seizing control of the man who interprets it. They strip the clergy of its property, assign it a salary, divert and monopolize the influence that the priest possesses — they make him one of their functionaries and often one of their servants, and through him they penetrate to the very depths of each person's soul.

As the functions of central power increase, the number of officials who represent it grows. They form a nation within each nation; and since the government lends them its stability, they increasingly replace the old aristocracy in each of these nations.

Almost everywhere in Europe, the sovereign governs in two ways: he leads one portion of citizens through the fear they feel of his agents, and the other through the hope they conceive of becoming his agents.

But this is still only one side of the picture.

Not only has the sovereign's power expanded, as we have just seen, to fill the entire sphere of the old powers; that sphere is no longer large enough to contain it. It overflows on all sides and spreads into the domain that individual independence had reserved for itself until now. A multitude of actions that formerly escaped the control of society entirely have been brought under its authority in our time, and their number is growing constantly.

Among aristocratic peoples, social power typically confined itself to directing and overseeing citizens in everything that had a direct and visible bearing on the national interest; it willingly left them to their own judgment in everything else. Among such peoples, the government often seemed to forget that there comes a point where the faults and miseries of individuals compromise the general welfare, and that preventing the ruin of a private citizen must sometimes be a public concern.

The democratic nations of our time lean toward the opposite extreme.

It is clear that most of our rulers do not want merely to direct the entire people; you would think they consider themselves responsible for the actions and the individual destiny of their subjects, that they have undertaken to guide and enlighten each one of them in the various acts of their life, and if need be, to make them happy despite themselves.

For their part, private citizens increasingly view social power in the same light; in all their needs they call on it for help, and they fix their gaze on it at every moment as on a tutor or a guide.

I maintain that there is no country in Europe where public administration has not become not only more centralized, but more inquisitive and more detailed. Everywhere it penetrates further than before into private affairs; it regulates more actions in its own way, and smaller actions, and it establishes itself more and more, every day, beside, around, and above each individual — to assist, advise, and constrain them.

In the old days, the sovereign lived off the revenue from his lands or from taxes. This is no longer the case now that his needs have grown along with his power. In circumstances where a ruler once would have levied a new tax, today the government resorts to a loan. Gradually the state thus becomes the debtor of most of the wealthy, and it centralizes the greatest capital in its hands.

It attracts smaller sums by another means.

As people mingle and conditions equalize, the poor gain more resources, more education, and more desires. They conceive the idea of improving their lot, and they seek to do so through saving. Saving thus produces, every day, an infinite number of small sums of capital — the slow and successive fruits of labor — which are constantly growing. But most of them would remain unproductive if they stayed scattered. This has given rise to a philanthropic institution that will soon become, if I am not mistaken, one of our greatest political institutions. Charitable people conceived the idea of collecting the savings of the poor and putting the proceeds to use. In some countries, these benevolent associations have remained entirely separate from the state; but in nearly all of them, they are visibly tending to merge with it, and there are even some where the government has replaced them and taken on the immense task of centralizing in a single place, and investing with its own hands, the daily savings of several million workers.

Thus the state attracts the money of the rich through loans and, through savings banks, it controls the funds of the poor. Near it and in its hands, the nation's wealth flows in ceaselessly; it accumulates all the more as equality of conditions grows — for in a democratic nation, only the state inspires trust in private individuals, because only the state seems to them to have any strength and any permanence.

On the one hand, the taste for comfort keeps growing, and the government keeps taking control of all the sources of comfort.

People are thus heading toward servitude by two different paths. The taste for comfort diverts them from getting involved in government, and the love of comfort places them in an ever-tighter dependence on those who govern.

Thus the sovereign does not merely direct the public fortune; it inserts itself into private fortunes as well. It is the leader of each citizen and often their master, and on top of that, it makes itself their steward and their banker.

Not only does the central power fill the entire sphere of the old powers by itself, extend it, and go beyond it — it moves within it with more agility, strength, and independence than it ever did before.

All the governments of Europe have prodigiously perfected the science of administration in our time; they do more things, and they do each thing with more order, more speed, and less expense. They seem to be constantly enriching themselves with all the knowledge they have taken from private individuals. Every day, the rulers of Europe keep their agents in tighter dependence and invent new methods for directing them more closely and supervising them with less effort. It is not enough for them to manage all affairs through their agents — they undertake to direct the conduct of their agents in all affairs. The result is that public administration depends not only on the same power, but is being squeezed into a single place and concentrated in fewer hands. The government centralizes its action at the same time that it increases its prerogatives: a double source of strength.

When you examine the constitution that the judiciary once had in most European nations, two things stand out: the independence of that power, and the breadth of its jurisdiction.

Not only did the courts decide nearly all disputes between private individuals; in a great many cases, they served as arbiters between the individual and the state.

I am not speaking here of the political and administrative powers that the courts had usurped in some countries, but of the judicial powers that they possessed in all. Among all the peoples of Europe, there were and still are many individual rights — most of them connected to the general right of property — that were placed under the protection of the judge and that the state could not violate without the judge's permission.

It was this semi-political power that chiefly distinguished European courts from all others; for all peoples have had judges, but not all have given judges the same privileges.

If you now look at what is happening in the democratic nations of Europe that call themselves free, as well as in the rest, you see that on all sides, alongside these courts, new and more dependent ones are being created, whose particular function is to decide, on an exceptional basis, the disputes that may arise between the public administration and the citizens. The old judiciary is left its independence, but its jurisdiction is narrowed, and there is a growing tendency to make it nothing more than an arbiter between private interests.

The number of these special courts is constantly increasing, and their jurisdiction is expanding. The government therefore escapes more and more from the obligation to have its wishes and its rights sanctioned by another power. Unable to do without judges, it at least wants to choose its own judges and always keep them under its control — that is to say, between itself and private individuals, it places the image of justice rather than justice itself.

A curious sophism is employed in France on this subject. When a lawsuit arises between the administration and a private individual, the case is refused to an ordinary judge, so as not to mix — they say — administrative power and judicial power. As if it were not mixing these two powers, and mixing them in the most dangerous and tyrannical way, to give the government the right to judge and administer at the same time.

It is not enough, then, for the state to attract all affairs to itself — it is also increasingly deciding them all on its own, without oversight and without appeal.

Among the modern nations of Europe, there is one great cause that, apart from all those I have just mentioned, constantly acts to extend the sovereign's reach or to increase its prerogatives — one that has not been sufficiently noticed. That cause is the development of industry, which the progress of equality encourages.

Industry typically brings a multitude of people together in one place; it establishes new and complicated relationships among them. It exposes them to great and sudden swings between abundance and poverty, during which public order is threatened. And it may happen that the work itself endangers the health or even the lives of those who profit from it or engage in it. Thus the industrial class needs to be regulated, supervised, and restrained more than other classes, and it is natural that the functions of government should grow along with it.

This truth is generally applicable; but here is what relates more particularly to the nations of Europe.

In the centuries before ours, the aristocracy owned the land and was in a position to defend it. Real property was therefore surrounded by guarantees, and its owners enjoyed great independence. This created laws and habits that have endured, despite the division of land and the ruin of the nobility. Even today, landowners and farmers are, of all citizens, those who most easily escape the control of social power.

In those same aristocratic centuries — where all the sources of our history lie — personal property was of little importance, and its owners were despised and weak. Industrialists formed an exceptional class in the midst of the aristocratic world. Having no guaranteed patronage, they were not protected, and often they could not protect themselves.

It therefore became a habit to regard industrial property as a possession of a peculiar nature, not deserving the same respect or the same guarantees as property in general — and industrialists as a small, separate class in the social order, whose independence was of little value and who could safely be abandoned to the regulatory passion of rulers. If you open the codes of the Middle Ages, you are astonished to see how, in those centuries of individual independence, industry was constantly regulated by kings down to the smallest details; on this point, centralization was as active and as thorough as it could possibly be.

Since then, a great revolution has taken place in the world; industrial property, which was only a seed, has grown and now covers Europe. The industrial class has expanded; it has enriched itself from the debris of all other classes; it has grown in numbers, in importance, in wealth — and it keeps growing. Almost everyone who does not belong to it is connected to it in some way. Having been the exceptional class, it threatens to become the principal class, and virtually the only class. Yet the political ideas and habits it originally gave rise to have remained. These ideas and habits have not changed — because they are old, and also because they happen to be in perfect harmony with the new ideas and general habits of people today.

Industrial property therefore does not grow in rights as it grows in importance. The industrial class does not become less dependent as it becomes more numerous; on the contrary, you might say that it carries despotism within it, and that despotism naturally expands as the class develops.

I will cite a few facts in support of this. It is in mines that the natural sources of industrial wealth are found. As industry has developed in Europe, as the output of mines has become a matter of more general interest and their proper exploitation more difficult due to the division of property that equality brings about, most sovereigns have claimed the right to own the subsoil and to oversee mining operations — something that had never happened with other kinds of property.

Mines, which were once private property subject to the same obligations and provided with the same guarantees as other real estate, have thus fallen into the public domain. The state exploits them or grants concessions; the owners are transformed into mere users. They hold their rights from the state, and moreover, the state claims the power to direct them almost everywhere — it prescribes rules for them, imposes methods, subjects them to regular oversight, and if they resist, an administrative court dispossesses them and the public administration transfers their rights to others. So the government does not merely own the mines — it holds all the miners in its hand.

Meanwhile, as industry develops, the exploitation of existing mines increases. New ones are opened. The mining population expands and grows. Each day, the sovereigns extend their domain beneath our feet and populate it with their servants.

The more industrial a nation becomes, the more it feels the need for roads, canals, ports, and other works of a semi-public nature that facilitate the acquisition of wealth — and the more democratic it is, the more difficulty private individuals have in carrying out such works, and the more easily the state can do them. I would not hesitate to affirm that the manifest tendency of all the sovereigns of our time is to take sole responsibility for the execution of such enterprises; through this, they tighten their hold on populations every day.

On the other hand, as the state's power grows and its needs increase, it consumes an ever-larger quantity of industrial products itself, which it typically manufactures in its own arsenals and factories. Thus in every kingdom, the sovereign becomes the greatest of industrialists; it attracts and retains in its service a prodigious number of engineers, architects, mechanics, and craftsmen.

It is not only the foremost industrialist — it increasingly tends to make itself the chief, or rather the master, of all the others.

Since citizens have become weaker as they have become more equal, they can do nothing in industry without forming associations; and public power naturally wants to place these associations under its control.

It must be acknowledged that these collective beings we call associations are stronger and more formidable than any single individual could be, and that they have less individual responsibility for their own actions — from which it follows that it seems reasonable to grant each of them less independence from social power than one would grant to a private individual.

Sovereigns are all the more inclined to act this way because their own tastes push them in that direction. Among democratic peoples, it is only through association that citizens can resist the central power; that power therefore never looks favorably on associations that are not under its control. And what is truly remarkable is that among these democratic peoples, citizens themselves often regard these same associations — which they need so badly — with a secret feeling of fear and jealousy that prevents them from defending them. The power and permanence of these small private societies, amid the general weakness and instability, astonish and worry them, and they are not far from regarding the free exercise of each association's natural capacities as a dangerous privilege.

All these associations that are being born in our time are, moreover, new persons whose rights time has not consecrated, and which enter the world at an era when the idea of particular rights is weak and social power is without limits; it is not surprising that they lose their liberty at birth.

Among all the peoples of Europe, there are certain associations that cannot be formed until the state has examined their bylaws and authorized their existence. In several countries, efforts are being made to extend this rule to all associations. It is easy to see where success in such an enterprise would lead.

If the sovereign once had the general right to authorize associations of all kinds on certain conditions, it would not be long before it claimed the right to oversee and direct them, so that they could not deviate from the rules it had imposed. In this way, the state — after having made all who want to associate dependent on it — would also make dependent all those who have already associated, which is to say almost everyone alive today.

Sovereigns are thus increasingly appropriating and putting to their own use the greatest share of that new force which industry is creating in our world. Industry leads us, and they lead it.

I attach so much importance to everything I have just said that I am tormented by the fear of having damaged my argument in trying to express it better.

So if the reader finds that the examples I have cited in support of my claims are insufficient or poorly chosen; if they think I have exaggerated somewhere the progress of social power, or that I have unduly narrowed the sphere in which individual independence still operates, I beg them to set this book aside for a moment and consider for themselves the things I have tried to show them. Let them carefully examine what is happening every day, among us and outside of us; let them question their neighbors; let them, finally, look at themselves. I am much mistaken if they do not arrive, without a guide and by different paths, at the point to which I have tried to lead them.

They will notice that during the half-century just passed, centralization has grown everywhere in a thousand different ways. Wars, revolutions, and conquests have all served its development; all men have worked to increase it. During this same period, in which leaders have succeeded one another with prodigious speed, their ideas, interests, and passions have varied infinitely — but all of them have wanted to centralize in one way or another. The instinct of centralization has been like the one fixed point amid the singular instability of their existence and their thinking.

And when the reader, having examined these details of human affairs, steps back to take in the vast picture as a whole, they will be astonished.

On one side, the most established dynasties are shaken or destroyed; everywhere peoples are violently escaping the rule of their laws; they destroy or limit the authority of their lords or their rulers; every nation that is not in revolution seems at least restless and trembling; the same spirit of revolt animates them all. And on the other side, during this very same time and among these very same ungovernable peoples, social power is ceaselessly expanding its prerogatives; it becomes more centralized, more enterprising, more absolute, more far-reaching. Citizens are falling at every moment under the control of the public administration; they are being drawn imperceptibly, and as if without knowing it, into sacrificing some new portion of their individual independence every day — and these same people who from time to time overthrow a throne and trample kings underfoot are bending more and more, without resistance, to the slightest wishes of a clerk.

Two revolutions thus seem to be taking place in our time, moving in opposite directions; one continually weakens power, and the other continually strengthens it. At no other period in our history has it appeared so weak and yet so strong.

But when you finally look more closely at the state of the world, you see that these two revolutions are intimately connected, that they spring from the same source, and that after taking different courses, they ultimately lead people to the same place.

I will not hesitate to repeat one last time what I have already said or suggested in several places throughout this book: we must take great care not to confuse the fact of equality itself with the revolution that is completing its introduction into the social order and the laws. That is where the explanation lies for almost all the phenomena that astonish us.

All the old political powers of Europe, the greatest as well as the least, were founded in aristocratic centuries, and they represented or defended, to varying degrees, the principle of inequality and privilege. To make the new needs and interests inspired by growing equality prevail in the government, people in our time have had to overthrow or constrain the old powers. This led them to make revolutions, and it inspired in a great many of them that fierce taste for disorder and independence that all revolutions, whatever their object, invariably produce.

I do not believe there is a single country in Europe where the development of equality has not been preceded or followed by violent changes in the state of property and persons — and nearly all these changes have been accompanied by a great deal of anarchy and lawlessness, because they were carried out by the least civilized portion of the nation against the most civilized.

From this arose the two opposing tendencies I described earlier. As long as the democratic revolution was at its hottest, the people busy destroying the old aristocratic powers that were fighting against it showed a great spirit of independence; and as the victory of equality became more complete, they gradually surrendered to the natural instincts that this same equality creates, and they strengthened and centralized social power. They had wanted to be free in order to make themselves equal, and as equality became more firmly established with the help of liberty, it made liberty harder to sustain.

These two conditions have not always been sequential. Our forebears showed how a people could organize an immense tyranny in its midst at the very moment it was escaping the authority of the nobles and defying the power of kings — teaching the world how to win its independence and lose it at the same time.

The people of our day see that old powers are crumbling on all sides; they see every ancient influence dying, every old barrier falling; this disturbs the judgment of even the cleverest among them. They pay attention only to the prodigious revolution unfolding before their eyes, and they believe that the human race is about to fall into permanent anarchy. If they thought about the ultimate consequences of this revolution, they might conceive of very different fears.

As for me, I do not trust — I confess — in the spirit of liberty that seems to animate my contemporaries. I can see that the nations of our time are turbulent; but I cannot clearly see that they are liberal. And I fear that when these upheavals that shake every throne have passed, the sovereigns may find themselves more powerful than they have ever been.

CHAPTER VI.

What kind of despotism democratic nations have to fear.

I had noticed during my stay in the United States that a democratic social order like that of the Americans could offer peculiar opportunities for the establishment of despotism, and upon my return to Europe I saw how far most of our rulers had already used the ideas, feelings, and needs that this same social order produces to expand the reach of their power.

This led me to believe that Christian nations might eventually suffer some form of oppression like that which once weighed upon several of the peoples of antiquity.

A more detailed examination of the subject, and five years of new reflections, have not diminished my fears — but they have changed their object.

In past centuries, no sovereign, however absolute and powerful, ever undertook to administer by himself, without the aid of secondary powers, every part of a great empire; none attempted to subject all his people indiscriminately to the details of a uniform code, or descended to the side of each one of them to regulate and direct them. The idea of such an enterprise had never occurred to the human mind, and if it had occurred to anyone, the inadequacy of knowledge, the imperfection of administrative methods, and above all the natural obstacles created by the inequality of conditions would have quickly stopped them in the execution of so vast a design.

We see that at the height of the Caesars' power, the various peoples who inhabited the Roman world had still preserved diverse customs and values: although subject to the same monarch, most provinces were administered separately; they were full of powerful and active municipalities; and although all the government of the empire was concentrated in the emperor's hands alone, and he remained at all times the final arbiter of all things, the details of social life and individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.

The emperors possessed, it is true, an immense and unchecked power, which allowed them to indulge freely in the whims of their inclinations and to use the entire force of the state to satisfy them. They often abused this power to arbitrarily strip a citizen of his property or his life: their tyranny weighed prodigiously on a few, but it did not extend to the many. It fastened on a few great objects and neglected the rest; it was violent and limited.

If despotism were to establish itself among the democratic nations of our time, it would have a different character: it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade people without tormenting them.

I have no doubt that in centuries of knowledge and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in gathering all public power into their hands alone, and in penetrating more habitually and more deeply into the sphere of private interests, than any ruler of antiquity was ever able to do. But this same equality that facilitates despotism also tempers it. We have seen how, as people become more alike and more equal, public customs and values become more humane and gentle. When no citizen has great power or great wealth, tyranny lacks, in a sense, both opportunity and a stage. Since all fortunes are modest, passions are naturally restrained, imagination is limited, pleasures are simple. This universal moderation moderates the sovereign himself, and holds the unruly impulses of his desires within certain limits.

Apart from these reasons, drawn from the very nature of the social order, I could add many others that I would take from outside my subject; but I want to stay within the boundaries I have set for myself.

Democratic governments may become violent and even cruel at certain moments of great turmoil and great danger; but these crises will be rare and brief.

When I think about the petty passions of the people of our time, the softness of their customs, the breadth of their education, the purity of their religion, the gentleness of their morality, their industrious and orderly habits, and the restraint they show in vice as in virtue alike, I do not fear that they will find tyrants among their leaders — but rather guardians.

I therefore think that the kind of oppression threatening democratic peoples will resemble nothing that has preceded it in the world; our contemporaries could not find its image in their memories. I search in vain for an expression that exactly reproduces the idea I form of it and contains it; the old words "despotism" and "tyranny" do not fit. The thing is new, so I must try to define it, since I cannot name it.

I want to imagine under what new features despotism could appear in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of similar and equal people who spin restlessly around themselves to procure small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn into himself, is virtually a stranger to the fate of all the others; his children and his close friends make up for him the entire human race. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he stands beside them but does not see them; he touches them but does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if he still has a family, one can say at least that he no longer has a country.

Above these people rises an immense and tutelary power, which takes sole charge of securing their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-sighted, and mild. It would resemble paternal authority if, like that authority, its aim were to prepare people for adulthood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them locked forever in childhood. It likes citizens to enjoy themselves, provided they think of nothing but enjoyment. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the sole agent and the sole arbiter of that happiness. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, settles their estates, divides their inheritances — why can it not simply spare them the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?

This is how, every day, it makes the use of free will less useful and more rare; how it confines the action of the will within a smaller space, and gradually steals from each citizen even the ability to use himself. Equality has prepared people for all these things; it has disposed them to endure them and often even to regard them as a benefit.

After having thus taken each individual, one by one, into its powerful hands and kneaded him to its liking, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break free to rise above the crowd. It does not break wills, but it softens, bends, and directs them; it rarely forces anyone to act, but it constantly opposes action; it does not destroy, but it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, but it hinders, compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies — and it finally reduces each nation to nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always believed that this sort of orderly, gentle, and peaceful servitude, which I have just described, could be combined more easily than one might imagine with some of the outward forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to establish itself in the very shadow of popular sovereignty.

Our contemporaries are incessantly driven by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these opposing instincts, they try to satisfy both at once. They imagine a power that is single, tutelary, and all-powerful, but elected by the citizens. They combine centralization and popular sovereignty. This gives them some relief. They console themselves for being in tutelage by reminding themselves that they chose their own tutors. Each individual endures being chained because he sees that it is not a man or a class but the people themselves who hold the end of the chain.

Under this system, citizens step out of dependence for a moment to indicate their master, and then step back in.

There are, in our time, many people who adjust quite comfortably to this kind of compromise between administrative despotism and popular sovereignty, and who believe they have sufficiently guaranteed the liberty of individuals by handing it over to the national power. That is not enough for me. The nature of the master matters far less to me than the obedience.

I will not deny, however, that a constitution of this kind is infinitely preferable to one that, after concentrating all powers, deposits them in the hands of a single irresponsible man or body. Of all the different forms that democratic despotism could take, that would certainly be the worst.

When the sovereign is elected, or closely watched by a legislature that is truly elected and independent, the oppression it inflicts on individuals is sometimes greater; but it is always less degrading, because each citizen — even when constrained and reduced to impotence — can still imagine that in obeying, he is only submitting to himself, and that it is to one of his own desires that he sacrifices all the others.

I also understand that when the sovereign represents the nation and depends on it, the powers and rights taken from each citizen do not serve only the head of state but benefit the state itself, and that private individuals derive some return from the sacrifice they have made of their independence to the public.

Creating a national legislature in a highly centralized country therefore reduces the harm that extreme centralization can produce — but it does not eliminate it.

I can see that in this way, individual participation is preserved in the most important affairs; but it is no less suppressed in the small and particular ones. People forget that it is above all in matters of detail that it is dangerous to enslave people. For my part, I would be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in small ones, if I believed you could ever be sure of the one without possessing the other.

Subjection in small affairs manifests itself every day, and is felt indiscriminately by all citizens. It does not drive them to despair, but it constantly frustrates them and leads them to give up the use of their will. It thus gradually extinguishes their spirit and enervates their soul; while the obedience that is owed only in a small number of very serious but very rare circumstances reveals servitude only at intervals, and weighs on only some people. In vain will you charge these same citizens — whom you have made so dependent on the central power — with choosing the representatives of that power from time to time; this use of their free will, however important but brief and rare, will not prevent them from gradually losing the ability to think, feel, and act for themselves, and thus from sinking gradually below the level of humanity.

I would add that they will soon become incapable of exercising the one great and unique privilege that remains to them. Those democratic peoples who have introduced liberty into the political sphere while increasing despotism in the administrative sphere have been led to very strange anomalies. When it comes to running small affairs where plain common sense is enough, they consider citizens incapable; but when it comes to governing the entire state, they entrust those same citizens with immense prerogatives. They turn them alternately into the playthings of the sovereign and into its masters — more than kings and less than human beings. After exhausting every different system of election without finding one that suits them, they are surprised and keep searching — as if the problem they see lay in the constitution of the country's electoral body far more than in the constitution of the country itself.

It is indeed difficult to see how people who have entirely given up the habit of governing themselves could succeed in choosing well those who are to govern them; and no one will convince us that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the votes of a nation of servants.

A constitution that is republican at the top and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts has always struck me as an ephemeral monster. The vices of the rulers and the stupidity of the ruled would not be long in bringing about its ruin; and the people, weary of their representatives and of themselves, would either create freer institutions or soon go back to stretching out at the feet of a single master.

CHAPTER VII.

Continuation of the preceding chapters.

I believe it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government among a people where conditions are equal than among any other, and I think that if such a government were once established among such a people, it would not only oppress them but would, in the long run, strip each of them of several of the principal attributes of humanity.

Despotism therefore seems to me particularly to be feared in democratic ages.

I would have loved liberty, I think, in all times; but I feel inclined to worship it in the time in which we live.

I am convinced, moreover, that all those who, in the centuries we are entering, attempt to base liberty on privilege and aristocracy will fail. All those who try to attract and retain authority within a single class will fail. There is no sovereign today clever enough or strong enough to found despotism by re-establishing permanent distinctions among his subjects; nor is there any legislator so wise or so powerful as to be able to maintain free institutions unless he takes equality as his first principle and his creed. All of our contemporaries who wish to create or secure the independence and dignity of their fellow human beings must therefore show themselves to be friends of equality; and the only worthy way to show it is to be so in truth: the success of their sacred enterprise depends on it.

The task, then, is not to reconstruct an aristocratic society, but to make liberty emerge from within the democratic society where God has placed us.

These two fundamental truths seem to me simple, clear, and fertile, and they lead me naturally to consider what kind of free government can be established among a people where conditions are equal.

It follows from the very constitution of democratic nations and their needs that among them the power of the sovereign must be more uniform, more centralized, more extensive, more penetrating, and more powerful than elsewhere. Society is naturally more active and stronger, the individual more subordinate and weaker; the one does more, the other less — that is inevitable.

We must not expect, therefore, that in democratic countries the sphere of individual independence will ever be as broad as in aristocratic ones. But this is not something to regret; for in aristocratic nations, society is often sacrificed to the individual, and the prosperity of the many to the greatness of a few.

It is at once necessary and desirable that the central power directing a democratic people should be active and powerful. The point is not to make it weak or indolent, but only to prevent it from abusing its agility and its strength.

What most helped secure the independence of private individuals in aristocratic centuries was that the sovereign did not take it upon himself alone to govern and administer the citizens; he was obliged to leave part of that work to members of the aristocracy. As a result, social power was always divided and never weighed entirely and in the same way on every person.

Not only did the sovereign not do everything himself, but most of the officials who acted in his place derived their power from the fact of their birth, not from him, and were not constantly in his hand. He could not create or destroy them at will, or bend them all uniformly to his slightest wishes. This too guaranteed the independence of private individuals.

I fully understand that one cannot resort to the same means today; but I see democratic methods that can replace them.

Instead of turning over to the sovereign alone all the administrative powers that are taken from corporations or from the nobility, some of them can be entrusted to secondary bodies temporarily formed from ordinary citizens; in this way, the liberty of individuals will be more secure without their equality being any less.

The Americans, who do not cling to words as much as we do, kept the name "county" for the largest of their administrative districts, but they partially replaced the count with a provincial assembly.

I would readily concede that in an age of equality like ours, it would be unjust and unreasonable to establish hereditary officials; but nothing prevents us from substituting, to some extent, elected officials. Election is a democratic device that ensures the independence of the official from the central power as much as — and even more than — heredity does among aristocratic peoples.

Aristocratic countries are full of wealthy and influential private individuals who know how to look after themselves and who are not easily or secretly oppressed; and these individuals keep the government in general habits of moderation and restraint.

I know well that democratic countries do not naturally present individuals of this kind; but something analogous can be artificially created in them.

I firmly believe that one cannot re-establish an aristocracy in the world; but I think that ordinary citizens, by associating, can constitute very wealthy, very influential, and very powerful beings — in a word, aristocratic persons.

In this way, one could obtain several of the greatest political advantages of aristocracy without its injustices or its dangers. A political, industrial, commercial, or even scientific and literary association is an enlightened and powerful citizen that cannot be bent at will or oppressed in the shadows, and which, by defending its own particular rights against the demands of power, safeguards the common liberties.

In aristocratic times, every person is always bound very closely to several of their fellow citizens, so that one cannot be attacked without the others rushing to help. In ages of equality, each individual is naturally isolated; they have no hereditary friends whose support they can demand, no class whose sympathies are assured to them; they are easily set apart and trampled underfoot with impunity. In our time, then, an oppressed citizen has only one means of defending himself: to appeal to the nation as a whole, and if it is deaf to his plea, to the human race. And he has only one way to do so: the press. Freedom of the press is therefore infinitely more precious in democratic nations than in all others; it alone cures most of the ills that equality can produce. Equality isolates and weakens people; but the press places beside each of them a very powerful weapon that the weakest and most isolated person can use. Equality strips each individual of the support of those closest to them; but the press allows them to call all their fellow citizens and all their fellow human beings to their aid. Printing has accelerated the progress of equality, and it is one of equality's best correctives.

I think that people who live in aristocracies can, strictly speaking, get along without freedom of the press; but those who live in democratic countries cannot. To guarantee the personal independence of the latter, I do not place my trust in great political assemblies, in parliamentary prerogatives, or in the proclamation of popular sovereignty. All of these can be reconciled, up to a point, with individual servitude; but that servitude cannot be complete if the press is free. The press is, par excellence, the democratic instrument of liberty.

I would say something analogous about the judiciary.

It is in the very nature of the judiciary to concern itself with particular interests and to willingly fix its gaze on the small matters placed before it; it is also in the nature of this power not to come to the aid of the oppressed on its own initiative, but to be constantly at the disposal of the humblest among them. However weak that person may be, they can always compel the judge to hear their complaint and respond to it: this derives from the very constitution of the judiciary.

Such a power is therefore specially suited to the needs of liberty at a time when the sovereign's eye and hand are constantly reaching into the most minute details of human affairs, and when individuals, too weak to protect themselves, are too isolated to count on the help of their peers. The strength of the courts has been, at all times, the greatest guarantee that can be offered to individual independence; but this is especially true in democratic ages. Private rights and interests are always in danger there, unless the judiciary grows and expands as conditions equalize.

Equality suggests to people several tendencies that are very dangerous to liberty and that the lawmaker must always keep a watchful eye on. I will recall only the main ones.

People living in democratic ages do not easily understand the usefulness of forms; they feel an instinctive disdain for them. I have explained the reasons elsewhere. Forms excite their contempt and often their hatred. Since they typically aspire only to easy and immediate gratifications, they rush impetuously toward the object of each desire; the slightest delays make them desperate. This temperament, which they carry into political life, sets them against the forms that delay or obstruct them in some of their plans every day.

But this very inconvenience that the people of democracies find in formal procedures is exactly what makes those procedures so useful to liberty — their principal merit being to serve as a barrier between the strong and the weak, the ruler and the ruled; to slow down the one and give the other time to collect their thoughts. Forms become more necessary as the sovereign becomes more active and more powerful and private individuals become more indolent and more feeble. Thus democratic peoples naturally have more need of formal procedures than other peoples, and they naturally respect them less. This deserves very serious attention.

There is nothing more wretched than the arrogant disdain that most of our contemporaries feel toward questions of procedure; for the smallest questions of procedure have acquired in our time an importance they never had before. Several of the greatest interests of humanity are bound up in them.

I think that if the statesmen who lived in aristocratic times could sometimes scorn formal procedures with impunity, and often rise above them, those who lead the peoples of today must treat the least of them with respect, and must never neglect one except when compelling necessity demands it. In aristocracies, people had a superstitious reverence for forms; we must have an enlightened and deliberate devotion to them.

Another very natural and very dangerous instinct of democratic peoples is the one that leads them to despise individual rights and to pay them little heed.

People generally become attached to a right and show it respect in proportion to its importance or the long use they have made of it. The individual rights found among democratic peoples are usually unimportant, very recent, and quite unstable; as a result, they are often sacrificed without difficulty and violated almost always without remorse.

Now it happens that in this very same time and among these very same nations where people feel a natural contempt for the rights of individuals, the rights of society are naturally expanding and consolidating — that is, people are becoming less attached to particular rights at the very moment when it would be most necessary to retain and defend the few that remain.

It is therefore above all in the democratic times in which we live that the true friends of liberty and of human greatness must constantly stand ready to prevent social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times, there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to let them be oppressed, and no individual right so unimportant that it can be safely handed over to arbitrary power. The reason is simple: when you violate the particular right of an individual at a time when the human mind is imbued with the importance and the sacredness of rights of this kind, you harm only the person you despoil. But to violate such a right in our time is to deeply corrupt national customs and values and to imperil all of society — because the very idea of these kinds of rights is constantly tending, among us, to deteriorate and to be lost.

There are certain habits, certain ideas, and certain vices that belong to a state of revolution, and that a long revolution cannot fail to create and spread, whatever its character, its object, or its setting.

When any nation has changed its leaders, its opinions, and its laws several times within a short span, the people who compose it end up developing a taste for change and growing accustomed to all change being accomplished rapidly by force. They then naturally conceive a contempt for forms whose impotence they see demonstrated every day, and they can only bear with impatience the rule of law that has been evaded so many times before their eyes.

Since the ordinary notions of fairness and morality are no longer sufficient to explain and justify all the novelties that the revolution produces each day, people fall back on the principle of social utility; they create the dogma of political necessity; and they willingly accustom themselves to sacrificing individual interests without scruple, and to trampling individual rights underfoot, in order to more quickly achieve whatever general goal they have set for themselves.

These habits and ideas — which I will call revolutionary, because all revolutions produce them — appear in aristocracies as well as among democratic peoples; but in the former, they are often less powerful and always less lasting, because there they encounter opposing habits, ideas, flaws, and attitudes. They disappear on their own once the revolution is over, and the nation returns to its old political ways. This is not always the case in democratic countries, where there is always reason to fear that revolutionary instincts — softening and regularizing themselves without dying out — may gradually transform into governmental practices and administrative habits.

I know of no country, then, where revolutions are more dangerous than democratic ones — because, apart from the accidental and temporary damage they inevitably cause, they always risk creating permanent and, so to speak, eternal harm.

I believe there are honest forms of resistance and legitimate rebellions. I am not saying, in absolute terms, that people in democratic times should never make revolutions; but I think they are right to hesitate more than others before undertaking one, and that it is often better for them to endure many of the discomforts of their present condition than to resort to so dangerous a remedy.

I will conclude with a general idea that encompasses not only all the particular ideas expressed in this chapter, but most of those that this entire book aims to present.

In the aristocratic centuries that preceded our own, there were very powerful individuals and a very feeble social authority. The very image of society was dim, constantly being lost amid all the different powers that governed citizens. The chief effort of the people of those times had to be directed toward enlarging and strengthening social power, increasing and securing its prerogatives, and, conversely, narrowing individual independence into tighter limits and subordinating private interest to the general interest.

Other dangers and other concerns await the people of our time.

Among most modern nations, the sovereign — whatever its origin, its constitution, or its name — has become almost all-powerful, and individuals are falling more and more to the lowest level of weakness and dependence.

Everything was different in the old societies. Unity and uniformity were found nowhere. Everything threatens to become so alike in ours that the individual face of each person will soon be entirely lost in the common physiognomy. Our forebears were always ready to abuse the idea that particular rights are worthy of respect, and we are naturally inclined to exaggerate the opposite idea — that the interest of any one individual must always yield to the interest of the many.

The political world is changing; from now on, we must seek new remedies for new ills.

To set broad but visible and immovable limits on social power; to give individuals certain rights and guarantee them the uncontested enjoyment of those rights; to preserve for the individual what little independence, strength, and originality they have left; to raise them up beside society and sustain them in the face of it: this seems to me the chief task of the lawmaker in the age we are entering.

It seems as if the rulers of our time seek only to do great things with people. I wish they would think a little more about making great people; that they would attach less value to the work and more to the worker; and that they would remember constantly that a nation cannot long remain strong when every person in it is individually weak, and that no one has yet found any social form or political arrangement capable of making a people energetic by composing it of citizens who are faint-hearted and spineless.

I see among our contemporaries two opposing ideas, both equally destructive.

Some see in equality only the anarchic tendencies it produces. They dread their own free will; they are afraid of themselves.

Others, fewer in number but better informed, take a different view. Alongside the road that starts from equality and leads to anarchy, they have at last discovered the path that seems to lead people irresistibly toward servitude. They bend their souls in advance to this inevitable servitude; and, despairing of remaining free, they already worship in the depths of their hearts the master who is sure to come.

The first group abandons liberty because they think it dangerous; the second, because they judge it impossible.

If I had held this latter belief, I would not have written the book you have just read; I would have confined myself to grieving in secret over the destiny of my fellow human beings.

I wanted to lay bare the dangers that equality poses to human independence, because I firmly believe that these dangers are the most formidable, as well as the least foreseen, of all those that the future holds. But I do not believe them insurmountable.

The people who live in the democratic centuries we are entering naturally have a taste for independence. They naturally bear the constraints of rules with impatience: the very permanence of the conditions they prefer wearies them. They love power; but they are inclined to despise and hate whoever wields it, and they easily slip from its grasp because of their very smallness and their mobility.

These instincts will always be found, because they spring from the very depths of a social order that will not change. For a long time, they will prevent any despotism from establishing itself, and they will furnish new weapons to each new generation that chooses to fight for the liberty of humankind.

Let us therefore have, toward the future, that salutary fear that makes us watchful and ready to fight — and not that soft and idle terror that demoralizes the heart and saps it of all strength.

CHAPTER VIII.

General view of the subject.

Before I leave forever the path I have been traveling, I would like to take in, with one last look, all the various features that mark the face of the new world, and to render a final judgment on the general influence that equality is bound to exert on the fate of humankind. But the difficulty of such an undertaking stops me; in the presence of so great a subject, I feel my vision blurring and my reason faltering.

This new society that I have tried to paint and now wish to judge is only just being born. Time has not yet fixed its form; the great revolution that created it is still going on; and in what is happening in our time, it is nearly impossible to tell what will pass away with the revolution itself and what will endure after it.

The world that is rising is still half buried under the ruins of the world that is falling, and amid the immense confusion of human affairs, no one can say what will remain standing of old institutions and old customs and values, and what will finish disappearing.

Although the revolution taking place in the social order, the laws, the ideas, and the feelings of human beings is still far from complete, it is already impossible to compare what it has produced with anything the world has seen before. I look back century by century to the remotest antiquity; I see nothing that resembles what is before my eyes. The past no longer illuminates the future; the mind advances in darkness.

Yet amid this picture — so vast, so new, so confused — I can already make out a few main features emerging, and I will point them out:

I see that goods and evils are distributed fairly equally in the world. Great fortunes are disappearing; the number of small ones is growing; desires and pleasures are multiplying; there is no more extraordinary prosperity or irremediable misery. Ambition is a universal feeling, but vast ambitions are rare. Each individual is isolated and weak; society is agile, far-sighted, and strong; private individuals accomplish small things, and the state accomplishes immense ones.

Souls are not filled with energy; but customs are gentle and laws are humane. If there is little in the way of great self-sacrifice, of very lofty, very brilliant, or very pure virtues, habits are orderly, violence is rare, cruelty almost unknown. People's lives are growing longer and their property more secure. Life is not highly adorned, but it is very comfortable and very peaceful. There are few very refined pleasures and few very crude ones, little polish in manners and little brutality in tastes. You rarely find very learned individuals or very ignorant populations. Genius becomes rarer and general knowledge more widespread. The human mind develops through the small combined efforts of all, not through the powerful thrust of a few. There is less perfection but more productivity in human works. All the ties of race, class, and homeland are loosening; the great bond of humanity is growing tighter.

If, among all these diverse features, I look for the one that seems to me the most general and the most striking, I find that what is happening to fortunes is reproducing itself in a thousand other forms. Nearly all extremes are softening and blunting; nearly every sharp peak is being worn down to make way for something average — something at once less lofty and less low, less brilliant and less obscure, than what used to exist in the world.

I cast my gaze over this innumerable crowd of similar beings, where nothing rises and nothing sinks. The spectacle of this universal uniformity saddens me and chills me, and I am tempted to mourn the society that is no more.

When the world was full of people who were very great and very small, very rich and very poor, very learned and very ignorant, I turned my eyes away from the latter to fix them only on the former, and these delighted my sight. But I understand that this pleasure came from my own weakness: it is because I cannot take in everything around me at once that I am allowed to select, from among so many objects, those that I choose to contemplate. It is not the same for the all-powerful and eternal being whose eye necessarily encompasses the whole of things, and who sees distinctly — yet all at once — the entire human race and every individual person.

It is natural to believe that what most satisfies the gaze of this creator and preserver of humankind is not the singular prosperity of a few, but the greater well-being of all. What seems like a decline to me is therefore, in his eyes, a form of progress; what wounds me pleases him. Equality is perhaps less elevated; but it is more just, and its justice is the source of its grandeur and its beauty.

I strive to enter into this divine point of view, and it is from there that I seek to consider and to judge human affairs.

No one on earth can yet affirm, in absolute and general terms, that the new state of societies is superior to the old; but it is already easy to see that it is different.

There are certain vices and certain virtues that were bound up with the constitution of aristocratic nations and that are so contrary to the spirit of new peoples that one could not introduce them into their midst. There are good tendencies and bad instincts that were foreign to the former and are natural to the latter; ideas that present themselves readily to the imagination of the one, and that the mind of the other rejects. They are like two distinct humanities, each of which has its own particular advantages and disadvantages, its own blessings and afflictions.

We must therefore take great care not to judge the societies that are being born with ideas drawn from those that are no more. That would be unjust, for these societies differ so prodigiously from one another that they are incomparable.

It would be scarcely more reasonable to ask the people of our time for the particular virtues that flowed from the social order of their ancestors, since that social order itself has collapsed, dragging down with it, in a confused heap, all the goods and all the evils it carried.

But these things are still poorly understood in our time.

I see a great number of my contemporaries who undertake to select, from among the institutions, the opinions, and the ideas that arose from the aristocratic constitution of the old society, certain ones they would happily abandon, while wishing to keep others and carry them into the new world.

I think these people are wasting their time and their effort on an honest but futile task.

The question is no longer how to retain the particular advantages that inequality of conditions provided, but how to secure the new goods that equality can offer. We should not strive to make ourselves resemble our ancestors, but endeavor to attain the kind of greatness and happiness that is our own.

As for me, having arrived at this final point of my journey, and looking back from a distance at all the diverse objects I contemplated one by one as I walked, I am full of fears and full of hopes. I see great dangers that can be averted; great evils that can be avoided or contained. And I grow more and more firm in the belief that, for democratic nations to be honest and prosperous, it is still enough for them to will it.

I am not unaware that many of my contemporaries have thought that peoples are never masters of themselves here on earth, and that they necessarily obey some insurmountable and unintelligible force born of prior events, of race, of soil, or of climate.

These are false and cowardly doctrines, which can never produce anything but weak people and faint-hearted nations. Providence did not create the human race either entirely independent or completely enslaved. It is true that Providence traces around each person a fatal circle that they cannot escape; but within its vast limits, human beings are powerful and free — and so are peoples.

The nations of our time cannot prevent conditions within them from being equal; but it depends on them whether equality leads them to servitude or to freedom, to knowledge or to barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness.

END OF VOLUME FOUR.