Democracy In America, Vol. 2
by Alexis de Toqueville
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

Book Two

Influence Of Democracy On Progress Of Opinion In US

De Tocqueville's Preface To The Second Part

The Americans live in a democratic state of society, which
has naturally suggested to them certain laws and a certain
political character. This same state of society has, moreover,
engendered amongst them a multitude of feelings and opinions
which were unknown amongst the elder aristocratic communities of
Europe: it has destroyed or modified all the relations which
before existed, and established others of a novel kind. The
aspect of civil society has been no less affected by these
changes than that of the political world. The former subject has
been treated of in the work on the Democracy of America, which I
published five years ago; to examine the latter is the object of
the present book; but these two parts complete each other, and
form one and the same work.

I must at once warn the reader against an error which would
be extremely prejudicial to me. When he finds that I attribute
so many different consequences to the principle of equality, he
may thence infer that I consider that principle to be the sole
cause of all that takes place in the present age: but this would
be to impute to me a very narrow view. A multitude of opinions,
feelings, and propensities are now in existence, which owe their
origin to circumstances unconnected with or even contrary to the
principle of equality. Thus if I were to select the United
States as an example, I could easily prove that the nature of the
country, the origin of its inhabitants, the religion of its
founders, their acquired knowledge, and their former habits, have
exercised, and still exercise, independently of democracy, a vast
influence upon the thoughts and feelings of that people.
Different causes, but no less distinct from the circumstance of
the equality of conditions, might be traced in Europe, and would
explain a great portion of the occurrences taking place amongst
us.

I acknowledge the existence of all these different causes,
and their power, but my subject does not lead me to treat of
them. I have not undertaken to unfold the reason of all our
inclinations and all our notions: my only object is to show in
what respects the principle of equality has modified both the
former and the latter.

Some readers may perhaps be astonished that - firmly
persuaded as I am that the democratic revolution which we are
witnessing is an irresistible fact against which it would be
neither desirable nor wise to struggle - I should often have had
occasion in this book to address language of such severity to
those democratic communities which this revolution has brought
into being. My answer is simply, that it is because I am not an
adversary of democracy, that I have sought to speak of democracy
in all sincerity.

Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and
truth is seldom offered to them by their friends: for this reason
I have spoken it. I was persuaded that many would take upon
themselves to announce the new blessings which the principle of
equality promises to mankind, but that few would dare to point
out from afar the dangers with which it threatens them. To those
perils therefore I have turned my chief attention, and believing
that I had discovered them clearly, I have not had the cowardice
to leave them untold.

I trust that my readers will find in this Second Part that
impartiality which seems to have been remarked in the former
work. Placed as I am in the midst of the conflicting opinions
between which we are divided, I have endeavored to suppress
within me for a time the favorable sympathies or the adverse
emotions with which each of them inspires me. If those who read
this book can find a single sentence intended to flatter any of
the great parties which have agitated my country, or any of those
petty factions which now harass and weaken it, let such readers
raise their voices to accuse me.

The subject I have sought to embrace is immense, for it
includes the greater part of the feelings and opinions to which
the new state of society has given birth. Such a subject is
doubtless above my strength, and in treating it I have not
succeeded in satisfying myself. But, if I have not been able to
reach the goal which I had in view, my readers will at least do
me the justice to acknowledge that I have conceived and followed
up my undertaking in a spirit not unworthy of success.

A. De T.

March, 1840

Chapter I: Philosophical Method Among the Americans

I think that in no country in the civilized world is less
attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The
Americans have no philosophical school of their own; and they
care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided,
the very names of which are scarcely known to them. Nevertheless
it is easy to perceive that almost all the inhabitants of the
United States conduct their understanding in the same manner, and
govern it by the same rules; that is to say, that without ever
having taken the trouble to define the rules of a philosophical
method, they are in possession of one, common to the whole
people. To evade the bondage of system and habit, of family
maxims, class opinions, and, in some degree, of national
prejudices; to accept tradition only as a means of information,
and existing facts only as a lesson used in doing otherwise, and
doing better; to seek the reason of things for one's self, and in
one's self alone; to tend to results without being bound to
means, and to aim at the substance through the form; - such are
the principal characteristics of what I shall call the
philosophical method of the Americans. But if I go further, and
if I seek amongst these characteristics that which predominates
over and includes almost all the rest, I discover that in most of
the operations of the mind, each American appeals to the
individual exercise of his own understanding alone. America is
therefore one of the countries in the world where philosophy is
least studied, and where the precepts of Descartes are best
applied. Nor is this surprising. The Americans do not read the
works of Descartes, because their social condition deters them
from speculative studies; but they follow his maxims because this
very social condition naturally disposes their understanding to
adopt them. In the midst of the continual movement which agitates
a democratic community, the tie which unites one generation to
another is relaxed or broken; every man readily loses the trace
of the ideas of his forefathers or takes no care about them. Nor
can men living in this state of society derive their belief from
the opinions of the class to which they belong, for, so to speak,
there are no longer any classes, or those which still exist are
composed of such mobile elements, that their body can never
exercise a real control over its members. As to the influence
which the intelligence of one man has on that of another, it must
necessarily be very limited in a country where the citizens,
placed on the footing of a general similitude, are all closely
seen by each other; and where, as no signs of incontestable
greatness or superiority are perceived in any one of them, they
are constantly brought back to their own reason as the most
obvious and proximate source of truth. It is not only confidence
in this or that man which is then destroyed, but the taste for
trusting the ipse dixit of any man whatsoever. Everyone shuts
himself up in his own breast, and affects from that point to
judge the world.

The practice which obtains amongst the Americans of fixing
the standard of their judgment in themselves alone, leads them to
other habits of mind. As they perceive that they succeed in
resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which
their practical life presents, they readily conclude that
everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it
transcends the limits of the understanding. Thus they fall to
denying what they cannot comprehend; which leaves them but little
faith for whatever is extraordinary, and an almost insurmountable
distaste for whatever is supernatural. As it is on their own
testimony that they are accustomed to rely, they like to discern
the object which engages their attention with extreme clearness;
they therefore strip off as much as possible all that covers it,
they rid themselves of whatever separates them from it, they
remove whatever conceals it from sight, in order to view it more
closely and in the broad light of day. This disposition of the
mind soon leads them to contemn forms, which they regard as
useless and inconvenient veils placed between them and the truth.

The Americans then have not required to extract their
philosophical method from books; they have found it in
themselves. The same thing may be remarked in what has taken
place in Europe. This same method has only been established and
made popular in Europe in proportion as the condition of society
has become more equal, and men have grown more like each other.
Let us consider for a moment the connection of the periods in
which this change may be traced. In the sixteenth century the
Reformers subjected some of the dogmas of the ancient faith to
the scrutiny of private judgment; but they still withheld from it
the judgment of all the rest. In the seventeenth century, Bacon
in the natural sciences, and Descartes in the study of philosophy
in the strict sense of the term, abolished recognized formulas,
destroyed the empire of tradition, and overthrew the authority of
the schools. The philosophers of the eighteenth century,
generalizing at length the same principle, undertook to submit to
the private judgment of each man all the objects of his belief.

Who does not perceive that Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire
employed the same method, and that they differed only in the
greater or less use which they professed should be made of it?
Why did the Reformers confine themselves so closely within the
circle of religious ideas? Why did Descartes, choosing only to
apply his method to certain matters, though he had made it fit to
be applied to all, declare that men might judge for themselves in
matters philosophical but not in matters political? How happened
it that in the eighteenth century those general applications were
all at once drawn from this same method, which Descartes and his
predecessors had either not perceived or had rejected? To what,
lastly, is the fact to be attributed, that at this period the
method we are speaking of suddenly emerged from the schools, to
penetrate into society and become the common standard of
intelligence; and that, after it had become popular among the
French, it has been ostensibly adopted or secretly followed by
all the nations of Europe?

The philosophical method here designated may have been
engendered in the sixteenth century - it may have been more
accurately defined and more extensively applied in the
seventeenth; but neither in the one nor in the other could it be
commonly adopted. Political laws, the condition of society, and
the habits of mind which are derived from these causes, were as
yet opposed to it. It was discovered at a time when men were
beginning to equalize and assimilate their conditions. It could
only be generally followed in ages when those conditions had at
length become nearly equal, and men nearly alike.

The philosophical method of the eighteenth century is then
not only French, but it is democratic; and this explains why it
was so readily admitted throughout Europe, where it has
contributed so powerfully to change the face of society. It is
not because the French have changed their former opinions, and
altered their former manners, that they have convulsed the world;
but because they were the first to generalize and bring to light
a philosophical method, by the assistance of which it became easy
to attack all that was old, and to open a path to all that was
new.

If it be asked why, at the present day, this same method is
more rigorously followed and more frequently applied by the
French than by the Americans, although the principle of equality
be no less complete, and of more ancient date, amongst the latter
people, the fact may be attributed to two circumstances, which it
is essential to have clearly understood in the first instance.
It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to
Anglo-American society. In the United States religion is
therefore commingled with all the habits of the nation and all
the feelings of patriotism; whence it derives a peculiar force.
To this powerful reason another of no less intensity may be
added: in American religion has, as it were, laid down its own
limits. Religious institutions have remained wholly distinct from
political institutions, so that former laws have been easily
changed whilst former belief has remained unshaken. Christianity
has therefore retained a strong hold on the public mind in
America; and, I would more particularly remark, that its sway is
not only that of a philosophical doctrine which has been adopted
upon inquiry, but of a religion which is believed without
discussion. In the United States Christian sects are infinitely
diversified and perpetually modified; but Christianity itself is
a fact so irresistibly established, that no one undertakes either
to attack or to defend it. The Americans, having admitted the
principal doctrines of the Christian religion without inquiry,
are obliged to accept in like manner a great number of moral
truths originating in it and connected with it. Hence the
activity of individual analysis is restrained within narrow
limits, and many of the most important of human opinions are
removed from the range of its influence.

The second circumstance to which I have alluded is the
following: the social condition and the constitution of the
Americans are democratic, but they have not had a democratic
revolution. They arrived upon the soil they occupy in nearly the
condition in which we see them at the present day; and this is of
very considerable importance.

There are no revolutions which do not shake existing belief,
enervate authority, and throw doubts over commonly received
ideas. The effect of all revolutions is therefore, more or less,
to surrender men to their own guidance, and to open to the mind
of every man a void and almost unlimited range of speculation.
When equality of conditions succeeds a protracted conflict
between the different classes of which the elder society was
composed, envy, hatred, and uncharitableness, pride, and
exaggerated self- confidence are apt to seize upon the human
heart, and plant their sway there for a time. This,
independently of equality itself, tends powerfully to divide men
- to lead them to mistrust the judgment of others, and to seek
the light of truth nowhere but in their own understandings.
Everyone then attempts to be his own sufficient guide, and makes
it his boast to form his own opinions on all subjects. Men are
no longer bound together by ideas, but by interests; and it would
seem as if human opinions were reduced to a sort of intellectual
dust, scattered on every side, unable to collect, unable to
cohere.

Thus, that independence of mind which equality supposes to
exist, is never so great, nor ever appears so excessive, as at
the time when equality is beginning to establish itself, and in
the course of that painful labor by which it is established.
That sort of intellectual freedom which equality may give ought,
therefore, to be very carefully distinguished from the anarchy
which revolution brings. Each of these two things must be
severally considered, in order not to conceive exaggerated hopes
or fears of the future.

I believe that the men who will live under the new forms of
society will make frequent use of their private judgment; but I
am far from thinking that they will often abuse it. This is
attributable to a cause of more general application to all
democratic countries, and which, in the long run, must needs
restrain in them the independence of individual speculation
within fixed, and sometimes narrow, limits. I shall proceed to
point out this cause in the next chapter.

Chapter II: Of The Principal Source Of Belief Among Democratic
Nations

At different periods dogmatical belief is more or less
abundant. It arises in different ways, and it may change its
object or its form; but under no circumstances will dogmatical
belief cease to exist, or, in other words, men will never cease
to entertain some implicit opinions without trying them by actual
discussion. If everyone undertook to form his own opinions and
to seek for truth by isolated paths struck out by himself alone,
it is not to be supposed that any considerable number of men
would ever unite in any common belief. But obviously without
such common belief no society can prosper - say rather no society
can subsist; for without ideas held in common, there is no common
action, and without common action, there may still be men, but
there is no social body. In order that society should exist,
and, a fortiori, that a society should prosper, it is required
that all the minds of the citizens should be rallied and held
together by certain predominant ideas; and this cannot be the
case, unless each of them sometimes draws his opinions from the
common source, and consents to accept certain matters of belief
at the hands of the community.

If I now consider man in his isolated capacity, I find that
dogmatical belief is not less indispensable to him in order to
live alone, than it is to enable him to co-operate with his
fellow- creatures. If man were forced to demonstrate to himself
all the truths of which he makes daily use, his task would never
end. He would exhaust his strength in preparatory exercises,
without advancing beyond them. As, from the shortness of his
life, he has not the time, nor, from the limits of his
intelligence, the capacity, to accomplish this, he is reduced to
take upon trust a number of facts and opinions which he has not
had either the time or the power to verify himself, but which men
of greater ability have sought out, or which the world adopts. On
this groundwork he raises for himself the structure of his own
thoughts; nor is he led to proceed in this manner by choice so
much as he is constrainsd by the inflexible law of his condition.
There is no philosopher of such great parts in the world, but
that he believes a million of things on the faith of other
people, and supposes a great many more truths than he
demonstrates. This is not only necessary but desirable. A man
who should undertake to inquire into everything for himself,
could devote to each thing but little time and attention. His
task would keep his mind in perpetual unrest, which would prevent
him from penetrating to the depth of any truth, or of grappling
his mind indissolubly to any conviction. His intellect would be
at once independent and powerless. He must therefore make his
choice from amongst the various objects of human belief, and he
must adopt many opinions without discussion, in order to search
the better into that smaller number which he sets apart for
investigation. It is true that whoever receives an opinion on
the word of another, does so far enslave his mind; but it is a
salutary servitude which allows him to make a good use of
freedom.

A principle of authority must then always occur, under all
circumstances, in some part or other of the moral and
intellectual world. Its place is variable, but a place it
necessarily has. The independence of individual minds may be
greater, or it may be less: unbounded it cannot be. Thus the
question is, not to know whether any intellectual authority
exists in the ages of democracy, but simply where it resides and
by what standard it is to be measured.

I have shown in the preceding chapter how the equality of
conditions leads men to entertain a sort of instinctive
incredulity of the supernatural, and a very lofty and often
exaggerated opinion of the human understanding. The men who live
at a period of social equality are not therefore easily led to
place that intellectual authority to which they bow either beyond
or above humanity. They commonly seek for the sources of truth
in themselves, or in those who are like themselves. This would
be enough to prove that at such periods no new religion could be
established, and that all schemes for such a purpose would be not
only impious but absurd and irrational. It may be foreseen that
a democratic people will not easily give credence to divine
missions; that they will turn modern prophets to a ready jest;
and they that will seek to discover the chief arbiter of their
belief within, and not beyond, the limits of their kind.

When the ranks of society are unequal, and men unlike each
other in condition, there are some individuals invested with all
the power of superior intelligence, learning, and enlightenment,
whilst the multitude is sunk in ignorance and prejudice. Men
living at these aristocratic periods are therefore naturally
induced to shape their opinions by the superior standard of a
person or a class of persons, whilst they are averse to recognize
the infallibility of the mass of the people.

The contrary takes place in ages of equality. The nearer
the citizens are drawn to the common level of an equal and
similar condition, the less prone does each man become to place
implicit faith in a certain man or a certain class of men. But
his readiness to believe the multitude increases, and opinion is
more than ever mistress of the world. Not only is common opinion
the only guide which private judgment retains amongst a
democratic people, but amongst such a people it possesses a power
infinitely beyond what it has elsewhere. At periods of equality
men have no faith in one another, by reason of their common
resemblance; but this very resemblance gives them almost
unbounded confidence in the judgment of the public; for it would
not seem probable, as they are all endowed with equal means of
judging, but that the greater truth should go with the greater
number.

When the inhabitant of a democratic country compares himself
individually with all those about him, he feels with pride that
he is the equal of any one of them; but when he comes to survey
the totality of his fellows, and to place himself in contrast to
so huge a body, he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his
own insignificance and weakness. The same equality which renders
him independent of each of his fellow-citizens taken severally,
exposes him alone and unprotected to the influence of the greater
number. The public has therefore among a democratic people a
singular power, of which aristocratic nations could never so much
as conceive an idea; for it does not persuade to certain
opinions, but it enforces them, and infuses them into the
faculties by a sort of enormous pressure of the minds of all upon
the reason of each.

In the United States the majority undertakes to supply a
multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who
are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their
own. Everybody there adopts great numbers of theories, on
philosophy, morals, and politics, without inquiry, upon public
trust; and if we look to it very narrowly, it will be perceived
that religion herself holds her sway there, much less as a
doctrine of revelation than as a commonly received opinion. The
fact that the political laws of the Americans are such that the
majority rules the community with sovereign sway, materially
increases the power which that majority naturally exercises over
the mind. For nothing is more customary in man than to recognize
superior wisdom in the person of his oppressor. This political
omnipotence of the majority in the United States doubtless
augments the influence which public opinion would obtain without
it over the mind of each member of the community; but the
foundations of that influence do not rest upon it. They must be
sought for in the principle of equality itself, not in the more
or less popular institutions which men living under that
condition may give themselves. The intellectual dominion of the
greater number would probably be less absolute amongst a
democratic people governed by a king than in the sphere of a pure
democracy, but it will always be extremely absolute; and by
whatever political laws men are governed in the ages of equality,
it may be foreseen that faith in public opinion will become a
species of religion there, and the majority its ministering
prophet.

Thus intellectual authority will be different, but it will
not be diminished; and far from thinking that it will disappear,
I augur that it may readily acquire too much preponderance, and
confine the action of private judgment within narrower limits
than are suited either to the greatness or the happiness of the
human race. In the principle of equality I very clearly discern
two tendencies; the one leading the mind of every man to untried
thoughts, the other inclined to prohibit him from thinking at
all. And I perceive how, under the dominion of certain laws,
democracy would extinguish that liberty of the mind to which a
democratic social condition is favorable; so that, after having
broken all the bondage once imposed on it by ranks or by men, the
human mind would be closely fettered to the general will of the
greatest number.

If the absolute power of the majority were to be substituted
by democratic nations, for all the different powers which checked
or retarded overmuch the energy of individual minds, the evil
would only have changed its symptoms. Men would not have found
the means of independent life; they would simply have invented
(no easy task) a new dress for servitude. There is - and I
cannot repeat it too often - there is in this matter for profound
reflection for those who look on freedom as a holy thing, and who
hate not only the despot, but despotism. For myself, when I feel
the hand of power lie heavy on my brow, I care but little to know
who oppresses me; and I am not the more disposed to pass beneath
the yoke, because it is held out to me by the arms of a million
of men.

Book One - Chapters III-V

Chapter III: Why The Americans Display More Readiness And More
Taste For General Ideas Than Their Forefathers, The English
The Deity does not regard the human race collectively. He
surveys at one glance and severally all the beings of whom
mankind is composed, and he discerns in each man the resemblances
which assimilate him to all his fellows, and the differences
which distinguish him from them. God, therefore, stands in no
need of general ideas; that is to say, he is never sensible of
the necessity of collecting a considerable number of analogous
objects under the same form for greater convenience in thinking.
Such is, however, not the case with man. If the human mind were
to attempt to examine and pass a judgment on all the individual
cases before it, the immensity of detail would soon lead it
astray and bewilder its discernment: in this strait, man has
recourse to an imperfect but necessary expedient, which at once
assists and demonstrates his weakness. Having superficially
considered a certain number of objects, and remarked their
resemblance, he assigns to them a common name, sets them apart,
and proceeds onwards.

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of
the insufficiency of the human intellect; for there are in nature
no beings exactly alike, no things precisely identical, nor any
rules indiscriminately and alike applicable to several objects at
once. The chief merit of general ideas is, that they enable the
human mind to pass a rapid judgment on a great many objects at
once; but, on the other hand, the notions they convey are never
otherwise than incomplete, and they always cause the mind to lose
as much in accuracy as it gains in comprehensiveness. As social
bodies advance in civilization, they acquire the knowledge of new
facts, and they daily lay hold almost unconsciously of some
particular truths. The more truths of this kind a man
apprehends, the more general ideas is he naturally led to
conceive. A multitude of particular facts cannot be seen
separately, without at last discovering the common tie which
connects them. Several individuals lead to the perception of the
species; several species to that of the genus. Hence the habit
and the taste for general ideas will always be greatest amongst a
people of ancient cultivation and extensive knowledge.

But there are other reasons which impel men to generalize
their ideas, or which restrain them from it.

The Americans are much more addicted to the use of general
ideas than the English, and entertain a much greater relish for
them: this appears very singular at first sight, when it is
remembered that the two nations have the same origin, that they
lived for centuries under the same laws, and that they still
incessantly interchange their opinions and their manners. This
contrast becomes much more striking still, if we fix our eyes on
our own part of the world, and compare together the two most
enlightened nations which inhabit it. It would seem as if the
mind of the English could only tear itself reluctantly and
painfully away from the observation of particular facts, to rise
from them to their causes; and that it only generalizes in spite
of itself. Amongst the French, on the contrary, the taste for
general ideas would seem to have grown to so ardent a passion,
that it must be satisfied on every occasion. I am informed,
every morning when I wake, that some general and eternal law has
just been discovered, which I never heard mentioned before.
There is not a mediocre scribbler who does not try his hand at
discovering truths applicable to a great kingdom, and who is very
ill pleased with himself if he does not succeed in compressing
the human race into the compass of an article. So great a
dissimilarity between two very enlightened nations surprises me.
If I again turn my attention to England, and observe the events
which have occurred there in the last half-century, I think I may
affirm that a taste for general ideas increases in that country
in proportion as its ancient constitution is weakened.

The state of civilization is therefore insufficient by
itself to explain what suggests to the human mind the love of
general ideas, or diverts it from them. When the conditions of
men are very unequal, and inequality itself is the permanent
state of society, individual men gradually become so dissimilar
that each class assumes the aspect of a distinct race: only one
of these classes is ever in view at the same instant; and losing
sight of that general tie which binds them all within the vast
bosom of mankind, the observation invariably rests not on man,
but on certain men. Those who live in this aristocratic state of
society never, therefore, conceive very general ideas respecting
themselves, and that is enough to imbue them with an habitual
distrust of such ideas, and an instinctive aversion of them.
He, on the contrary, who inhabits a democratic country, sees
around him, one very hand, men differing but little from each
other; he cannot turn his mind to any one portion of mankind,
without expanding and dilating his thought till it embrace the
whole. All the truths which are applicable to himself, appear to
him equally and similarly applicable to each of his
fellow-citizens and fellow-men. Having contracted the habit of
generalizing his ideas in the study which engages him most, and
interests him more than others, he transfers the same habit to
all his pursuits; and thus it is that the craving to discover
general laws in everything, to include a great number of objects
under the same formula, and to explain a mass of facts by a
single cause, becomes an ardent, and sometimes an undiscerning,
passion in the human mind.

Nothing shows the truth of this proposition more clearly
than the opinions of the ancients respecting their slaves. The
most profound and capacious minds of Rome and Greece were never
able to reach the idea, at once so general and so simple, of the
common likeness of men, and of the common birthright of each to
freedom: they strove to prove that slavery was in the order of
nature, and that it would always exist. Nay, more, everything
shows that those of the ancients who had passed from the servile
to the free condition, many of whom have left us excellent
writings, did themselves regard servitude in no other light.

All the great writers of antiquity belonged to the
aristocracy of masters, or at least they saw that aristocracy
established and uncontested before their eyes. Their mind, after
it had expanded itself in several directions, was barred from
further progress in this one; and the advent of Jesus Christ upon
earth was required to teach that all the members of the human
race are by nature equal and alike.

In the ages of equality all men are independent of each
other, isolated and weak. The movements of the multitude are not
permanently guided by the will of any individuals; at such times
humanity seems always to advance of itself. In order, therefore,
to explain what is passing in the world, man is driven to seek
for some great causes, which, acting in the same manner on all
our fellow-creatures, thus impel them all involuntarily to pursue
the same track. This again naturally leads the human mind to
conceive general ideas, and superinduces a taste for them.

I have already shown in what way the equality of conditions
leads every man to investigate truths for himself. It may
readily be perceived that a method of this kind must insensibly
beget a tendency to general ideas in the human mind. When I
repudiate the traditions of rank, profession, and birth; when I
escape from the authority of example, to seek out, by the single
effort of my reason, the path to be followed, I am inclined to
derive the motives of my opinions from human nature itself; which
leads me necessarily, and almost unconsciously, to adopt a great
number of very general notions.

All that I have here said explains the reasons for which the
English display much less readiness and taste or the
generalization of ideas than their American progeny, and still
less again than their French neighbors; and likewise the reason
for which the English of the present day display more of these
qualities than their forefathers did. The English have long been
a very enlightened and a very aristocratic nation; their
enlightened condition urged them constantly to generalize, and
their aristocratic habits confined them to particularize. Hence
arose that philosophy, at once bold and timid, broad and narrow,
which has hitherto prevailed in England, and which still
obstructs and stagnates in so many minds in that country.

Independently of the causes I have pointed out in what goes
before, others may be discerned less apparent, but no less
efficacious, which engender amongst almost every democratic
people a taste, and frequently a passion, for general ideas. An
accurate distinction must be taken between ideas of this kind.
Some are the result of slow, minute, and conscientious labor of
the mind, and these extend the sphere of human knowledge; others
spring up at once from the first rapid exercise of the wits, and
beget none but very superficial and very uncertain notions. Men
who live in ages of equality have a great deal of curiosity and
very little leisure; their life is so practical, so confused, so
excited, so active, that but little time remains to them for
thought. Such men are prone to general ideas because they spare
them the trouble of studying particulars; they contain, if I may
so speak, a great deal in a little compass, and give, in a little
time, a great return. If then, upon a brief and inattentive
investigation, a common relation is thought to be detected
between certain obtects, inquiry is not pushed any further; and
without examining in detail how far these different objects
differ or agree, they are hastily arranged under one formulary,
in order to pass to another subject.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a democratic
period is the taste all men have at such ties for easy success
and present enjoyment. This occurs in the pursuits of the
intellect as well as in all others. Most of those who live at a
time of equality are full of an ambition at once aspiring and
relaxed: they would fain succeed brilliantly and at once, but
they would be dispensed from great efforts to obtain success.
These conflicting tendencies lead straight to the research of
general ideas, by aid of which they flatter themselves that they
can figure very importantly at a small expense, and draw the
attention of the public with very little trouble. And I know not
whether they be wrong in thinking thus. For their readers are as
much averse to investigating anything to the bottom as they can
be themselves; and what is generally sought in the productions of
the mind is easy pleasure and information without labor.

If aristocratic nations do not make sufficient use of
general ideas, and frequently treat them with inconsiderate
disdain, it is true, on the other hand, that a democratic people
is ever ready to carry ideas of this kind to excess, and to
espouse the with injudicious warmth.

Chapter IV: Why The Americans Have Never Been So Eager As The
French For General Ideas In Political Matters

I observed in the last chapter, that the Americans show a
less decided taste for general ideas than the French; this is
more especially true in political matters. Although the
Americans infuse into their legislation infinitely more general
ideas than the English, and although they pay much more attention
than the latter people to the adjustment of the practice of
affairs to theory, no political bodies in the United States have
ever shown so warm an attachment to general ideas as the
Constituent Assembly and the Convention in France. At no time
has the American people laid hold on ideas of this kind with the
passionate energy of the French people in the eighteenth century,
or displayed the same blind confidence in the value and absolute
truth of any theory. This difference between the Americans and
the French originates in several causes, but principally in the
following one. The Americans form a democratic people, which has
always itself directed public affairs. The French are a
democratic people, who, for a long time, could only speculate on
the best manner of conducting them. The social condition of
France led that people to conceive very general ideas on the
subject of government, whilst its political constitution
prevented it from correcting those ideas by experiment,and from
gradually detecting their insufficiency; whereas in America the
two things constantly balance and correct each other.

It may seem, at first sight, that this is very much opposed
to what I have said before, that democratic nations derive their
love of theory from the excitement of their active life. A more
attentive examination will show that there is nothing
contradictory in the proposition. Men living in democratic
countries eagerly lay hold of general ideas because they have but
little leisure, and because these ideas spare them the trouble of
studying particulars. This is true; but it is only to be
understood to apply to those matters which are not the necessary
and habitual subjects of their thoughts. Mercantile men will take
up very eagerly, and without any very close scrutiny, all the
general ideas on philosophy, politics, science, or the arts,
which may be presented to them; but for such as relate to
commerce, they will not receive them without inquiry, or adopt
them without reserve. The same thing applies to statesmen with
regard to general ideas in politics. If, then, there be a subject
upon which a democratic people is peculiarly liable to abandon
itself, blindly and extravagantly, to general ideas, the best
corrective that can be used will be to make that subject a part
of the daily practical occupation of that people. The people
will then be compelled to enter upon its details, and the details
will teach them the weak points of the theory. This remedy may
frequently be a painful one, but its effect is certain.

Thus it happens, that the democratic institutions which
compel every citizen to take a practical part in the government,
moderate that excessive taste for general theories in politics
which the principle of equality suggests.

Chapter V: Of The Manner In Which Religion In The United States
Avails Itself Of Democratic Tendencies

I have laid it down in a preceding chapter that men cannot
do without dogmatical belief; and even that it is very much to be
desired that such belief should exist amongst them. I now add,
that of all the kinds of dogmatical belief the most desirable
appears to me to be dogmatical belief in matters of religion; and
this is a very clear inference, even from no higher consideration
than the interests of this world. There is hardly any human
action, however particular a character be assigned to it, which
does not originate in some very general idea men have conceived
of the Deity, of his relation to mankind, of the nature of their
own souls, and of their duties to their fellow-creatures. Nor
can anything prevent these ideas from being the common spring
from which everything else emanates. Men are therefore
immeasurably interested in acquiring fixed ideas of God, of the
soul, and of their common duties to their Creator and to their
fellow-men; for doubt on these first principles would abandon all
their actions to the impulse of chance, and would condemn them to
live, to a certain extent, powerless and undisciplined.

This is then the subject on which it is most important for
each of us to entertain fixed ideas; and unhappily it is also the
subject on which it is most difficult for each of us, left to
himself, to settle his opinions by the sole force of his reason.
None but minds singularly free from the ordinary anxieties of
life - minds at once penetrating, subtle, and trained by thinking
- can even with the assistance of much time and care, sound the
depth of these most necessary truths. And, indeed, we see that
these philosophers are themselves almost always enshrouded in
uncertainties; that at every step the natural light which
illuminates their path grows dimmer and less secure; and that, in
spite of all their efforts, they have as yet only discovered a
small number of conflicting notions, on which the mind of man has
been tossed about for thousands of years, without either laying a
firmer grasp on truth, or finding novelty even in its errors.
Studies of this nature are far above the average capacity of men;
and even if the majority of mankind were capable of such
pursuits, it is evident that leisure to cultivate them would
still be wanting. Fixed ideas of God and human nature are
indispensable to the daily practice of men's lives; but the
practice of their lives prevents them from acquiring such ideas.

The difficulty appears to me to be without a parallel.
Amongst the sciences there are some which are useful to the mass
of mankind, and which are within its reach; others can only be
approached by the few, and are not cultivated by the many, who
require nothing beyond their more remote applications: but the
daily practice of the science I speak of is indispensable to all,
although the study of it is inaccessible to the far greater
number.

General ideas respecting God and human nature are therefore
the ideas above all others which it is most suitable to withdraw
from the habitual action of private judgment, and in which there
is most to gain and least to lose by recognizing a principle of
authority. The first object and one of the principal advantages
of religions, is to furnish to each of these fundamental
questions a solution which is at once clear, precise,
intelligible to the mass of mankind, and lasting. There are
religions which are very false and very absurd; but it may be
affirmed, that any religion which remains within the circle I
have just traced, without aspiring to go beyond it (as many
religions have attempted to do, for the purpose of enclosing on
every side the free progress of the human mind), imposes a
salutary restraint on the intellect; and it must be admitted
that, if it do not save men in another world, such religion is at
least very conducive to their happiness and their greatness in
this. This is more especially true of men living in free
countries. When the religion of a people is destroyed, doubt
gets hold of the highest portions of the intellect, and half
paralyzes all the rest of its powers. Every man accustoms
himself to entertain none but confused and changing notions on
the subjects most interesting to his fellow-creatures and
himself. His opinions are ill-defended and easily abandoned:
and, despairing of ever resolving by himself the hardest problems
of the destiny of man, he ignobly submits to think no more about
them. Such a condition cannot but enervate the soul, relax the
springs of the will, and prepare a people for servitude. Nor
does it only happen, in such a case, that they allow their
freedom to be wrested from them; they frequently themselves
surrender it. When there is no longer any principle of authority
in religion any more than in politics, men are speedily
frightened at the aspect of this unbounded independence. The
constant agitation of all surrounding things alarms and exhausts
them. As everything is at sea in the sphere of the intellect,
they determine at least that the mechanism of society should be
firm and fixed; and as they cannot resume their ancient belief,
they assume a master.

For my own part, I doubt whether man can ever support at the
same time complete religious independence and entire public
freedom. And I am inclined to think, that if faith be wanting in
him, he must serve; and if he be free, he must believe.

Perhaps, however, this great utility of religions is still
more obvious amongst nations where equality of conditions
prevails than amongst others. It must be acknowledged that
equality, which brings great benefits into the world,
nevertheless suggests to men (as will be shown hereafter) some
very dangerous propensities. It tends to isolate them from each
other, to concentrate every man's attention upon himself; and it
lays open the soul to an inordinate love of material
gratification. The greatest advantage of religion is to inspire
diametrically contrary principles. There is no religion which
does not place the object of man's desires above and beyond the
treasures of earth, and which does not naturally raise his soul
to regions far above those of the senses. Nor is there any which
does not impose on man some sort of duties to his kind, and thus
draws him at times from the contemplation of himself. This
occurs in religions the most false and dangerous. Religious
nations are therefore naturally strong on the very point on which
democratic nations are weak; which shows of what importance it is
for men to preserve their religion as their conditions become
more equal.

I have neither the right nor the intention of examining the
supernatural means which God employs to infuse religious belief
into the heart of man. I am at this moment considering religions
in a purely human point of view: my object is to inquire by what
means they may most easily retain their sway in the democratic
ages upon which we are entering. It has been shown that, at
times of general cultivation and equality, the human mind does
not consent to adopt dogmatical opinions without reluctance, and
feels their necessity acutely in spiritual matters only. This
proves, in the first place, that at such times religions ought,
more cautiously than at any other, to confine themselves within
their own precincts; for in seeking to extend their power beyond
religious matters, they incur a risk of not being believed at
all. The circle within which they seek to bound the human
intellect ought therefore to be carefully traced, and beyond its
verge the mind should be left in entire freedom to its own
guidance. Mahommed professed to derive from Heaven, and he has
inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines,
but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of
science. The gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general
relations of men to God and to each other - beyond which it
inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone, besides a
thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of
these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and
democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway
at these as at all other periods.

But in continuation of this branch of the subject, I find
that in order for religions to maintain their authority, humanly
speaking, in democratic ages, they must not only confine
themselves strictly within the circle of spiritual matters: their
power also depends very much on the nature of the belief they
inculcate, on the external forms they assume, and on the
obligations they impose. The preceding observation, that
equality leads men to very general and very extensive notions, is
principally to be understood as applied to the question of
religion. Men living in a similar and equal condition in the
world readily conceive the idea of the one God, governing every
man by the same laws, and granting to every man future happiness
on the same conditions. The idea of the unity of mankind
constantly leads them back to the idea of the unity of the
Creator; whilst, on the contrary, in a state of society where men
are broken up into very unequal ranks, they are apt to devise as
many deities as there are nations, castes, classes, or families,
and to trace a thousand private roads to heaven.

It cannot be denied that Christianity itself has felt, to a
certain extent, the influence which social and political
conditions exercise on religious opinions. At the epoch at which
the Christian religion appeared upon earth, Providence, by whom
the world was doubtless prepared for its coming, had gathered a
large portion of the human race, like an immense flock, under the
sceptre of the Caesars. The men of whom this multitude was
composed were distinguished by numerous differences; but they had
thus much in common, that they all obeyed the same laws, and that
every subject was so weak and insignificant in relation to the
imperial potentate, that all appeared equal when their condition
was contrasted with his. This novel and peculiar state of
mankind necessarily predisposed men to listen to the general
truths which Christianity teaches, and may serve to explain the
facility and rapidity with which they then penetrated into the
human mind. The counterpart of this state of things was
exhibited after the destruction of the empire. The Roman world
being then as it were shattered into a thousand fragments, each
nation resumed its pristine individuality. An infinite scale of
ranks very soon grew up in the bosom of these nations; the
different races were more sharply defined, and each nation was
divided by castes into several peoples. In the midst of this
common effort, which seemed to be urging human society to the
greatest conceivable amount of voluntary subdivision,
Christianity did not lose sight of the leading general ideas
which it had brought into the world. But it appeared,
nevertheless, to lend itself, as much as was possible, to those
new tendencies to which the fractional distribution of mankind
had given birth. Men continued to worship an only God, the
Creator and Preserver of all things; but every people, every
city, and, so to speak, every man, thought to obtain some
distinct privilege, and win the favor of an especial
patron at the foot of the Throne of Grace. Unable to subdivide
the Deity, they multiplied and improperly enhanced the importance
of the divine agents. The homage due to saints and angels became
an almost idolatrous worship amongst the majority of the
Christian world; and apprehensions might be entertained for a
moment lest the religion of Christ should retrograde towards the
superstitions which it had subdued. It seems evident, that the
more the barriers are removed which separate nation from nation
amongst mankind, and citizen from citizen amongst a people, the
stronger is the bent of the human mind, as if by its own impulse,
towards the idea of an only and all-powerful Being, dispensing
equal laws in the same manner to every man. In democratic ages,
then, it is more particularly important not to allow the homage
paid to secondary agents to be confounded with the worship due to
the Creator alone.

Another truth is no less clear - that religions ought to
assume fewer external observances in democratic periods than at
any others. In speaking of philosophical method among the
Americans, I have shown that nothing is more repugnant to the
human mind in an age of equality than the idea of subjection to
forms. Men living at such times are impatient of figures; to
their eyes symbols appear to be the puerile artifice which is
used to conceal or to set off truths, which should more naturally
be bared to the light of open day: they are unmoved by ceremonial
observances, and they are predisposed to attach a secondary
importance to the details of public worship. Those whose care it
is to regulate the external forms of religion in a democratic age
should pay a close attention to these natural propensities of the
human mind, in order not unnecessarily to run counter to them. I
firmly believe in the necessity of forms, which fix the human
mind in the contemplation of abstract truths, and stimulate its
ardor in the pursuit of them, whilst they invigorate its powers
of retaining them steadfastly. Nor do I suppose that it is
possible to maintain a religion without external observances;
but, on the other hand, I am persuaded that, in the ages upon
which we are entering, it would be peculiarly dangerous to
multiply them beyond measure; and that they ought rather to be
limited to as much as is absolutely necessary to perpetuate the
doctrine itself, which is the substance of religions of which the
ritual is only the form. *a A religion which should become more
minute, more peremptory, and more surcharged with small
observances at a time in which men are becoming more equal, would
soon find itself reduced to a band of fanatical zealots in the
midst of an infidel people.

[Footnote a: In all religions there are some ceremonies which are
inherent in the substance of the faith itself, and in these
nothing should, on any account, be changed. This is especially
the case with Roman Catholicism, in which the doctrine and the
form are frequently so closely united as to form one point of
belief.]

I anticipate the objection, that as all religions have
general and eternal truths for their object, they cannot thus
shape themselves to the shifting spirit of every age without
forfeiting their claim to certainty in the eyes of mankind. To
this I reply again, that the principal opinions which constitute
belief, and which theologians call articles of faith, must be
very carefully distinguished from the accessories connected with
them. Religions are obliged to hold fast to the former, whatever
be the peculiar spirit of the age; but they should take good care
not to bind themselves in the same manner to the latter at a time
when everything is in transition, and when the mind, accustomed
to the moving pageant of human affairs, reluctantly endures the
attempt to fix it to any given point. The fixity of external and
secondary things can only afford a chance of duration when civil
society is itself fixed; under any other circumstances I hold it
to be perilous.

We shall have occasion to see that, of all the passions
which originate in, or are fostered by, equality, there is one
which it renders peculiarly intense, and which it infuses at the
same time into the heart of every man: I mean the love of
well-being. The taste for well-being is the prominent and
indelible feature of democratic ages. It may be believed that a
religion which should undertake to destroy so deep seated a
passion, would meet its own destruction thence in the end; and if
it attempted to wean men entirely from the contemplation of the
good things of this world, in order to devote their faculties
exclusively to the thought of another, it may be foreseen that
the soul would at length escape from its grasp, to plunge into
the exclusive enjoyment of present and material pleasures. The
chief concern of religions is to purify, to regulate, and to
restrain the excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which
men feel at periods of equality; but they would err in attempting
to control it completely or to eradicate it. They will not
succeed in curing men of the love of riches: but they may still
persuade men to enrich themselves by none but honest means.

This brings me to a final consideration, which comprises, as
it were, all the others. The more the conditions of men are
equalized and assimilated to each other, the more important is it
for religions, whilst they carefully abstain from the daily
turmoil of secular affairs, not needlessly to run counter to the
ideas which generally prevail, and the permanent interests which
exist in the mass of the people. For as public opinion grows to
be more and more evidently the first and most irresistible of
existing powers, the religious principle has no external support
strong enough to enable it long to resist its attacks. This is
not less true of a democratic people, ruled by a despot, than in
a republic. In ages of equality, kings may often command
obedience, but the majority always commands belief: to the
majority, therefore, deference is to be paid in whatsoever is not
contrary to the faith.

I showed in my former volumes how the American clergy stand
aloof from secular affairs. This is the most obvious, but it is
not the only, example of their self-restraint. In America
religion is a distinct sphere, in which the priest is sovereign,
but out of which he takes care never to go. Within its limits he
is the master of the mind; beyond them, he leaves men to
themselves, and surrenders them to the independence and
instability which belong to their nature and their age. I have
seen no country in which Christianity is clothed with fewer
forms, figures, and observances than in the United States; or
where it presents more distinct, more simple, or more general
notions to the mind. Although the Christians of America are
divided into a multitude of sects, they all look upon their
religion in the same light. This applies to Roman Catholicism as
well as to the other forms of belief. There are no Romish
priests who show less taste for the minute individual observances
for extraordinary or peculiar means of salvation, or who cling
more to the spirit, and less to the letter of the law, than the
Roman Catholic priests of the United States. Nowhere is that
doctrine of the Church, which prohibits the worship reserved to
God alone from being offered to the saints, more clearly
inculcated or more generally followed. Yet the Roman Catholics
of America are very submissive and very sincere.

Another remark is applicable to the clergy of every
communion. The American ministers of the gospel do not attempt
to draw or to fix all the thoughts of man upon the life to come;
they are willing to surrender a portion of his heart to the cares
of the present; seeming to consider the goods of this world as
important, although as secondary, objects. If they take no part
themselves in productive labor, they are at least interested in
its progression, and ready to applaud its results; and whilst
they never cease to point to the other world as the great object
of the hopes and fears of the believer, they do not forbid him
honestly to court prosperity in this. Far from attempting to show
that these things are distinct and contrary to one another, they
study rather to find out on what point they are most nearly and
closely connected.

All the American clergy know and respect the intellectual
supremacy exercised by the majority; they never sustain any but
necessary conflicts with it. They take no share in the
altercations of parties, but they readily adopt the general
opinions of their country and their age; and they allow
themselves to be borne away without opposition in the current of
feeling and opinion by which everything around them is carried
along. They endeavor to amend their contemporaries, but they do
not quit fellowship with them. Public opinion is therefore never
hostile to them; it rather supports and protects them; and their
belief owes its authority at the same time to the strength which
is its own, and to that which they borrow from the opinions of
the majority. Thus it is that, by respecting all democratic
tendencies not absolutely contrary to herself, and by making use
of several of them for her own purposes, religion sustains an
advantageous struggle with that spirit of individual independence
which is her most dangerous antagonist.

Book One - Chapters VI-IX

Chapter VI: Of The Progress Of Roman Catholicism In The United
States

America is the most democratic country in the world, and it
is at the same time (according to reports worthy of belief) the
country in which the Roman Catholic religion makes most progress.
At first sight this is surprising. Two things must here be
accurately distinguished: equality inclines men to wish to form
their own opinions; but, on the other hand, it imbues them with
the taste and the idea of unity, simplicity, and impartiality in
the power which governs society. Men living in democratic ages
are therefore very prone to shake off all religious authority;
but if they consent to subject themselves to any authority of
this kind, they choose at least that it should be single and
uniform. Religious powers not radiating from a common centre are
naturally repugnant to their minds; and they almost as readily
conceive that there should be no religion, as that there should
be several. At the present time, more than in any preceding one,
Roman Catholics are seen to lapse into infidelity, and
Protestants to be converted to Roman Catholicism. If the Roman
Catholic faith be considered within the pale of the church, it
would seem to be losing ground; without that pale, to be gaining
it. Nor is this circumstance difficult of explanation. The men
of our days are naturally disposed to believe; but, as soon as
they have any religion, they immediately find in themselves a
latent propensity which urges them unconsciously towards
Catholicism. Many of the doctrines and the practices of the
Romish Church astonish them; but they feel a secret admiration
for its discipline, and its great unity attracts them. If
Catholicism could at length withdraw itself from the political
animosities to which it has given rise, I have hardly any doubt
but that the same spirit of the age, which appears to be so
opposed to it, would become so favorable as to admit of its great
and sudden advancement. One of the most ordinary weaknesses of
the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles,
and to purchase peace at the expense of logic. Thus there have
ever been, and will ever be, men who, after having submitted some
portion of their religious belief to the principle of authority,
will seek to exempt several other parts of their faith from its
influence, and to keep their minds floating at random between
liberty and obedience. But I am inclined to believe that the
number of these thinkers will be less in democratic than in other
ages; and that our posterity will tend more and more to a single
division into two parts - some relinquishing Christianity
entirely, and others returning to the bosom of the Church of
Rome.

Chapter VII: Of The Cause Of A Leaning To Pantheism Amongst
Democratic Nations

I shall take occasion hereafter to show under what form the
preponderating taste of a democratic people for very general
ideas manifests itself in politics; but I would point out, at the
present stage of my work, its principal effect on philosophy. It
cannot be denied that pantheism has made great progress in our
age. The writings of a part of Europe bear visible marks of it:
the Germans introduce it into philosophy, and the French into
literature. Most of the works of imagination published in France
contain some opinions or some tinge caught from pantheistical
doctrines, or they disclose some tendency to such doctrines in
their authors. This appears to me not only to proceed from an
accidental, but from a permanent cause.

When the conditions of society are becoming more equal, and
each individual man becomes more like all the rest, more weak and
more insignificant, a habit grows up of ceasing to notice the
citizens to consider only the people, and of overlooking
individuals to think only of their kind. At such times the human
mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once;
and it constantly strives to succeed in connecting a variety of
consequences with a single cause. The idea of unity so possesses
itself of man, and is sought for by him so universally, that if
he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself up to repose
in that belief. Nor does he content himself with the discovery
that nothing is in the world but a creation and a Creator; still
embarrassed by this primary division of things, he seeks to
expand and to simplify his conception by including God and the
universe in one great whole. If there be a philosophical system
which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible
and invisible, which the world contains, are only to be
considered as the several parts of an immense Being, which alone
remains unchanged amidst the continual change and ceaseless
transformation of all that constitutes it, we may readily infer
that such a system, although it destroy the individuality of man
- nay, rather because it destroys that individuality - will have
secret charms for men living in democracies. All their habits of
thought prepare them to conceive it, and predispose them to adopt
it. It naturally attracts and fixes their imagination; it
fosters the pride, whilst it soothes the indolence, of their
minds. Amongst the different systems by whose aid philosophy
endeavors to explain the universe, I believe pantheism to be one
of those most fitted to seduce the human mind in democratic ages.
Against it all who abide in their attachment to the true
greatness of man should struggle and combine.

Chapter VIII: The Principle Of Equality Suggests To The Americans
The Idea Of The Indefinite Perfectibility Of Man

Equality suggests to the human mind several ideas which
would not have originated from any other source, and it modifies
almost all those previously entertained. I take as an example
the idea of human perfectibility, because it is one of the
principal notions that the intellect can conceive, and because it
constitutes of itself a great philosophical theory, which is
every instant to be traced by its consequences in the practice of
human affairs. Although man has many points of resemblance with
the brute creation, one characteristic is peculiar to himself -
he improves: they are incapable of improvement. Mankind could
not fail to discover this difference from its earliest period.
The idea of perfectibility is therefore as old as the world;
equality did not give birth to it, although it has imparted to it
a novel character.

When the citizens of a community are classed according to
their rank, their profession, or their birth, and when all men
are constrained to follow the career which happens to open before
them, everyone thinks that the utmost limits of human power are
to be discerned in proximity to himself, and none seeks any
longer to resist the inevitable law of his destiny. Not indeed
that an aristocratic people absolutely contests man's faculty of
self- improvement, but they do not hold it to be indefinite;
amelioration they conceive, but not change: they imagine that the
future condition of society may be better, but not essentially
different; and whilst they admit that mankind has made vast
strides in improvement, and may still have some to make, they
assign to it beforehand certain impassable limits. Thus they do
not presume that they have arrived at the supreme good or at
absolute truth (what people or what man was ever wild enough to
imagine it?) but they cherish a persuasion that they have pretty
nearly reached that degree of greatness and knowledge which our
imperfect nature admits of; and as nothing moves about them they
are willing to fancy that everything is in its fit place. Then it
is that the legislator affects to lay down eternal laws; that
kings and nations will raise none but imperishable monuments; and
that the present generation undertakes to spare generations to
come the care of regulating their destinies.

In proportion as castes disappear and the classes of society
approximate - as manners, customs, and laws vary, from the
tumultuous intercourse of men -as new facts arise - as new truths
are brought to light - as ancient opinions are dissipated, and
others take their place -the image of an ideal perfection,
forever on the wing, presents itself to the human mind. Continual
changes are then every instant occurring under the observation of
every man: the position of some is rendered worse; and he learns
but too well, that no people and no individual, how enlightened
soever they may be, can lay claim to infallibility; - the
condition of others is improved; whence he infers that man is
endowed with an indefinite faculty of improvement. His reverses
teach him that none may hope to have discovered absolute good -
his success stimulates him to the never-ending pursuit of it.
Thus, forever seeking -forever falling, to rise again - often
disappointed, but not discouraged - he tends unceasingly towards
that unmeasured greatness so indistinctly visible at the end of
the long track which humanity has yet to tread. It can hardly be
believed how many facts naturally flow from the philosophical
theory of the indefinite perfectibility of man, or how strong an
influence it exercises even on men who, living entirely for the
purposes of action and not of thought, seem to conform their
actions to it, without knowing anything about it. I accost an
American sailor, and I inquire why the ships of his country are
built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without
hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such
rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost
useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years. In these
words, which fell accidentally and on a particular subject from a
man of rude attainments, I recognize the general and systematic
idea upon which a great people directs all its concerns.

Aristocratic nations are naturally too apt to narrow the
scope of human perfectibility; democratic nations to expand it
beyond compass.

Chapter IX: The Example Of The Americans Does Not Prove That A
Democratic People Can Have No Aptitude And No Taste For Science,
Literature, Or Art

It must be acknowledged that amongst few of the civilized
nations of our time have the higher sciences made less progress
than in the United States; and in few have great artists, fine
poets, or celebrated writers been more rare. Many Europeans,
struck by this fact, have looked upon it as a natural and
inevitable result of equality; and they have supposed that if a
democratic state of society and democratic institutions were ever
to prevail over the whole earth, the human mind would gradually
find its beacon-lights grow dim, and men would relapse into a
period of darkness. To reason thus is, I think, to confound
several ideas which it is important to divide and to examine
separately: it is to mingle, unintentionally, what is democratic
with what is only American.

The religion professed by the first emigrants, and
bequeathed by them to their descendants, simple in its form of
worship, austere and almost harsh in its principles, and hostile
to external symbols and to ceremonial pomp, is naturally
unfavorable to the fine arts, and only yields a reluctant
sufferance to the pleasures of literature. The Americans are a
very old and a very enlightened people, who have fallen upon a
new and unbounded country, where they may extend themselves at
pleasure, and which they may fertilize without difficulty. This
state of things is without a parallel in the history of the
world. In America, then, every one finds facilities, unknown
elsewhere, for making or increasing his fortune. The spirit of
gain is always on the stretch, and the human mind, constantly
diverted from the pleasures of imagination and the labors of the
intellect, is there swayed by no impulse but the pursuit of
wealth. Not only are manufacturing and commercial classes to be
found in the United States, as they are in all other countries;
but what never occurred elsewhere, the whole community is
simultaneously engaged in productive industry and commerce. I am
convinced that, if the Americans had been alone in the world,
with the freedom and the knowledge acquired by their forefathers,
and the passions which are their own, they would not have been
slow to discover that progress cannot long be made in the
application of the sciences without cultivating the theory of
them; that all the arts are perfected by one another: and,
however absorbed they might have been by the pursuit of the
principal object of their desires, they would speedily have
admitted, that it is necessary to turn aside from it
occasionally, in order the better to attain it in the end.

The taste for the pleasures of the mind is moreover so
natural to the heart of civilized man, that amongst the polite
nations, which are least disposed to give themselves up to these
pursuits, a certain number of citizens are always to be found who
take part in them. This intellectual craving, when once felt,
would very soon have been satisfied. But at the very time when
the Americans were naturally inclined to require nothing of
science but its special applications to the useful arts and the
means of rendering life comfortable, learned and literary Europe
was engaged in exploring the common sources of truth, and in
improving at the same time all that can minister to the pleasures
or satisfy the wants of man. At the head of the enlightened
nations of the Old World the inhabitants of the United States
more particularly distinguished one, to which they were closely
united by a common origin and by kindred habits. Amongst this
people they found distinguished men of science, artists of skill,
writers of eminence, and they were enabled to enjoy the treasures
of the intellect without requiring to labor in amassing them. I
cannot consent to separate America from Europe, in spite of the
ocean which intervenes. I consider the people of the United
States as that portion of the English people which is
commissioned to explore the wilds of the New World; whilst the
rest of the nation, enjoying more leisure and less harassed by
the drudgery of life, may devote its energies to thought, and
enlarge in all directions the empire of the mind.
The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and
it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed
in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin - their
exclusively commercial habits - even the country they inhabit,
which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science,
literature, and the arts - the proximity of Europe, which allows
them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism -
a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to
point out the most important - have singularly concurred to fix
the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His
passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem
to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward:
his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient
and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease then to view all
democratic nations under the mask of the American people, and let
us attempt to survey them at length with their own proper
features.

It is possible to conceive a people not subdivided into any
castes or scale of ranks; in which the law, recognizing no
privileges, should divide inherited property into equal shares;
but which, at the same time, should be without knowledge and
without freedom. Nor is this an empty hypothesis: a despot may
find that it is his interest to render his subjects equal and to
leave them ignorant, in order more easily to keep them slaves.
Not only would a democratic people of this kind show neither
aptitude nor taste for science, literature, or art, but it would
probably never arrive at the possession of them. The law of
descent would of itself provide for the destruction of fortunes
at each succeeding generation; and new fortunes would be acquired
by none. The poor man, without either knowledge or freedom,
would not so much as conceive the idea of raising himself to
wealth; and the rich man would allow himself to be degraded to
poverty, without a notion of self-defence. Between these two
members of the community complete and invincible equality would
soon be established.

No one would then have time or taste to devote himself to
the pursuits or pleasures of the intellect; but all men would
remain paralyzed by a state of common ignorance and equal
servitude. When I conceive a democratic society of this kind, I
fancy myself in one of those low, close, and gloomy abodes, where
the light which breaks in from without soon faints and fades
away. A sudden heaviness overpowers me, and I grope through the
surrounding darkness, to find the aperture which will restore me
to daylight and the air.

But all this is not applicable to men already enlightened
who retain their freedom, after having abolished from amongst
them those peculiar and hereditary rights which perpetuated the
tenure of property in the hands of certain individuals or certain
bodies. When men living in a democratic state of society are
enlightened, they readily discover that they are confined and
fixed within no limits which constrain them to take up with their
present fortune. They all therefore conceive the idea of
increasing it; if they are free, they all attempt it, but all do
not succeed in the same manner. The legislature, it is true, no
longer grants privileges, but they are bestowed by nature. As
natural inequality is very great, fortunes become unequal as soon
as every man exerts all his faculties to get rich. The law of
descent prevents the establishment of wealthy families; but it
does not prevent the existence of wealthy individuals. It
constantly brings back the members of the community to a common
level, from which they as constantly escape: and the inequality
of fortunes augments in proportion as knowledge is diffused and
liberty increased.

A sect which arose in our time, and was celebrated for its
talents and its extravagance, proposed to concentrate all
property into the hands of a central power, whose function it
should afterwards be to parcel it out to individuals, according
to their capacity. This would have been a method of escaping
from that complete and eternal equality which seems to threaten
democratic society. But it would be a simpler and less dangerous
remedy to grant no privilege to any, giving to all equal
cultivation and equal independence, and leaving everyone to
determine his own position. Natural inequality will very soon
make way for itself, and wealth will spontaneously pass into the
hands of the most capable.

Free and democratic communities, then, will always contain a
considerable number of people enjoying opulence or competency.
The wealthy will not be so closely linked to each other as the
members of the former aristocratic class of society: their
propensities will be different, and they will scarcely ever enjoy
leisure as secure or as complete: but they will be far more
numerous than those who belonged to that class of society could
ever be. These persons will not be strictly confined to the
cares of practical life, and they will still be able, though in
different degrees, to indulge in the pursuits and pleasures of
the intellect. In those pleasures they will indulge; for if it
be true that the human mind leans on one side to the narrow, the
practical, and the useful, it naturally rises on the other to the
infinite, the spiritual, and the beautiful. Physical wants
confine it to the earth; but, as soon as the tie is loosened, it
will unbend itself again.

Not only will the number of those who can take an interest
in the productions of the mind be enlarged, but the taste for
intellectual enjoyment will descend, step by step, even to those
who, in aristocratic societies, seem to have neither time nor
ability to in indulge in them. When hereditary wealth, the
privileges of rank, and the prerogatives of birth have ceased to
be, and when every man derives his strength from himself alone,
it becomes evident that the chief cause of disparity between the
fortunes of men is the mind. Whatever tends to invigorate, to
extend, or to adorn the mind, instantly rises to great value.
The utility of knowledge becomes singularly conspicuous even to
the eyes of the multitude: those who have no taste for its charms
set store upon its results, and make some efforts to acquire it.
In free and enlightened democratic ages, there is nothing to
separate men from each other or to retain them in their peculiar
sphere; they rise or sink with extreme rapidity. All classes
live in perpetual intercourse from their great proximity to each
other. They communicate and intermingle every day -they imitate
and envy one other: this suggests to the people many ideas,
notions, and desires which it would never have entertained if the
distinctions of rank had been fixed and society at rest. In such
nations the servant never considers himself as an entire stranger
to the pleasures and toils of his master, nor the poor man to
those of the rich; the rural population assimilates itself to
that of the towns, and the provinces to the capital. No one
easily allows himself to be reduced to the mere material cares of
life; and the humblest artisan casts at times an eager and a
furtive glance into the higher regions of the intellect. People
do not read with the same notions or in the same manner as they
do in an aristocratic community; but the circle of readers is
unceasingly expanded, till it includes all the citizens.

As soon as the multitude begins to take an interest in the
labors of the mind, it finds out that to excel in some of them is
a powerful method of acquiring fame, power, or wealth. The
restless ambition which equality begets instantly takes this
direction as it does all others. The number of those who
cultivate science, letters, and the arts, becomes immense. The
intellectual world starts into prodigious activity: everyone
endeavors to open for himself a path there, and to draw the eyes
of the public after him. Something analogous occurs to what
happens in society in the United States, politically considered.
What is done is often imperfect, but the attempts are
innumerable; and, although the results of individual effort are
commonly very small, the total amount is always very large.

It is therefore not true to assert that men living in
democratic ages are naturally indifferent to science, literature,
and the arts: only it must be acknowledged that they cultivate
them after their own fashion, and bring to the task their own
peculiar qualifications and deficiencies.

Book One - Chapters X-XII

Chapter X: Why The Americans Are More Addicted To Practical Than
To Theoretical Science

If a democratic state of society and democratic institutions
do not stop the career of the human mind, they incontestably
guide it in one direction in preference to another. Their
effects, thus circumscribed, are still exceedingly great; and I
trust I may be pardoned if I pause for a moment to survey them.
We had occasion, in speaking of the philosophical method of the
American people, to make several remarks which must here be
turned to account.

Equality begets in man the desire of judging of everything
for himself: it gives him, in all things, a taste for the
tangible and the real, a contempt for tradition and for forms.
These general tendencies are principally discernible in the
peculiar subject of this chapter. Those who cultivate the
sciences amongst a democratic people are always afraid of losing
their way in visionary speculation. They mistrust systems; they
adhere closely to facts and the study of facts with their own
senses. As they do not easily defer to the mere name of any
fellow-man, they are never inclined to rest upon any man's
authority; but, on the contrary, they are unremitting in their
efforts to point out the weaker points of their neighbors'
opinions. Scientific precedents have very little weight with
them; they are never long detained by the subtility of the
schools, nor ready to accept big words for sterling coin; they
penetrate, as far as they can, into the principal parts of the
subject which engages them, and they expound them in the
vernacular tongue. Scientific pursuits then follow a freer and a
safer course, but a less lofty one.

The mind may, as it appears to me, divide science into three
parts. The first comprises the most theoretical principles, and
those more abstract notions whose application is either unknown
or very remote. The second is composed of those general truths
which still belong to pure theory, but lead, nevertheless, by a
straight and short road to practical results. Methods of
application and means of execution make up the third. Each of
these different portions of science may be separately cultivated,
although reason and experience show that none of them can prosper
long, if it be absolutely cut off from the two others.

In America the purely practical part of science is admirably
understood, and careful attention is paid to the theoretical
portion which is immediately requisite to application. On this
head the Americans always display a clear, free, original, and
inventive power of mind. But hardly anyone in the United States
devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract
portion of human knowledge. In this respect the Americans carry
to excess a tendency which is, I think, discernible, though in a
less degree, amongst all democratic nations.

Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher
sciences, or of the more elevated departments of science, than
meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the
structure of democratic society. We do not find there, as
amongst an aristocratic people, one class which clings to a state
of repose because it is well off; and another which does not
venture to stir because it despairs of improving its condition.
Everyone is actively in motion: some in quest of power, others of
gain. In the midst of this universal tumult - this incessant
conflict of jarring interests - this continual stride of men
after fortune - where is that calm to be found which is necessary
for the deeper combinations of the intellect? How can the mind
dwell upon any single point, when everything whirls around it,
and man himself is swept and beaten onwards by the heady current
which rolls all things in its course? But the permanent
agitation which subsists in the bosom of a peaceable and
established democracy, must be distinguished from the tumultuous
and revolutionary movements which almost always attend the birth
and growth of democratic society. When a violent revolution
occurs amongst a highly civilized people, it cannot fail to give
a sudden impulse to their feelings and their opinions. This is
more particularly true of democratic revolutions, which stir up
all the classes of which a people is composed, and beget, at the
same time, inordinate ambition in the breast of every member of
the community. The French made most surprising advances in the
exact sciences at the very time at which they were finishing the
destruction of the remains of their former feudal society; yet
this sudden fecundity is not to be attributed to democracy, but
to the unexampled revolution which attended its growth. What
happened at that period was a special incident, and it would be
unwise to regard it as the test of a general principle.
Great revolutions are not more common amongst democratic
nations than amongst others: I am even inclined to believe that
they are less so. But there prevails amongst those populations a
small distressing motion -a sort of incessant jostling of men -
which annoys and disturbs the mind, without exciting or elevating
it. Men who live in democratic communities not only seldom
indulge in meditation, but they naturally entertain very little
esteem for it. A democratic state of society and democratic
institutions plunge the greater part of men in constant active
life; and the habits of mind which are suited to an active life,
are not always suited to a contemplative one. The man of action
is frequently obliged to content himself with the best he can
get, because he would never accomplish his purpose if he chose to
carry every detail to perfection. He has perpetually occasion to
rely on ideas which he has not had leisure to search to the
bottom; for he is much more frequently aided by the opportunity
of an idea than by its strict accuracy; and, in the long run, he
risks less in making use of some false principles, than in
spending his time in establishing all his principles on the basis
of truth. The world is not led by long or learned demonstrations;
a rapid glance at particular incidents, the daily study of the
fleeting passions of the multitude, the accidents of the time,
and the art of turning them to account, decide all its affairs.

In the ages in which active life is the condition of almost
everyone, men are therefore generally led to attach an excessive
value to the rapid bursts and superficial conceptions of the
intellect; and, on the other hand, to depreciate below their true
standard its slower and deeper labors. This opinion of the
public influences the judgment of the men who cultivate the
sciences; they are persuaded that they may succeed in those
pursuits without meditation, or deterred from such pursuits as
demand it.

There are several methods of studying the sciences. Amongst
a multitude of men you will find a selfish, mercantile, and
trading taste for the discoveries of the mind, which must not be
confounded with that disinterested passion which is kindled in
the heart of the few. A desire to utilize knowledge is one
thing; the pure desire to know is another. I do not doubt that
in a few minds and far between, an ardent, inexhaustible love of
truth springs up, self-supported, and living in ceaseless
fruition without ever attaining the satisfaction which it seeks.
This ardent love it is - this proud, disinterested love of what
is true - which raises men to the abstract sources of truth, to
draw their mother-knowledge thence. If Pascal had had nothing in
view but some large gain, or even if he had been stimulated by
the love of fame alone, I cannot conceive that he would ever have
been able to rally all the powers of his mind, as he did, for the
better discovery of the most hidden things of the Creator. When
I see him, as it were, tear his soul from the midst of all the
cares of life to devote it wholly to these researches, and,
prematurely snapping the links which bind the frame to life, die
of old age before forty, I stand amazed, and I perceive that no
ordinary cause is at work to produce efforts so extra-ordinary.

The future will prove whether these passions, at once so
rare and so productive, come into being and into growth as easily
in the midst of democratic as in aristocratic communities. For
myself, I confess that I am slow to believe it. In aristocratic
society, the class which gives the tone to opinion, and has the
supreme guidance of affairs, being permanently and hereditarily
placed above the multitude, naturally conceives a lofty idea of
itself and of man. It loves to invent for him noble pleasures,
to carve out splendid objects for his ambition. Aristocracies
often commit very tyrannical and very inhuman actions; but they
rarely entertain grovelling thoughts; and they show a kind of
haughty contempt of little pleasures, even whilst they indulge in
them. The effect is greatly to raise the general pitch of
society. In aristocratic ages vast ideas are commonly entertained
of the dignity, the power, and the greatness of man. These
opinions exert their influence on those who cultivate the
sciences, as well as on the rest of the community. They
facilitate the natural impulse of the mind to the highest regions
of thought, and they naturally prepare it to conceive a sublime -
nay, almost a divine - love of truth. Men of science at such
periods are consequently carried away by theory; and it even
happens that they frequently conceive an inconsiderate contempt
for the practical part of learning. "Archimedes," says Plutarch,
"was of so lofty a spirit, that he never condescended to write
any treatise on the manner of constructing all these engines of
offence and defence. And as he held this science of inventing
and putting together engines, and all arts generally speaking
which tended to any usetul end in practice, to be vile, low, and
mercenary, he spent his talents and his studious hours in writing
of those things only whose beauty and subtilty had in them no
admixture of necessity." Such is the aristocratic aim of science;
in democratic nations it cannot be the same.

The greater part of the men who constitute these nations are
extremely eager in the pursuit of actual and physical
gratification. As they are always dissatisfied with the position
which they occupy, and are always free to leave it, they think of
nothing but the means of changing their fortune, or of increasing
it. To minds thus predisposed, every new method which leads by a
shorter road to wealth, every machine which spares labor, every
instrument which diminishes the cost of production, every
discovery which facilitates pleasures or augments them, seems to
be the grandest effort of the human intellect. It is chiefly
from these motives that a democratic people addicts itself to
scientific pursuits - that it understands, and that it respects
them. In aristocratic ages, science is more particularly called
upon to furnish gratification to the mind; in democracies, to the
body. You may be sure that the more a nation is democratic,
enlightened, and free, the greater will be the number of these
interested promoters of scientific genius, and the more will
discoveries immediately applicable to productive industry confer
gain, fame, and even power on their authors. For in democracies
the working class takes a part in public affairs; and public
honors, as well as pecuniary remuneration, may be awarded to
those who deserve them. In a community thus organized it may
easily be conceived that the human mind may be led insensibly to
the neglect of theory; and that it is urged, on the contrary,
with unparalleled vehemence to the applications of science, or at
least to that portion of theoretical science which is necessary
to those who make such applications. In vain will some innate
propensity raise the mind towards the loftier spheres of the
intellect; interest draws it down to the middle zone. There it
may develop all its energy and restless activity, there it may
engender all its wonders. These very Americans, who have not
discovered one of the general laws of mechanics, have introduced
into navigation an engine which changes the aspect of the world.

Assuredly I do not content that the democratic nations of
our time are destined to witness the extinction of the
transcendent luminaries of man's intelligence, nor even that no
new lights will ever start into existence. At the age at which
the world has now arrived, and amongst so many cultivated
nations, perpetually excited by the fever of productive industry,
the bonds which connect the different parts of science together
cannot fail to strike the observation; and the taste for
practical science itself, if it be enlightened, ought to lead men
not to neglect theory. In the midst of such numberless attempted
applications of so many experiments, repeated every day, it is
almost impossible that general laws should not frequently be
brought to light; so that great discoveries would be frequent,
though great inventors be rare. I believe, moreover, in the high
calling of scientific minds. If the democratic principle does
not, on the one hand, induce men to cultivate science for its own
sake, on the other it enormously increases the number of those
who do cultivate it. Nor is it credible that, from amongst so
great a multitude no speculative genius should from time to time
arise, inflamed by the love of truth alone. Such a one, we may
be sure, would dive into the deepest mysteries of nature,
whatever be the spirit of his country or his age. He requires no
assistance in his course - enough that he be not checked in it.

All that I mean to say is this: - permanent inequality of
conditions leads men to confine themselves to the arrogant and
sterile research of abstract truths; whilst the social condition
and the institutions of democracy prepare them to seek the
immediate and useful practical results of the sciences. This
tendency is natural and inevitable: it is curious to be
acquainted with it, and it may be necessary to point it out. If
those who are called upon to guide the nations of our time
clearly discerned from afar off these new tendencies, which will
soon be irresistible, they would understand that, possessing
education and freedom, men living in democratic ages cannot fail
to improve the industrial part of science; and that henceforward
all the efforts of the constituted authorities ought to be
directed to support the highest branches of learning, and to
foster the nobler passion for science itself. In the present age
the human mind must be coerced into theoretical studies; it runs
of its own accord to practical applications; and, instead of
perpetually referring it to the minute examination of secondary
effects, it is well to divert it from them sometimes, in order to
raise it up to the contemplation of primary causes. Because the
civilization of ancient Rome perished in consequence of the
invasion of the barbarians, we are perhaps too apt to think that
civilization cannot perish in any other manner. If the light by
which we are guided is ever extinguished, it will dwindle by
degrees, and expire of itself. By dint of close adherence to
mere applications, principles would be lost sight of; and when
the principles were wholly forgotten, the methods derived from
them would be ill-pursued. New methods could no longer be
invented, and men would continue to apply, without intelligence,
and without art, scientific processes no longer understood.

When Europeans first arrived in China, three hundred years
ago, they found that almost all the arts had reached a certain
degree of perfection there; and they were surprised that a people
which had attained this point should not have gone beyond it. At
a later period they discovered some traces of the higher branches
of science which were lost. The nation was absorbed in
productive industry: the greater part of its scientific processes
had been preserved, but science itself no longer existed there.
This served to explain the strangely motionless state in which
they found the minds of this people. The Chinese, in following
the track of their forefathers, had forgotten the reasons by
which the latter had been guided. They still used the formula,
without asking for its meaning: they retained the instrument, but
they no longer possessed the art of altering or renewing it. The
Chinese, then, had lost the power of change; for them to improve
was impossible. They were compelled, at all times and in all
points, to imitate their predecessors, lest they should stray
into utter darkness, by deviating for an instant from the path
already laid down for them. The source of human knowledge was
all but dry; and though the stream still ran on, it could neither
swell its waters nor alter its channel. Notwithstanding this,
China had subsisted peaceably for centuries. The invaders who
had conquered the country assumed the manners of the inhabitants,
and order prevailed there. A sort of physical prosperity was
everywhere discernible: revolutions were rare, and war was, so to
speak, unknown.

It is then a fallacy to flatter ourselves with the
reflection that the barbarians are still far from us; for if
there be some nations which allow civilization to be torn from
their grasp, there are others who trample it themselves under
their feet.

Chapter XI: Of The Spirit In Which The Americans Cultivate The
Arts

It would be to waste the time of my readers and my own if I
strove to demonstrate how the general mediocrity of fortunes, the
absence of superfluous wealth, the universal desire of comfort,
and the constant efforts by which everyone attempts to procure
it, make the taste for the useful predominate over the love of
the beautiful in the heart of man. Democratic nations, amongst
which all these things exist, will therefore cultivate the arts
which serve to render life easy, in preference to those whose
object is to adorn it. They will habitually prefer the useful to
the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful should be
useful. But I propose to go further; and after having pointed
out this first feature, to sketch several others.

It commonly happens that in the ages of privilege the
practice of almost all the arts becomes a privilege; and that
every profession is a separate walk, upon which it is not
allowable for everyone to enter. Even when productive industry
is free, the fixed character which belongs to aristocratic
nations gradually segregates all the persons who practise the
same art, till they form a distinct class, always composed of the
same families, whose members are all known to each other, and
amongst whom a public opinion of their own and a species of
corporate pride soon spring up. In a class or guild of this kind,
each artisan has not only his fortune to make, but his reputation
to preserve. He is not exclusively swayed by his own interest,
or even by that of his customer, but by that of the body to which
he belongs; and the interest of that body is, that each artisan
should produce the best possible workmanship. In aristocratic
ages, the object of the arts is therefore to manufacture as well
as possible - not with the greatest despatch, or at the lowest
rate.

When, on the contrary, every profession is open to all -
when a multitude of persons are constantly embracing and
abandoning it -  and when its several members are strangers to
each other, indifferent, and from their numbers hardly seen
amongst themselves; the social tie is destroyed, and each
workman, standing alone, endeavors simply to gain the greatest
possible quantity of money at the least possible cost. The will
of the customer is then his only limit. But at the same time a
corresponding revolution takes place in the customer also. In
countries in which riches as well as power are concentrated and
retained in the hands of the few, the use of the greater part of
this world's goods belongs to a small number of individuals, who
are always the same. Necessity, public opinion, or moderate
desires exclude all others from the enjoyment of them. As this
aristocratic class remains fixed at the pinnacle of greatness on
which it stands, without diminution or increase, it is always
acted upon by the same wants and affected by them in the same
manner. The men of whom it is composed naturally derive from
their superior and hereditary position a taste for what is
extremely well made and lasting. This affects the general way of
thinking of the nation in relation to the arts. It often occurs,
among such a people, that even the peasant will rather go without
the object he covets, than procure it in a state of imperfection.
In aristocracies, then, the handicraftsmen work for only a
limited number of very fastidious customers: the profit they hope
to make depends principally on the perfection of their
workmanship.

Such is no longer the case when, all privileges being
abolished, ranks are intermingled, and men are forever rising or
sinking upon the ladder of society. Amongst a democratic people
a number of citizens always exist whose patrimony is divided and
decreasing. They have contracted, under more prosperous
circumstances, certain wants, which remain after the means of
satisfying such wants are gone; and they are anxiously looking
out for some surreptitious method of providing for them. On the
other hand, there are always in democracies a large number of men
whose fortune is upon the increase, but whose desires grow much
faster than their fortunes: and who gloat upon the gifts of
wealth in anticipation, long before they have means to command
them. Such men eager to find some short cut to these
gratifications, already almost within their reach. From the
combination of these causes the result is, that in democracies
there are always a multitude of individuals whose wants are above
their means, and who are very willing to take up with imperfect
satisfaction rather than abandon the object of their desires.

The artisan readily understands these passions, for he
himself partakes in them: in an aristocracy he would seek to sell
his workmanship at a high price to the few; he now conceives that
the more expeditious way of getting rich is to sell them at a low
price to all. But there are only two ways of lowering the price
of commodities. The first is to discover some better, shorter,
and more ingenious method of producing them: the second is to
manufacture a larger quantity of goods, nearly similar, but of
less value. Amongst a democratic population, all the intellectual
faculties of the workman are directed to these two objects: he
strives to invent methods which may enable him not only to work
better, but quicker and cheaper; or, if he cannot succeed in
that, to diminish the intrinsic qualities of the thing he makes,
without rendering it wholly unfit for the use for which it is
intended. When none but the wealthy had watches, they were
almost all very good ones: few are now made which are worth much,
but everybody has one in his pocket. Thus the democratic
principle not only tends to direct the human mind to the useful
arts, but it induces the artisan to produce with greater rapidity
a quantity of imperfect commodities, and the consumer to content
himself with these commodities.

Not that in democracies the arts are incapable of producing
very commendable works, if such be required. This may
occasionally be the case, if customers appear who are ready to
pay for time and trouble. In this rivalry of every kind of
industry - in the midst of this immense competition and these
countless experiments, some excellent workmen are formed who
reach the utmost limits of their craft. But they have rarely an
opportunity of displaying what they can do; they are scrupulously
sparing of their powers; they remain in a state of accomplished
mediocrity, which condemns itself, and, though it be very well
able to shoot beyond the mark before it, aims only at what it
hits. In aristocracies, on the contrary, workmen always do all
they can; and when they stop, it is because they have reached the
limit of their attainments.

When I arrive in a country where I find some of the finest
productions of the arts, I learn from this fact nothing of the
social condition or of the political constitution of the country.
But if I perceive that the productions of the arts are generally
of an inferior quality, very abundant and very cheap, I am
convinced that, amongst the people where this occurs, privilege
is on the decline, and that ranks are beginning to intermingle,
and will soon be confounded together.

The handicraftsmen of democratic ages endeavor not only to
bring their useful productions within the reach of the whole
community, but they strive to give to all their commodities
attractive qualities which they do not in reality possess. In
the confusion of all ranks everyone hopes to appear what he is
not, and makes great exertions to succeed in this object. This
sentiment indeed, which is but too natural to the heart of man,
does not originate in the democratic principle; but that
principle applies it to material objects. To mimic virtue is of
every age; but the hypocrisy of luxury belongs more particularly
to the ages of democracy.

To satisfy these new cravings of human vanity the arts have
recourse to every species of imposture: and these devices
sometimes go so far as to defeat their own purpose. Imitation
diamonds are now made which may be easily mistaken for real ones;
as soon as the art of fabricating false diamonds shall have
reached so high a degree of perfection that they cannot be
distinguished from real ones, it is probable that both one and
the other will be abandoned, and become mere pebbles again.

This leads me to speak of those arts which are called the
fine arts, by way of distinction. I do not believe that it is a
necessary effect of a democratic social condition and of
democratic institutions to diminish the number of men who
cultivate the fine arts; but these causes exert a very powerful
influence on the manner in which these arts are cultivated. Many
of those who had already contracted a taste for the fine arts are
impoverished: on the other hand, many of those who are not yet
rich begin to conceive that taste, at least by imitation; and the
number of consumers increases, but opulent and fastidious
consumers become more scarce. Something analogous to what I have
already pointed out in the useful arts then takes place in the
fine arts; the productions of artists are more numerous, but the
merit of each production is diminished. No longer able to soar
to what is great, they cultivate what is pretty and elegant; and
appearance is more attended to than reality. In aristocracies a
few great pictures are produced; in democratic countries, a vast
number of insignificant ones. In the former, statues are raised
of bronze; in the latter, they are modelled in plaster.

When I arrived for the first time at New York, by that part
of the Atlantic Ocean which is called the Narrows, I was
surprised to perceive along the shore, at some distance from the
city, a considerable number of little palaces of white marble,
several of which were built after the models of ancient
architecture. When I went the next day to inspect more closely
the building which had particularly attracted my notice, I found
that its walls were of whitewashed brick, and its columns of
painted wood. All the edifices which I had admired the night
before were of the same kind.

The social condition and the institutions of democracy
impart, moreover, certain peculiar tendencies to all the
imitative arts, which it is easy to point out. They frequently
withdraw them from the delineation of the soul to fix them
exclusively on that of the body: and they substitute the
representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment and
thought: in a word, they put the real in the place of the ideal.
I doubt whether Raphael studied the minutest intricacies of the
mechanism of the human body as thoroughly as the draughtsmen of
our own time. He did not attach the same importance to rigorous
accuracy on this point as they do, because he aspired to surpass
nature. He sought to make of man something which should be
superior to man, and to embellish beauty's self. David and his
scholars were, on the contrary, as good anatomists as they were
good painters. They wonderfully depicted the models which they
had before their eyes, but they rarely imagined anything beyond
them: they followed nature with fidelity: whilst Raphael sought
for something better than nature. They have left us an exact
portraiture of man; but he discloses in his works a glimpse of
the Divinity. This remark as to the manner of treating a subject
is no less applicable to the choice of it. The painters of the
Middle Ages generally sought far above themselves, and away from
their own time, for mighty subjects, which left to their
imagination an unbounded range. Our painters frequently employ
their talents in the exact imitation of the details of private
life, which they have always before their eyes; and they are
forever copying trivial objects, the originals of which are only
too abundant in nature.

Chapter XII: Why The Americans Raise Some Monuments So
Insignificant, And Others So Important

I have just observed, that in democratic ages monuments of
the arts tend to become more numerous and less important. I now
hasten to point out the exception to this rule. In a democratic
community individuals are very powerless; but the State which
represents them all, and contains them all in its grasp, is very
powerful. Nowhere do citizens appear so insignificant as in a
democratic nation; nowhere does the nation itself appear greater,
or does the mind more easily take in a wide general survey of it.
In democratic communities the imagination is compressed when men
consider themselves; it expands indefinitely when they think of
the State. Hence it is that the same men who live on a small
scale in narrow dwellings, frequently aspire to gigantic splendor
in the erection of their public monuments.

The Americans traced out the circuit of an immense city on
the site which they intended to make their capital, but which, up
to the present time, is hardly more densely peopled than
Pontoise, though, according to them, it will one day contain a
million of inhabitants. They have already rooted up trees for
ten miles round, lest they should interfere with the future
citizens of this imaginary metropolis. They have erected a
magnificent palace for Congress in the centre of the city, and
have given it the pompous name of the Capitol. The several
States of the Union are every day planning and erecting for
themselves prodigious undertakings, which would astonish the
engineers of the great European nations. Thus democracy not only
leads men to a vast number of inconsiderable productions; it also
leads them to raise some monuments on the largest scale: but
between these two extremes there is a blank. A few scattered
remains of enormous buildings can therefore teach us nothing of
the social condition and the institutions of the people by whom
they were raised. I may add, though the remark leads me to step
out of my subject, that they do not make us better acquainted
with its greatness, its civilization, and its real prosperity.
Whensoever a power of any kind shall be able to make a whole
people co-operate in a single undertaking, that power, with a
little knowledge and a great deal of time, will succeed in
obtaining something enormous from the co-operation of efforts so
multiplied. But this does not lead to the conclusion that the
people was very happy, very enlightened, or even very strong.

The Spaniards found the City of Mexico full of magnificent
temples and vast palaces; but that did not prevent Cortes from
conquering the Mexican Empire with 600 foot soldiers and sixteen
horses. If the Romans had been better acquainted with the laws
of hydraulics, they would not have constructed all the aqueducts
which surround the ruins of their cities - they would have made a
better use of their power and their wealth. If they had invented
the steam-engine, perhaps they would not have extended to the
extremities of their empire those long artificial roads which are
called Roman roads. These things are at once the splendid
memorials of their ignorance and of their greatness. A people
which should leave no other vestige of its track than a few
leaden pipes in the earth and a few iron rods upon its surface,
might have been more the master of nature than the Romans.

Book One - Chapters XIII-XV

Chapter XIII: Literary Characteristics Of Democratic Ages

When a traveller goes into a bookseller's shop in the United
States, and examines the American books upon the shelves, the
number of works appears extremely great; whilst that of known
authors appears, on the contrary, to be extremely small. He will
first meet with a number of elementary treatises, destined to
teach the rudiments of human knowledge. Most of these books are
written in Europe; the Americans reprint them, adapting them to
their own country. Next comes an enormous quantity of religious
works, Bibles, sermons, edifying anecdotes, controversial
divinity, and reports of charitable societies; lastly, appears
the long catalogue of political pamphlets. In America, parties
do not write books to combat each others' opinions, but pamphlets
which are circulated for a day with incredible rapidity, and then
expire. In the midst of all these obscure productions of the
human brain are to be found the more remarkable works of that
small number of authors, whose names are, or ought to be, known
to Europeans.

Although America is perhaps in our days the civilized
country in which literature is least attended to, a large number
of persons are nevertheless to be found there who take an
interest in the productions of the mind, and who make them, if
not the study of their lives, at least the charm of their leisure
hours. But England supplies these readers with the larger
portion of the books which they require. Almost all important
English books are republished in the United States. The literary
genius of Great Britain still darts its rays into the recesses of
the forests of the New World. There is hardly a pioneer's hut
which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I
remember that I read the feudal play of Henry V for the first
time in a loghouse.

Not only do the Americans constantly draw upon the treasures
of English literature, but it may be said with truth that they
find the literature of England growing on their own soil. The
larger part of that small number of men in the United States who
are engaged in the composition of literary works are English in
substance, and still more so in form. Thus they transport into
the midst of democracy the ideas and literary fashions which are
current amongst the aristocratic nation they have taken for their
model. They paint with colors borrowed from foreign manners; and
as they hardly ever represent the country they were born in as it
really is, they are seldom popular there. The citizens of the
United States are themselves so convinced that it is not for them
that books are published, that before they can make up their
minds upon the merit of one of their authors, they generally wait
till his fame has been ratified in England, just as in pictures
the author of an original is held to be entitled to judge of the
merit of a copy. The inhabitants of the United States have then
at present, properly speaking, no literature. The only authors
whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed
are not great writers, but they speak the language of their
countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. Other authors are
aliens; they are to the Americans what the imitators of the
Greeks and Romans were to us at the revival of learning - an
object of curiosity, not of general sympathy. They amuse the
mind, but they do not act upon the manners of the people.

I have already said that this state of things is very far
from originating in democracy alone, and that the causes of it
must be sought for in several peculiar circumstances independent
of the democratic principle. If the Americans, retaining the same
laws and social condition, had had a different origin, and had
been transported into another country, I do not question that
they would have had a literature. Even as they now are, I am
convinced that they will ultimately have one; but its character
will be different from that which marks the American literary
productions of our time, and that character will be peculiarly
its own. Nor is it impossible to trace this character
beforehand.

I suppose an aristocratic people amongst whom letters are
cultivated; the labors of the mind, as well as the affairs of
state, are conducted by a ruling class in society. The literary
as well as the political career is almost entirely confined to
this class, or to those nearest to it in rank. These premises
suffice to give me a key to all the rest. When a small number of
the same men are engaged at the same time upon the same objects,
they easily concert with one another, and agree upon certain
leading rules which are to govern them each and all. If the
object which attracts the attention of these men is literature,
the productions of the mind will soon be subjected by them to
precise canons, from which it will no longer be allowable to
depart. If these men occupy a hereditary position in the
country, they will be naturally inclined, not only to adopt a
certain number of fixed rules for themselves, but to follow those
which their forefathers laid down for their own guidance; their
code will be at once strict and traditional. As they are not
necessarily engrossed by the cares of daily life - as they have
never been so, any more than their fathers were before them -
they have learned to take an interest, for several generations
back, in the labors of the mind. They have learned to understand
literature as an art, to love it in the end for its own sake, and
to feel a scholar-like satisfaction in seeing men conform to its
rules. Nor is this all: the men of whom I speak began and will
end their lives in easy or in affluent circumstances; hence they
have naturally conceived a taste for choice gratifications, and a
love of refined and delicate pleasures. Nay more, a kind of
indolence of mind and heart, which they frequently contract in
the midst of this long and peaceful enjoyment of so much welfare,
leads them to put aside, even from their pleasures, whatever
might be too startling or too acute. They had rather be amused
than intensely excited; they wish to be interested, but not to be
carried away.

Now let us fancy a great number of literary performances
executed by the men, or for the men, whom I have just described,
and we shall readily conceive a style of literature in which
everything will be regular and prearranged. The slightest work
will be carefully touched in its least details; art and labor
will be conspicuous in everything; each kind of writing will have
rules of its own, from which it will not be allowed to swerve,
and which distinguish it from all others. Style will be thought
of almost as much importance as thought; and the form will be no
less considered than the matter: the diction will be polished,
measured, and uniform. The tone of the mind will be always
dignified, seldom very animated; and writers will care more to
perfect what they produce than to multiply their productions. It
will sometimes happen that the members of the literary class,
always living amongst themselves and writing for themselves
alone, will lose sight of the rest of the world, which will
infect them with a false and labored style; they will lay down
minute literary rules for their exclusive use, which will
insensibly lead them to deviate from common-sense, and finally to
transgress the bounds of nature. By dint of striving after a
mode of parlance different from the vulgar, they will arrive at a
sort of aristocratic jargon, which is hardly less remote from
pure language than is the coarse dialect of the people. Such are
the natural perils of literature amongst aristocracies. Every
aristocracy which keeps itself entirely aloof from the people
becomes impotent - a fact which is as true in literature as it is
in politics. *a

[Footnote a: All this is especially true of the aristocratic
countries which have been long and peacefully subject to a
monarchical government. When liberty prevails in an aristocracy,
the higher ranks are constantly obliged to make use of the lower
classes; and when they use, they approach them. This frequently
introduces something of a democratic spirit into an aristocratic
community. There springs up, moreover, in a privileged body,
governing with energy and an habitually bold policy, a taste for
stir and excitement which must infallibly affect all literary
performances.]

Let us now turn the picture and consider the other side of
it; let us transport ourselves into the midst of a democracy, not
unprepared by ancient traditions and present culture to partake
in the pleasures of the mind. Ranks are there intermingled and
confounded; knowledge and power are both infinitely subdivided,
and, if I may use the expression, scattered on every side. Here
then is a motley multitude, whose intellectual wants are to be
supplied. These new votaries of the pleasures of the mind have
not all received the same education; they do not possess the same
degree of culture as their fathers, nor any resemblance to them -
nay, they perpetually differ from themselves, for they live in a
state of incessant change of place, feelings, and fortunes. The
mind of each member of the community is therefore unattached to
that of his fellow-citizens by tradition or by common habits; and
they have never had the power, the inclination, nor the time to
concert together. It is, however, from the bosom of this
heterogeneous and agitated mass that authors spring; and from the
same source their profits and their fame are distributed. I can
without difficulty understand that, under these circumstances, I
must expect to meet in the literature of such a people with but
few of those strict conventional rules which are admitted by
readers and by writers in aristocratic ages. If it should happen
that the men of some one period were agreed upon any such rules,
that would prove nothing for the following period; for amongst
democratic nations each new generation is a new people. Amongst
such nations, then, literature will not easily be subjected to
strict rules, and it is impossible that any such rules should
ever be permanent.

In democracies it is by no means the case that all the men
who cultivate literature have received a literary education; and
most of those who have some tinge of belles-lettres are either
engaged in politics, or in a profession which only allows them to
taste occasionally and by stealth the pleasures of the mind.
These pleasures, therefore, do not constitute the principal charm
of their lives; but they are considered as a transient and
necessary recreation amidst the serious labors of life. Such man
can never acquire a sufficiently intimate knowledge of the art of
literature to appreciate its more delicate beauties; and the
minor shades of expression must escape them. As the time they can
devote to letters is very short, they seek to make the best use
of the whole of it. They prefer books which may be easily
procured, quickly read, and which require no learned researches
to be understood. They ask for beauties, self-proffered and
easily enjoyed; above all, they must have what is unexpected and
new. Accustomed to the struggle, the crosses, and the monotony
of practical life, they require rapid emotions, startling
passages -truths or errors brilliant enough to rouse them up, and
to plunge them at once, as if by violence, into the midst of a
subject.

Why should I say more? or who does not understand what is
about to follow, before I have expressed it? Taken as a whole,
literature in democratic ages can never present, as it does in
the periods of aristocracy, an aspect of order, regularity,
science, and art; its form will, on the contrary, ordinarily be
slighted, sometimes despised. Style will frequently be
fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose - almost always
vehement and bold. Authors will aim at rapidity of execution,
more than at perfection of detail. Small productions will be
more common than bulky books; there will be more wit than
erudition, more imagination than profundity; and literary
performances will bear marks of an untutored and rude vigor of
thought -frequently of great variety and singular fecundity. The
object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and
to stir the passions more than to charm the taste. Here and
there, indeed, writers will doubtless occur who will choose a
different track, and who will, if they are gifted with superior
abilities, succeed in finding readers, in spite of their defects
or their better qualities; but these exceptions will be rare, and
even the authors who shall so depart from the received practice
in the main subject of their works, will always relapse into it
in some lesser details.

I have just depicted two extreme conditions: the transition
by which a nation passes from the former to the latter is not
sudden but gradual, and marked with shades of very various
intensity. In the passage which conducts a lettered people from
the one to the other, there is almost always a moment at which
the literary genius of democratic nations has its confluence with
that of aristocracies, and both seek to establish their joint
sway over the human mind. Such epochs are transient, but very
brilliant: they are fertile without exuberance, and animated
without confusion. The French literature of the eighteenth
century may serve as an example.

I should say more than I mean if I were to assert that the
literature of a nation is always subordinate to its social
condition and its political constitution. I am aware that,
independently of these causes, there are several others which
confer certain characteristics on literary productions; but these
appear to me to be the chief. The relations which exist between
the social and political condition of a people and the genius of
its authors are always very numerous: whoever knows the one is
never completely ignorant of the other.

Chapter XIV: The Trade Of Literature

Democracy not only infuses a taste for letters among the
trading classes, but introduces a trading spirit into literature.
In aristocracies, readers are fastidious and few in number; in
democracies, they are far more numerous and far less difficult to
please. The consequence is, that among aristocratic nations, no
one can hope to succeed without immense exertions, and that these
exertions may bestow a great deal of fame, but can never earn
much money; whilst among democratic nations, a writer may flatter
himself that he will obtain at a cheap rate a meagre reputation
and a large fortune. For this purpose he need not be admired; it
is enough that he is liked. The ever-increasing crowd of
readers, and their continual craving for something new, insure
the sale of books which nobody much esteems.

In democratic periods the public frequently treat authors as
kings do their courtiers; they enrich, and they despise them.
What more is needed by the venal souls which are born in courts,
or which are worthy to live there? Democratic literature is
always infested with a tribe of writers who look upon letters as
a mere trade: and for some few great authors who adorn it you may
reckon thousands of idea-mongers.

Chapter XV: The Study Of Greek And Latin Literature Peculiarly
Useful In Democratic Communities

What was called the People in the most democratic republics
of antiquity, was very unlike what we designate by that term. In
Athens, all the citizens took part in public affairs; but there
were only 20,000 citizens to more than 350,000 inhabitants. All
the rest were slaves, and discharged the greater part of those
duties which belong at the present day to the lower or even to
the middle classes. Athens, then, with her universal suffrage,
was after all merely an aristocratic republic in which all the
nobles had an equal right to the government. The struggle
between the patricians and plebeians of Rome must be considered
in the same light: it was simply an intestine feud between the
elder and younger branches of the same family. All the citizens
belonged, in fact, to the aristocracy, and partook of its
character.

It is moreover to be remarked, that amongst the ancients
books were always scarce and dear; and that very great
difficulties impeded their publication and circulation. These
circumstances concentrated literary tastes and habits amongst a
small number of men, who formed a small literary aristocracy out
of the choicer spirits of the great political aristocracy.
Accordingly nothing goes to prove that literature was ever
treated as a trade amongst the Greeks and Romans.

These peoples, which not only constituted aristocracies, but
very polished and free nations, of course imparted to their
literary productions the defects and the merits which
characterize the literature of aristocratic ages. And indeed a
very superficial survey of the literary remains of the ancients
will suffice to convince us, that if those writers were sometimes
deficient in variety, or fertility in their subjects, or in
boldness, vivacity, or power of generalization in their thoughts,
they always displayed exquisite care and skill in their details.
Nothing in their works seems to be done hastily or at random:
every line is written for the eye of the connoisseur, and is
shaped after some conception of ideal beauty. No literature
places those fine qualities, in which the writers of democracies
are naturally deficient, in bolder relief than that of the
ancients; no literature, therefore, ought to be more studied in
democratic ages. This study is better suited than any other to
combat the literary defects inherent in those ages; as for their
more praiseworthy literary qualities, they will spring up of
their own accord, without its being necessary to learn to acquire
them.

It is important that this point should be clearly
understood. A particular study may be useful to the literature
of a people, without being appropriate to its social and
political wants. If men were to persist in teaching nothing but
the literature of the dead languages in a community where
everyone is habitually led to make vehement exertions to augment
or to maintain his fortune, the result would be a very polished,
but a very dangerous, race of citizens. For as their social and
political condition would give them every day a sense of wants
which their education would never teach them to supply, they
would perturb the State, in the name of the Greeks and Romans,
instead of enriching it by their productive industry.

It is evident that in democratic communities the interest of
individuals, as well as the security of the commonwealth, demands
that the education of the greater number should be scientific,
commercial, and industrial, rather than literary. Greek and
Latin should not be taught in all schools; but it is important
that those who by their natural disposition or their fortune are
destined to cultivate letters or prepared to relish them, should
find schools where a complete knowledge of ancient literature may
be acquired, and where the true scholar may be formed. A few
excellent universities would do more towards the attainment of
this object than a vast number of bad grammar schools, where
superfluous matters, badly learned, stand in the way of sound
instruction in necessary studies.

All who aspire to literary excellence in democratic nations,
ought frequently to refresh themselves at the springs of ancient
literature: there is no more wholesome course for the mind. Not
that I hold the literary productions of the ancients to be
irreproachable; but I think that they have some especial merits,
admirably calculated to counterbalance our peculiar defects.
They are a prop on the side on which we are in most danger of
falling.

Book One - Chapters XVI-XVIII

Chapter XVI: The Effect Of Democracy On Language

If the reader has rightly understood what I have already
said on the subject of literature in general, he will have no
difficulty in comprehending that species of influence which a
democratic social condition and democratic institutions may
exercise over language itself, which is the chief instrument of
thought.

American authors may truly be said to live more in England
than in their own country; since they constantly study the
English writers, and take them every day for their models. But
such is not the case with the bulk of the population, which is
more immediately subjected to the peculiar causes acting upon the
United States. It is not then to the written, but to the spoken
language that attention must be paid, if we would detect the
modifications which the idiom of an aristocratic people may
undergo when it becomes the language of a democracy.

Englishmen of education, and more competent judges than I
can be myself of the nicer shades of expression, have frequently
assured me that the language of the educated classes in the
United States is notably different from that of the educated
classes in Great Britain. They complain not only that the
Americans have brought into use a number of new words - the
difference and the distance between the two countries might
suffice to explain that much - but that these new words are more
especially taken from the jargon of parties, the mechanical arts,
or the language of trade. They assert, in addition to this, that
old English words are often used by the Americans in new
acceptations; and lastly, that the inhabitants of the United
States frequently intermingle their phraseology in the strangest
manner, and sometimes place words together which are always kept
apart in the language of the mother- country. These remarks,
which were made to me at various times by persons who appeared to
be worthy of credit, led me to reflect upon the subject; and my
reflections brought me, by theoretical reasoning, to the same
point at which my informants had arrived by practical
observation.

In aristocracies, language must naturally partake of that
state of repose in which everything remains. Few new words are
coined, because few new things are made; and even if new things
were made, they would be designated by known words, whose meaning
has been determined by tradition. If it happens that the human
mind bestirs itself at length, or is roused by light breaking in
from without, the novel expressions which are introduced are
characterized by a degree of learning, intelligence, and
philosophy, which shows that they do not originate in a
democracy. After the fall of Constantinople had turned the tide
of science and literature towards the west, the French language
was almost immediately invaded by a multitude of new words, which
had all Greek or Latin roots. An erudite neologism then sprang
up in France which was confined to the educated classes, and
which produced no sensible effect, or at least a very gradual
one, upon the people. All the nations of Europe successively
exhibited the same change. Milton alone introduced more than six
hundred words into the English language, almost all derived from
the Latin, the Greek, or the Hebrew. The constant agitation
which prevails in a democratic community tends unceasingly, on
the contrary, to change the character of the language, as it does
the aspect of affairs. In the midst of this general stir and
competition of minds, a great number of new ideas are formed, old
ideas are lost, or reappear, or are subdivided into an infinite
variety of minor shades. The consequence is, that many words
must fall into desuetude, and others must be brought into use.

Democratic nations love change for its own sake; and this is
seen in their language as much as in their politics. Even when
they do not need to change words, they sometimes feel a wish to
transform them. The genius of a democratic people is not only
shown by the great number of words they bring into use, but also
by the nature of the ideas these new words represent. Amongst
such a people the majority lays down the law in language as well
as in everything else; its prevailing spirit is as manifest in
that as in other respects. But the majority is more engaged in
business than in study - in political and commercial interests
than in philosophical speculation or literary pursuits. Most of
the words coined or adopted for its use will therefore bear the
mark of these habits; they will mainly serve to express the wants
of business, the passions of party, or the details of the public
administration. In these departments the language will
constantly spread, whilst on the other hand it will gradually
lose ground in metaphysics and theology.

As to the source from which democratic nations are wont to
derive their new expressions, and the manner in which they go to
work to coin them, both may easily be described. Men living in
democratic countries know but little of the language which was
spoken at Athens and at Rome, and they do not care to dive into
the lore of antiquity to find the expression they happen to want.
If they have sometimes recourse to learned etymologies, vanity
will induce them to search at the roots of the dead languages;
but erudition does not naturally furnish them with its resources.
The most ignorant, it sometimes happens, will use them most. The
eminently democratic desire to get above their own sphere will
often lead them to seek to dignify a vulgar profession by a Greek
or Latin name. The lower the calling is, and the more remote
from learning, the more pompous and erudite is its appellation.
Thus the French rope-dancers have transformed themselves into
acrobates and funambules.

In the absence of knowledge of the dead languages,
democratic nations are apt to borrow words from living tongues;
for their mutual intercourse becomes perpetual, and the
inhabitants of different countries imitate each other the more
readily as they grow more like each other every day.

But it is principally upon their own languages that
democratic nations attempt to perpetrate innovations. From time
to time they resume forgotten expressions in their vocabulary,
which they restore to use; or they borrow from some particular
class of the community a term peculiar to it, which they
introduce with a figurative meaning into the language of daily
life. Many expressions which originally belonged to the
technical language of a profession or a party, are thus drawn
into general circulation.

The most common expedient employed by democratic nations to
make an innovation in language consists in giving some unwonted
meaning to an expression already in use. This method is very
simple, prompt, and convenient; no learning is required to use it
aright, and ignorance itself rather facilitates the practice; but
that practice is most dangerous to the language. When a
democratic people doubles the meaning of a word in this way, they
sometimes render the signification which it retains as ambiguous
as that which it acquires. An author begins by a slight
deflection of a known expression from its primitive meaning, and
he adapts it, thus modified, as well as he can to his subject. A
second writer twists the sense of the expression in another way;
a third takes possession of it for another purpose; and as there
is no common appeal to the sentence of a permanent tribunal which
may definitely settle the signification of the word, it remains
in an ambiguous condition. The consequence is that writers
hardly ever appear to dwell upon a single thought, but they
always seem to point their aim at a knot of ideas, leaving the
reader to judge which of them has been hit. This is a deplorable
consequence of democracy. I had rather that the language should
be made hideous with words imported from the Chinese, the
Tartars, or the Hurons, than that the meaning of a word in our
own language should become indeterminate. Harmony and uniformity
are only secondary beauties in composition; many of these things
are conventional, and, strictly speaking, it is possible to
forego them; but without clear phraseology there is no good
language.

The principle of equality necessarily introduces several
other changes into language. In aristocratic ages, when each
nation tends to stand aloof from all others and likes to have
distinct characteristics of its own, it often happens that
several peoples which have a common origin become nevertheless
estranged from each other, so that, without ceasing to understand
the same language, they no longer all speak it in the same
manner. In these ages each nation is divided into a certain
number of classes, which see but little of each other, and do not
intermingle. Each of these classes contracts, and invariably
retains, habits of mind peculiar to itself, and adopts by choice
certain words and certain terms, which afterwards pass from
generation to generation, like their estates. The same idiom
then comprises a language of the poor and a language of the rich
- a language of the citizen and a language of the nobility - a
learned language and a vulgar one. The deeper the divisions, and
the more impassable the barriers of society become, the more must
this be the case. I would lay a wager, that amongst the castes
of India there are amazing variations of language, and that there
is almost as much difference between the language of the pariah
and that of the Brahmin as there is in their dress. When, on the
contrary, men, being no longer restrained by ranks, meet on terms
of constant intercourse - when castes are destroyed, and the
classes of society are recruited and intermixed with each other,
all the words of a language are mingled. Those which are
unsuitable to the greater number perish; the remainder form a
common store, whence everyone chooses pretty nearly at random.
Almost all the different dialects which divided the idioms of
European nations are manifestly declining; there is no patois in
the New World, and it is disappearing every day from the old
countries.

The influence of this revolution in social conditions is as
much felt in style as it is in phraseology. Not only does
everyone use the same words, but a habit springs up of using them
without discrimination. The rules which style had set up are
almost abolished: the line ceases to be drawn between expressions
which seem by their very nature vulgar, and other which appear to
be refined. Persons springing from different ranks of society
carry the terms and expressions they are accustomed to use with
them, into whatever circumstances they may pass; thus the origin
of words is lost like the origin of individuals, and there is as
much confusion in language as there is in society.

I am aware that in the classification of words there are
rules which do not belong to one form of society any more than to
another, but which are derived from the nature of things. Some
expressions and phrases are vulgar, because the ideas they are
meant to express are low in themselves; others are of a higher
character, because the objects they are intended to designate are
naturally elevated. No intermixture of ranks will ever efface
these differences. But the principle of equality cannot fail to
root out whatever is merely conventional and arbitrary in the
forms of thought. Perhaps the necessary classification which I
pointed out in the last sentence will always be less respected by
a democratic people than by any other, because amongst such a
people there are no men who are permanently disposed by
education, culture, and leisure to study the natural laws of
language, and who cause those laws to be respected by their own
observance of them.

I shall not quit this topic without touching on a feature of
democratic languages, which is perhaps more characteristic of
them than any other. It has already been shown that democratic
nations have a taste, and sometimes a passion, for general ideas,
and that this arises from their peculiar merits and defects.
This liking for general ideas is displayed in democratic
languages by the continual use of generic terms or abstract
expressions, and by the manner in which they are employed. This
is the great merit and the great imperfection of these languages.
Democratic nations are passionately addicted to generic terms or
abstract expressions, because these modes of speech enlarge
thought, and assist the operations of the mind by enabling it to
include several objects in a small compass. A French democratic
writer will be apt to say capacites in the abstract for men of
capacity, and without particularizing the objects to which their
capacity is applied: he will talk about actualites to designate
in one word the things passing before his eyes at the instant;
and he will comprehend under the term eventualites whatever may
happen in the universe, dating from the moment at which he
speaks. Democratic writers are perpetually coining words of this
kind, in which they sublimate into further abstraction the
abstract terms of the language. Nay, more, to render their mode
of speech more succinct, they personify the subject of these
abstract terms, and make it act like a real entity. Thus they
would say in French, "La force des choses veut que les capacites
gouvernent."

I cannot better illustrate what I mean than by my own
example. I have frequently used the word "equality" in an
absolute sense - nay, I have personified equality in several
places; thus I have said that equality does such and such things,
or refrains from doing others. It may be affirmed that the
writers of the age of Louis XIV would not have used these
expressions: they would never have thought of using the word
"equality" without applying it to some particular object; and
they would rather have renounced the term altogether than have
consented to make a living personage of it.

These abstract terms which abound in democratic languages,
and which are used on every occasion without attaching them to
any particular fact, enlarge and obscure the thoughts they are
intended to convey; they render the mode of speech more succinct,
and the idea contained in it less clear. But with regard to
language, democratic nations prefer obscurity to labor. I know
not indeed whether this loose style has not some secret charm for
those who speak and write amongst these nations. As the men who
live there are frequently left to the efforts of their individual
powers of mind, they are almost always a prey to doubt; and as
their situation in life is forever changing, they are never held
fast to any of their opinions by the certain tenure of their
fortunes. Men living in democratic countries are, then, apt to
entertain unsettled ideas, and they require loose expressions to
convey them. As they never know whether the idea they express
to-day will be appropriate to the new position they may occupy
to-morrow, they naturally acquire a liking for abstract terms.
An abstract term is like a box with a false bottom: you may put
in it what ideas you please, and take them out again without
being observed.

Amongst all nations, generic and abstract terms form the
basis of language. I do not, therefore, affect to expel these
terms from democratic languages; I simply remark that men have an
especial tendency, in the ages of democracy, to multiply words of
this kind - to take them always by themselves in their most
abstract acceptation, and to use them on all occasions, even when
the nature of the discourse does not require them.

Chapter XVII: Of Some Of The Sources Of Poetry Amongst Democratic
Nations

Various different significations have been given to the word
"poetry." It would weary my readers if I were to lead them into a
discussion as to which of these definitions ought to be selected:
I prefer telling them at once that which I have chosen. In my
opinion, poetry is the search and the delineation of the ideal.
The poet is he who, by suppressing a part of what exists, by
adding some imaginary touches to the picture, and by combining
certain real circumstances, but which do not in fact concurrently
happen, completes and extends the work of nature. Thus the
object of poetry is not to represent what is true, but to adorn
it, and to present to the mind some loftier imagery. Verse,
regarded as the ideal beauty of language, may be eminently
poetical; but verse does not, of itself, constitute poetry.

I now proceed to inquire whether, amongst the actions, the
sentiments, and the opinions of democratic nations, there are any
which lead to a conception of ideal beauty, and which may for
this reason be considered as natural sources of poetry. It must
in the first place, be acknowledged that the taste for ideal
beauty, and the pleasure derived from the expression of it, are
never so intense or so diffused amongst a democratic as amongst
an aristocratic people. In aristocratic nations it sometimes
happens that the body goes on to act as it were spontaneously,
whilst the higher faculties are bound and burdened by repose.
Amongst these nations the people will very often display poetic
tastes, and sometimes allow their fancy to range beyond and above
what surrounds them. But in democracies the love of physical
gratification, the notion of bettering one's condition, the
excitement of competition, the charm of anticipated success, are
so many spurs to urge men onwards in the active professions they
have embraced, without allowing them to deviate for an instant
from the track. The main stress of the faculties is to this
point. The imagination is not extinct; but its chief function is
to devise what may be useful, and to represent what is real.

The principle of equality not only diverts men from the
description of ideal beauty - it also diminishes the number of
objects to be described. Aristocracy, by maintaining society in a
fixed position, is favorable to the solidity and duration of
positive religions, as well as to the stability of political
institutions. It not only keeps the human mind within a certain
sphere of belief, but it predisposes the mind to adopt one faith
rather than another. An aristocratic people will always be prone
to place intermediate powers between God and man. In this
respect it may be said that the aristocratic element is favorable
to poetry. When the universe is peopled with supernatural
creatures, not palpable to the senses but discovered by the mind,
the imagination ranges freely, and poets, finding a thousand
subjects to delineate, also find a countless audience to take an
interest in their productions. In democratic ages it sometimes
happens, on the contrary, that men are as much afloat in matters
of belief as they are in their laws. Scepticism then draws the
imagination of poets back to earth, and confines them to the real
and visible world. Even when the principle of equality does not
disturb religious belief, it tends to simplify it, and to divert
attention from secondary agents, to fix it principally on the
Supreme Power. Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the
contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the
contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is
ancient. In this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to
poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they
are more remote; and for this twofold reason they are better
suited to the delineation of the ideal.

After having deprived poetry of the past, the principle of
equality robs it in part of the present. Amongst aristocratic
nations there are a certain number of privileged personages,
whose situation is, as it were, without and above the condition
of man; to these, power, wealth, fame, wit, refinement, and
distinction in all things appear peculiarly to belong. The crowd
never sees them very closely, or does not watch them in minute
details; and little is needed to make the description of such men
poetical. On the other hand, amongst the same people, you will
meet with classes so ignorant, low, and enslaved, that they are
no less fit objects for poetry from the excess of their rudeness
and wretchedness, than the former are from their greatness and
refinement. Besides, as the different classes of which an
aristocratic community is composed are widely separated, and
imperfectly acquainted with each other, the imagination may
always represent them with some addition to, or some subtraction
from, what they really are. In democratic communities, where men
are all insignificant and very much alike, each man instantly
sees all his fellows when he surveys himself. The poets of
democratic ages can never, therefore, take any man in particular
as the subject of a piece; for an object of slender importance,
which is distinctly seen on all sides, will never lend itself to
an ideal conception. Thus the principle of equality; in
proportion as it has established itself in the world, has dried
up most of the old springs of poetry. Let us now attempt to show
what new ones it may disclose.

When scepticism had depopulated heaven, and the progress of
equality had reduced each individual to smaller and better known
proportions, the poets, not yet aware of what they could
substitute for the great themes which were departing together
with the aristocracy, turned their eyes to inanimate nature. As
they lost sight of gods and heroes, they set themselves to
describe streams and mountains. Thence originated in the last
century, that kind of poetry which has been called, by way of
distinction, the
descriptive. Some have thought that this sort of delineation,
embellished with all the physical and inanimate objects which
cover the earth, was the kind of poetry peculiar to democratic
ages; but I believe this to be an error, and that it only belongs
to a period of transition.

I am persuaded that in the end democracy diverts the
imagination from all that is external to man, and fixes it on man
alone. Democratic nations may amuse themselves for a while with
considering the productions of nature; but they are only excited
in reality by a survey of themselves. Here, and here alone, the
true sources of poetry amongst such nations are to be found; and
it may be believed that the poets who shall neglect to draw their
inspirations hence, will lose all sway over the minds which they
would enchant, and will be left in the end with none but
unimpassioned spectators of their transports. I have shown how
the ideas of progression and of the indefinite perfectibility of
the human race belong to democratic ages. Democratic nations care
but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of
what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows
and dilates beyond all measure. Here then is the wildest range
open to the genius of poets, which allows them to remove their
performances to a sufficient distance from the eye. Democracy
shuts the past against the poet, but opens the future before him.
As all the citizens who compose a democratic community are nearly
equal and alike, the poet cannot dwell upon any one of them; but
the nation itself invites the exercise of his powers. The general
similitude of individuals, which renders any one of them taken
separately an improper subject of poetry, allows poets to include
them all in the same imagery, and to take a general survey of the
people itself. Democractic nations have a clearer perception than
any others of their own aspect; and an aspect so imposing is
admirably fitted to the delineation of the ideal.

I readily admit that the Americans have no poets; I cannot
allow that they have no poetic ideas. In Europe people talk a
great deal of the wilds of America, but the Americans themselves
never think about them: they are insensible to the wonders of
inanimate nature, and they may be said not to perceive the mighty
forests which surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet.
Their eyes are fixed upon another sight: the American people
views its own march across these wilds - drying swamps, turning
the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature.
This magnificent image of themselves does not meet the gaze of
the Americans at intervals only; it may be said to haunt every
one of them in his least as well as in his most important
actions, and to be always flitting before his mind. Nothing
conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry
interests, in one word so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in
the United States. But amongst the thoughts which it suggests
there is always one which is full of poetry, and that is the
hidden nerve which gives vigor to the frame.

In aristocratic ages each people, as well as each
individual, is prone to stand separate and aloof from all others.
In democratic ages, the extreme fluctuations of men and the
impatience of their desires keep them perpetually on the move; so
that the inhabitants of different countries intermingle, see,
listen to, and borrow from each other's stores. It is not only
then the members of the same community who grow more alike;
communities are themselves assimilated to one another, and the
whole assemblage presents to the eye of the spectator one vast
democracy, each citizen of which is a people. This displays the
aspect of mankind for the first time in the broadest light. All
that belongs to the existence of the human race taken as a whole,
to its vicissitudes and to its future, becomes an abundant mine
of poetry. The poets who lived in aristocratic ages have been
eminently successful in their delineations of certain incidents
in the life of a people or a man; but none of them ever ventured
to include within his performances the destinies of mankind - a
task which poets writing in democratic ages may attempt. At that
same time at which every man, raising his eyes above his country,
begins at length to discern mankind at large, the Divinity is
more and more manifest to the human mind in full and entire
majesty. If in democratic ages faith in positive religions be
often shaken, and the belief in intermediate agents, by whatever
name they are called, be overcast; on the other hand men are
disposed to conceive a far broader idea of Providence itself, and
its interference in human affairs assumes a new and more imposing
appearance to their eyes. Looking at the human race as one great
whole, they easily conceive that its destinies are regulated by
the same design; and in the actions of every individual they are
led to acknowledge a trace of that universal and eternal plan on
which God rules our race. This consideration may be taken as
another prolific source of poetry which is opened in democratic
ages. Democratic poets will always appear trivial and frigid if
they seek to invest gods, demons, or angels, with corporeal
forms, and if they attempt to draw them down from heaven to
dispute the supremacy of earth. But if they strive to connect the
great events they commemorate with the general providential
designs which govern the universe, and, without showing the
finger of the Supreme Governor, reveal the thoughts of the
Supreme Mind, their works will be admired and understood, for the
imagination of their contemporaries takes this direction of its
own accord.

It may be foreseen in the like manner that poets living in
democratic ages will prefer the delineation of passions and ideas
to that of persons and achievements. The language, the dress,
and the daily actions of men in democracies are repugnant to
ideal conceptions. These things are not poetical in themselves;
and, if it were otherwise, they would cease to be so, because
they are too familiar to all those to whom the poet would speak
of them. This forces the poet constantly to search below the
external surface which is palpable to the senses, in order to
read the inner soul: and nothing lends itself more to the
delineation of the ideal than the scrutiny of the hidden depths
in the immaterial nature of man. I need not to ramble over earth
and sky to discover a wondrous object woven of contrasts, of
greatness and littleness infinite, of intense gloom and of
amazing brightness - capable at once of exciting pity,
admiration, terror, contempt. I find that object in myself. Man
springs out of nothing, crosses time, and disappears forever in
the bosom of God; he is seen but for a moment,
staggering on the verge of the two abysses, and there he is lost.
If man were wholly ignorant of himself, he would have no poetry
in him; for it is impossible to describe what the mind does not
conceive. If man clearly discerned his own nature, his
imagination would remain idle, and would have nothing to add to
the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently disclosed for
him to apprehend something of himself; and sufficiently obscure
for all the rest to be plunged in thick darkness, in which he
gropes forever - and forever in vain - to lay hold on some
completer notion of his being.

Amongst a democratic people poetry will not be fed with
legendary lays or the memorials of old traditions. The poet will
not attempt to people the universe with supernatural beings in
whom his readers and his own fancy have ceased to believe; nor
will he present virtues and vices in the mask of frigid
personification, which are better received under their own
features. All these resources fail him; but Man remains, and the
poet needs no more. The destinies of mankind - man himself, taken
aloof from his age and his country, and standing in the presence
of Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare
prosperities, and inconceivable wretchedness - will become the
chief, if not the sole theme of poetry amongst these nations.
Experience may confirm this assertion, if we consider the
productions of the greatest poets who have appeared since the
world has been turned to democracy. The authors of our age who
have so admirably delineated the features of Faust, Childe
Harold, Rene, and Jocelyn, did not seek to record the actions of
an individual, but to enlarge and to throw light on some of the
obscurer recesses of the human heart. Such are the poems of
democracy. The principle of equality does not then destroy all
the subjects of poetry: it renders them less numerous, but more
vast.

Chapter XVIII: Of The Inflated Style Of American Writers And
Orators

I have frequently remarked that the Americans, who generally
treat of business in clear, plain language, devoid of all
ornament, and so extremely simple as to be often coarse, are apt
to become inflated as soon as they attempt a more poetical
diction. They then vent their pomposity from one end of a
harangue to the other; and to hear them lavish imagery on every
occasion, one might fancy that they never spoke of anything with
simplicity. The English are more rarely given to a similar
failing. The cause of this may be pointed out without much
difficulty. In democratic communities each citizen is habitually
engaged in the contemplation of a very puny object, namely
himself. If he ever raises his looks higher, he then perceives
nothing but the immense form of society at large, or the still
more imposing aspect of mankind. His ideas are all either
extremely minute and clear, or extremely general and vague: what
lies between is an open void. When he has been drawn out of his
own sphere, therefore, he always expects that some amazing object
will be offered to his attention; and it is on these terms alone
that he consents to tear himself for an instant from the petty
complicated cares which form the charm and the excitement of his
life. This appears to me sufficiently to explain why men in
democracies, whose concerns are in general so paltry, call upon
their poets for conceptions so vast and descriptions so
unlimited.

The authors, on their part, do not fail to obey a propensity
of which they themselves partake; they perpetually inflate their
imaginations, and expanding them beyond all bounds, they not
unfrequently abandon the great in order to reach the gigantic.
By these means they hope to attract the observation of the
multitude, and to fix it easily upon themselves: nor are their
hopes
disappointed; for as the multitude seeks for nothing in poetry
but subjects of very vast dimensions, it has neither the time to
measure with accuracy the proportions of all the subjects set
before it, nor a taste sufficiently correct to perceive at once
in what respect they are out of proportion. The author and the
public at once vitiate one another.

We have just seen that amongst democratic nations, the
sources of poetry are grand, but not abundant. They are soon
exhausted: and poets, not finding the elements of the ideal in
what is real and true, abandon them entirely and create monsters.
I do not fear that the poetry of democratic nations will prove
too insipid, or that it will fly too near the ground; I rather
apprehend that it will be forever losing itself in the clouds,
and that it will range at last to purely imaginary regions. I
fear that the productions of democratic poets may often be
surcharged with immense and incoherent imagery, with exaggerated
descriptions and strange creations; and that the fantastic beings
of their brain may sometimes make us regret the world of reality.

Book One -Chapters XIX-XXI

Chapter XIX: Some Observations On The Drama Amongst Democratic
Nations

When the revolution which subverts the social and political
state of an aristocratic people begins to penetrate into
literature, it generally first manifests itself in the drama, and
it always remains conspicuous there. The spectator of a dramatic
piece is, to a certain extent, taken by surprise by the
impression it conveys. He has no time to refer to his memory, or
to consult those more able to judge than himself. It does not
occur to him to resist the new literary tendencies which begin to
be felt by him; he yields to them before he knows what they are.
Authors are very prompt in discovering which way the taste of the
public is thus secretly inclined. They shape their productions
accordingly; and the literature of the stage, after having served
to indicate the approaching literary revolution, speedily
completes its accomplishment. If you would judge beforehand of
the literature of a people which is lapsing into democracy, study
its dramatic productions.

The literature of the stage, moreover, even amongst
aristocratic nations, constitutes the most democratic part of
their literature. No kind of literary gratification is so much
within the reach of the multitude as that which is derived from
theatrical representations. Neither preparation nor study is
required to enjoy them: they lay hold on you in the midst of your
prejudices and your ignorance. When the yet untutored love of
the pleasures of the mind begins to affect a class of the
community, it instantly draws them to the stage. The theatres of
aristocratic nations have always been filled with spectators not
belonging to the aristocracy. At the theatre alone the higher
ranks mix with the middle and the lower classes; there alone do
the former consent to listen to the opinion of the latter, or at
least to allow them to give an opinion at all. At the theatre,
men of cultivation and of literary attainments have always had
more difficulty than elsewhere in making their taste prevail over
that of the people, and in preventing themselves from being
carried away by the latter. The pit has frequently made laws for
the boxes.

If it be difficult for an aristocracy to prevent the people
from getting the upper hand in the theatre, it will readily be
understood that the people will be supreme there when democratic
principles have crept into the laws and manners - when ranks are
intermixed - when minds, as well as fortunes, are brought more
nearly together - and when the upper class has lost, with its
hereditary wealth, its power, its precedents, and its leisure.
The tastes and propensities natural to democratic nations, in
respect to literature, will therefore first be discernible in the
drama, and it may be foreseen that they will break out there with
vehemence. In written productions, the literary canons of
aristocracy will be gently, gradually, and, so to speak, legally
modified; at the theatre they will be riotously overthrown.
The drama brings out most of the good qualities, and almost
all the defects, inherent in democratic literature. Democratic
peoples hold erudition very cheap, and care but little for what
occurred at Rome and Athens; they want to hear something which
concerns themselves, and the delineation of the present age is
what they demand.

When the heroes and the manners of antiquity are frequently
brought upon the stage, and dramatic authors faithfully observe
the rules of antiquated precedent, that is enough to warrant a
conclusion that the democratic classes have not yet got the upper
hand of the theatres. Racine makes a very humble apology in the
preface to the "Britannicus" for having disposed of Junia amongst
the Vestals, who, according to Aulus Gellius, he says, "admitted
no one below six years of age nor above ten." We may be sure that
he would neither have accused himself of the offence, nor
defended himself from censure, if he had written for our
contemporaries. A fact of this kind not only illustrates the
state of literature at the time when it occurred, but also that
of society itself. A democratic stage does not prove that the
nation is in a state of democracy, for, as we have just seen,
even in aristocracies it may happen that democratic tastes affect
the drama; but when the spirit of aristocracy reigns exclusively
on the stage, the fact irrefragably demonstrates that the whole
of society is aristocratic; and it may be boldly inferred that
the same lettered and learned class which sways the dramatic
writers commands the people and governs the country.

The refined tastes and the arrogant bearing of an
aristocracy will rarely fail to lead it, when it manages the
stage, to make a kind of selection in human nature. Some of the
conditions of society claim its chief interest; and the scenes
which delineate their manners are preferred upon the stage.
Certain virtues, and even certain vices, are thought more
particularly to deserve to figure there; and they are applauded
whilst all others are excluded. Upon the stage, as well as
elsewhere, an aristocratic audience will only meet personages of
quality, and share the emotions of kings. The same thing applies
to style: an aristocracy is apt to impose upon dramatic authors
certain modes of expression which give the key in which
everything is to be delivered. By these means the stage
frequently comes to delineate only one side of man, or sometimes
even to represent what is not to be met with in human nature at
all - to rise above nature and to go beyond it.

In democratic communities the spectators have no such
partialities, and they rarely display any such antipathies: they
like to see upon the stage that medley of conditions, of
feelings, and of opinions, which occurs before their eyes. The
drama becomes more striking, more common, and more true.
Sometimes, however, those who write for the stage in democracies
also transgress the bounds of human nature - but it is on a
different side from their predecessors. By seeking to represent
in minute detail the little singularities of the moment and the
peculiar characteristics of certain personages, they forget to
portray the general features of the race.

When the democratic classes rule the stage, they introduce
as much license in the manner of treating subjects as in the
choice of them. As the love of the drama is, of all literary
tastes, that which is most natural to democratic nations, the
number of authors and of spectators, as well as of theatrical
representations, is constantly increasing amongst these
communities. A multitude composed of elements so different, and
scattered in so many different places, cannot acknowledge the
same rules or submit to the same laws. No concurrence is
possible amongst judges so numerous, who know not when they may
meet again; and therefore each pronounces his own sentence on the
piece. If the effect of democracy is generally to question the
authority of all literary rules and conventions, on the stage it
abolishes them altogether, and puts in their place nothing but
the whim of each author and of each public.

The drama also displays in an especial manner the truth of
what I have said before in speaking more generally of style and
art in democratic literature. In reading the criticisms which
were occasioned by the dramatic productions of the age of Louis
XIV, one is surprised to remark the great stress which the public
laid on the probability of the plot, and the importance which was
attached to the perfect consistency of the characters, and to
their doing nothing which could not be easily explained and
understood. The value which was set upon the forms of language at
that period, and the paltry strife about words with which
dramatic authors were assailed, are no less surprising. It would
seem that the men of the age of Louis XIV attached very
exaggerated importance to those details, which may be perceived
in the study, but which escape attention on the stage. For,
after all, the principal object of a dramatic piece is to be
performed, and its chief merit is to affect the audience. But
the audience and the readers in that age were the same: on
quitting the theatre they called up the author for judgment to
their own firesides. In democracies, dramatic pieces are
listened to, but not read. Most of those who frequent the
amusements of the stage do not go there to seek the pleasures of
the mind, but the keen emotions of the heart. They do not expect
to hear a fine literary work, but to see a play; and provided the
author writes the language of his country correctly enough to be
understood, and that his characters excite curiosity and awaken
sympathy, the audience are satisfied. They ask no more of
fiction, and immediately return to real life. Accuracy of style
is therefore less required, because the attentive observance of
its rules is less perceptible on the stage. As for the
probability of the plot, it is incompatible with perpetual
novelty, surprise, and rapidity of invention. It is therefore
neglected, and the public excuses the neglect. You may be sure
that if you succeed in bringing your audience into the presence
of something that affects them, they will not care by what road
you brought them there; and they will never reproach you for
having excited their emotions in spite of dramatic rules.

The Americans very broadly display all the different
propensities which I have here described when they go to the
theatres; but it must be acknowledged that as yet a very small
number of them go to theatres at all. Although playgoers and
plays have prodigiously increased in the United States in the
last forty years, the population indulges in this kind of
amusement with the greatest reserve. This is attributable to
peculiar causes, which the reader is already acquainted with, and
of which a few words will suffice to remind him. The Puritans
who founded the American republics were not only enemies to
amusements, but they professed an especial abhorrence for the
stage. They considered it as an abominable pastime; and as long
as their principles prevailed with undivided sway, scenic
performances were wholly unknown amongst them. These opinions of
the first fathers of the colony have left very deep marks on the
minds of their descendants. The extreme regularity of habits and
the great strictness of manners which are observable in the
United States, have as yet opposed additional obstacles to the
growth of dramatic art. There are no dramatic subjects in a
country which has witnessed no great political catastrophes, and
in which love invariably leads by a straight and easy road to
matrimony. People who spend every day in the week in making
money, and the Sunday in going to church, have nothing to invite
the muse of Comedy.

A single fact suffices to show that the stage is not very
popular in the United States. The Americans, whose laws allow of
the utmost freedom and even license of language in all other
respects, have nevertheless subjected their dramatic authors to a
sort of censorship. Theatrical performances can only take place
by permission of the municipal authorities. This may serve to
show how much communities are like individuals; they surrender
themselves unscrupulously to their ruling passions, and
afterwards take the greatest care not to yield too much to the
vehemence of tastes which they do not possess.

No portion of literature is connected by closer or more
numerous ties with the present condition of society than the
drama. The drama of one period can never be suited to the
following age, if in the interval an important revolution has
changed the manners and the laws of the nation. The great
authors of a preceding age may be read; but pieces written for a
different public will not be followed. The dramatic authors of
the past live only in books. The traditional taste of certain
individuals, vanity, fashion, or the genius of an actor may
sustain or resuscitate for a time the aristocratic drama amongst
a democracy; but it will speedily fall away of itself - not
overthrown, but abandoned.

Chapter XX: Characteristics Of Historians In Democratic Ages
Historians who write in aristocratic ages are wont to refer
all occurrences to the particular will or temper of certain
individuals; and they are apt to attribute the most important
revolutions to very slight accidents. They trace out the smallest
causes with sagacity, and frequently leave the greatest
unperceived. Historians who live in democratic ages exhibit
precisely opposite characteristics. Most of them attribute
hardly any influence to the individual over the destiny of the
race, nor to citizens over the fate of a people; but, on the
other hand, they assign great general causes to all petty
incidents. These contrary tendencies explain each other.

When the historian of aristocratic ages surveys the theatre
of the world, he at once perceives a very small number of
prominent actors, who manage the whole piece. These great
personages, who occupy the front of the stage, arrest the
observation, and fix it on themselves; and whilst the historian
is bent on penetrating the secret motives which make them speak
and act, the rest escape his memory. The importance of the
things which some men are seen to do, gives him an exaggerated
estimate of the influence which one man may possess; and
naturally leads him to think, that in order to explain the
impulses of the multitude, it is necessary to refer them to the
particular influence of some one individual.

When, on the contrary, all the citizens are independent of
one another, and each of them is individually weak, no one is
seen to exert a great, or still less a lasting power, over the
community. At first sight, individuals appear to be absolutely
devoid of any influence over it; and society would seem to
advance alone by the free and voluntary concurrence of all the
men who compose it. This naturally prompts the mind to search
for that general reason which operates upon so many men's
faculties at the same time, and turns them simultaneously in the
same direction.

I am very well convinced that even amongst democratic
nations, the genius, the vices, or the virtues of certain
individuals retard or accelerate the natural current of a
people's history: but causes of this secondary and fortuitous
nature are infinitely more various, more concealed, more complex,
less powerful, and consequently less easy to trace in periods of
equality than in ages of aristocracy, when the task of the
historian is simply to detach from the mass of general events the
particular influences of one man or of a few men. In the former
case the historian is soon wearied by the toil; his mind loses
itself in this labyrinth; and, in his inability clearly to
discern or conspicuously to point out the influence of
individuals, he denies their existence. He prefers talking about
the characteristics of race, the physical conformation of the
country, or the genius of civilization, which abridges his own
labors, and satisfies his reader far better at less cost.

M. de Lafayette says somewhere in his "Memoirs" that the
exaggerated system of general causes affords surprising
consolations to second-rate statesmen. I will add, that its
effects are not less consolatory to second-rate historians; it
can always furnish a few mighty reasons to extricate them from
the most difficult part of their work, and it indulges the
indolence or incapacity of their minds, whilst it confers upon
them the honors of deep thinking.

For myself, I am of opinion that at all times one great
portion of the events of this world are attributable to general
facts, and another to special influences. These two kinds of
cause are always in operation: their proportion only varies.
General facts serve to explain more things in democratic than in
aristocratic ages, and fewer things are then assignable to
special influences. At periods of aristocracy the reverse takes
place: special influences are stronger, general causes weaker -
unless indeed we consider as a general cause the fact itself of
the inequality of conditions, which allows some individuals to
baffle the natural tendencies of all the rest. The historians
who seek to describe what occurs in democratic societies are
right, therefore, in assigning much to general causes, and in
devoting their chief attention to discover them; but they are
wrong in wholly denying the special influence of individuals,
because they cannot easily trace or follow it.

The historians who live in democratic ages are not only
prone to assign a great cause to every incident, but they are
also given to connect incidents together, so as to deduce a
system from them. In aristocratic ages, as the attention of
historians is constantly drawn to individuals, the connection of
events escapes them; or rather, they do not believe in any such
connection. To them the clew of history seems every instant
crossed and broken by the step of man. In democratic ages, on
the contrary, as the historian sees much more of actions than of
actors, he may easily establish some kind of sequency and
methodical order amongst the former. Ancient literature, which
is so rich in fine historical compositions, does not contain a
single great historical system, whilst the poorest of modern
literatures abound with them. It would appear that the ancient
historians did not make sufficient use of those general theories
which our historical writers are ever ready to carry to excess.

Those who write in democratic ages have another more
dangerous tendency. When the traces of individual action upon
nations are lost, it often happens that the world goes on to
move, though the moving agent is no longer discoverable. As it
becomes extremely difficult to discern and to analyze the reasons
which, acting separately on the volition of each member of the
community, concur in the end to produce movement in the old mass,
men are led to believe that this movement is involuntary, and
that societies unconsciously obey some superior force ruling over
them. But even when the general fact which governs the private
volition of all individuals is supposed to be discovered upon the
earth, the principle of human free-will is not secure. A cause
sufficiently extensive to affect millions of men at once, and
sufficiently strong to bend them all together in the same
direction, may well seem irresistible: having seen that mankind
do yield to it, the mind is close upon the inference that mankind
cannot resist it.

Historians who live in democratic ages, then, not only deny
that the few have any power of acting upon the destiny of a
people, but they deprive the people themselves of the power of
modifying their own condition, and they subject them either to an
inflexible Providence, or to some blind necessity. According to
them, each nation is indissolubly bound by its position, its
origin, its precedents, and its character, to a certain lot which
no efforts can ever change. They involve generation in
generation, and thus, going back from age to age, and from
necessity to necessity, up to the origin of the world, they forge
a close and enormous chain, which girds and binds the human race.
To their minds it is not enough to show what events have
occurred: they would fain show that events could not have
occurred otherwise. They take a nation arrived at a certain
stage of its history, and they affirm that it could not but
follow the track which brought it thither. It is easier to make
such an assertion than to show by what means the nation might
have adopted a better course.

In reading the historians of aristocratic ages, and
especially those of antiquity, it would seem that, to be master
of his lot, and to govern his fellow-creatures, man requires only
to be master of himself. In perusing the historical volumes
which our age has produced, it would seem that man is utterly
powerless over himself and over all around him. The historians
of antiquity taught how to command: those of our time teach only
how to obey; in their writings the author often appears great,
but humanity is always diminutive. If this doctrine of
necessity, which is so attractive to those who write history in
democratic ages, passes from authors to their readers, till it
infects the whole mass of the community and gets possession of
the public mind, it will soon paralyze the activity of modern
society, and reduce Christians to the level of the Turks. I
would moreover observe, that such principles are peculiarly
dangerous at the period at which we are arrived. Our
contemporaries are but too prone to doubt of the human free-will,
because each of them feels himself confined on every side by his
own weakness; but they are still willing to acknowledge the
strength and independence of men united in society. Let not this
principle be lost sight of; for the great object in our time is
to raise the faculties of men, not to complete their prostration.
Chapter XXI: Of Parliamentary Eloquence In The United States
Amongst aristocratic nations all the members of the
community are connected with and dependent upon each other; the
graduated scale of different ranks acts as a tie, which keeps
everyone in his proper place and the whole body in subordination.
Something of the same kind always occurs in the political
assemblies of these nations. Parties naturally range themselves
under certain leaders, whom they obey by a sort of instinct,
which is only the result of habits contracted elsewhere. They
carry the manners of general society into the lesser assemblage.

In democratic countries it often happens that a great number
of citizens are tending to the same point; but each one only
moves thither, or at least flatters himself that he moves, of his
own accord. Accustomed to regulate his doings by personal
impulse alone, he does not willingly submit to dictation from
without. This taste and habit of independence accompany him into
the councils of the nation. If he consents to connect himself
with other men in the prosecution of the same purpose, at least
he chooses to remain free to contribute to the common success
after his own fashion. Hence it is that in democratic countries
parties are so impatient of control, and are never manageable
except in moments of great public danger. Even then, the
authority of leaders, which under such circumstances may be able
to make men act or speak, hardly ever reaches the extent of
making them keep silence.

Amongst aristocratic nations the members of political
assemblies are at the same time members of the aristocracy. Each
of them enjoys high established rank in his own right, and the
position which he occupies in the assembly is often less
important in his eyes than that which he fills in the country.
This consoles him for playing no part in the discussion of public
affairs, and restrains him from too eagerly attempting to play an
insignificant one.

In America, it generally happens that a Representative only
becomes somebody from his position in the Assembly. He is
therefore perpetually haunted by a craving to acquire importance
there, and he feels a petulant desire to be constantly obtruding
his opinions upon the House. His own vanity is not the only
stimulant which urges him on in this course, but that of his
constituents, and the continual necessity of propitiating them.
Amongst aristocratic nations a member of the legislature is
rarely in strict dependence upon his constituents: he is
frequently to them a sort of unavoidable representative;
sometimes they are themselves strictly dependent upon him; and if
at length they reject him, he may easily get elected elsewhere,
or, retiring from public life, he may still enjoy the pleasures
of splendid idleness. In a democratic country like the United
States a Representative has hardly ever a lasting hold on the
minds of his constituents. However small an electoral body may
be, the fluctuations of democracy are constantly changing its
aspect; it must, therefore, be courted unceasingly. He is never
sure of his supporters, and, if they forsake him, he is left
without a resource; for his natural position is not sufficiently
elevated for him to be easily known to those not close to him;
and, with the complete state of independence prevailing among the
people, he cannot hope that his friends or the government will
send him down to be returned by an electoral body unacquainted
with him. The seeds of his fortune are, therefore, sown in his
own neighborhood; from that nook of earth he must start, to raise
himself to the command of a people and to influence the destinies
of the world. Thus it is natural that in democratic countries
the members of political assemblies think more of their
constituents than of their party, whilst in aristocracies they
think more of their party than of their constituents.

But what ought to be said to gratify constituents is not
always what ought to be said in order to serve the party to which
Representatives profess to belong. The general interest of a
party frequently demands that members belonging to it should not
speak on great questions which they understand imperfectly; that
they should speak but little on those minor questions which
impede the great ones; lastly, and for the most part, that they
should not speak at all. To keep silence is the most useful
service that an indifferent spokesman can render to the
commonwealth. Constituents, however, do not think so. The
population of a district sends a representative to take a part in
the government of a country, because they entertain a very lofty
notion of his merits. As men appear greater in proportion to the
littleness of the objects by which they are surrounded, it may be
assumed that the opinion entertained of the delegate will be so
much the higher as talents are more rare among his constituents.
It will therefore frequently happen that the less constituents
have to expect from their representative, the more they will
anticipate from him; and, however incompetent he may be, they
will not fail to call upon him for signal exertions,
corresponding to the rank they have conferred upon him.

Independently of his position as a legislator of the State,
electors also regard their Representative as the natural patron
of the constituency in the Legislature; they almost consider him
as the proxy of each of his supporters, and they flatter
themselves that he will not be less zealous in defense of their
private interests than of those of the country. Thus electors
are well assured beforehand that the Representative of their
choice will be an orator; that he will speak often if he can, and
that in case he is forced to refrain, he will strive at any rate
to compress into his less frequent orations an inquiry into all
the great questions of state, combined with a statement of all
the petty grievances they have themselves to complain to; so
that, though he be not able to come forward frequently, he should
on each occasion prove what he is capable of doing; and that,
instead of perpetually lavishing his powers, he should
occasionally condense them in a small compass, so as to furnish a
sort of complete and brilliant epitome of his constituents and of
himself. On these terms they will vote for him at the next
election. These conditions drive worthy men of humble abilities
to despair, who, knowing their own powers, would never
voluntarily have come forward. But thus urged on, the
Representative begins to speak, to the great alarm of his
friends; and rushing imprudently into the midst of the most
celebrated orators, he perplexes the debate and wearies the
House.

All laws which tend to make the Representative more
dependent on the elector, not only affect the conduct of the
legislators, as I have remarked elsewhere, but also their
language. They exercise a simultaneous influence on affairs
themselves, and on the manner in which affairs are discussed.

There is hardly a member of Congress who can make up his
mind to go home without having despatched at least one speech to
his constituents; nor who will endure any interruption until he
has introduced into his harangue whatever useful suggestions may
be made touching the four-and-twenty States of which the Union is
composed, and especially the district which he represents. He
therefore presents to the mind of his auditors a succession of
great general truths (which he himself only comprehends, and
expresses, confusedly), and of petty minutia, which he is but too
able to discover and to point out. The consequence is that the
debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and
perplexed, and that they seem rather to drag their slow length
along than to advance towards a distinct object. Some such state
of things will, I believe, always arise in the public assemblies
of democracies.

Propitious circumstances and good laws might succeed in
drawing to the legislature of a democratic people men very
superior to those who are returned by the Americans to Congress;
but nothing will ever prevent the men of slender abilities who
sit there from obtruding themselves with complacency, and in all
ways, upon the public. The evil does not appear to me to be
susceptible of entire cure, because it not only originates in the
tactics of that assembly, but in its constitution and in that of
the country. The inhabitants of the United States seem themselves
to consider the matter in this light; and they show their long
experience of parliamentary life not by abstaining from making
bad speeches, but by courageously submitting to hear them made.
They are resigned to it, as to an evil which they know to be
inevitable.

We have shown the petty side of political debates in
democratic assemblies - let us now exhibit the more imposing one.
The proceedings within the Parliament of England for the last one
hundred and fifty years have never occasioned any great sensation
out of that country; the opinions and feelings expressed by the
speakers have never awakened much sympathy, even amongst the
nations placed nearest to the great arena of British liberty;
whereas Europe was excited by the very first debates which took
place in the small colonial assemblies of America at the time of
the Revolution. This was attributable not only to particular and
fortuitous circumstances, but to general and lasting causes. I
can conceive nothing more admirable or more powerful than a great
orator debating on great questions of state in a democratic
assembly. As no particular class is ever represented there by men
commissioned to defend its own interests, it is always to the
whole nation, and in the name of the whole nation, that the
orator speaks. This expands his thoughts, and heightens his
power of language. As precedents have there but little weight
-as there are no longer any privileges attached to certain
property, nor any rights inherent in certain bodies or in certain
individuals, the mind must have recourse to general truths
derived from human nature to resolve the particular question
under discussion. Hence the political debates of a democratic
people, however small it may be, have a degree of breadth which
frequently renders them attractive to mankind. All men are
interested by them, because they treat of man, who is everywhere
the same. Amongst the greatest aristocratic nations, on the
contrary, the most general questions are almost always argued on
some special grounds derived from the practice of a particular
time, or the rights of a particular class; which interest that
class alone, or at most the people amongst whom that class
happens to exist. It is owing to this, as much as to the
greatness of the French people, and the favorable disposition of
the nations who listen to them, that the great effect which the
French political debates sometimes produce in the world, must be
attributed. The orators of France frequently speak to mankind,
even when they are addressing their countrymen only.

Book 2

Influence Of Democracy On The Feelings Of Americans

Chapter I: Why Democratic Nations Show A More Ardent And Enduring
Love Of Equality Than Of Liberty

The first and most intense passion which is engendered by
the equality of conditions is, I need hardly say, the love of
that same equality. My readers will therefore not be surprised
that I speak of its before all others. Everybody has remarked
that in our time, and especially in France, this passion for
equality is every day gaining ground in the human heart. It has
been said a hundred times that our contemporaries are far more
ardently and tenaciously attached to equality than to freedom;
but as I do not find that the causes of the fact have been
sufficiently analyzed, I shall endeavor to point them out.

It is possible to imagine an extreme point at which freedom
and equality would meet and be confounded together. Let us
suppose that all the members of the community take a part in the
government, and that each of them has an equal right to take a
part in it. As none is different from his fellows, none can
exercise a tyrannical power: men will be perfectly free, because
they will all be entirely equal; and they will all be perfectly
equal, because they will be entirely free. To this ideal state
democratic nations tend. Such is the completest form that
equality can assume upon earth; but there are a thousand others
which, without being equally perfect, are not less cherished by
those nations.

The principle of equality may be established in civil
society, without prevailing in the political world. Equal rights
may exist of indulging in the same pleasures, of entering the
same professions, of frequenting the same places - in a word, of
living in the same manner and seeking wealth by the same means,
although all men do not take an equal share in the government. A
kind of equality may even be established in the political world,
though there should be no political freedom there. A man may be
the equal of all his countrymen save one, who is the master of
all without distinction, and who selects equally from among them
all the agents of his power. Several other combinations might be
easily imagined, by which very great equality would be united to
institutions more or less free, or even to institutions wholly
without freedom. Although men cannot become absolutely equal
unless they be entirely free, and consequently equality, pushed
to its furthest extent, may be confounded with freedom, yet there
is good reason for distinguishing the one from the other. The
taste which men have for liberty, and that which they feel for
equality, are, in fact, two different things; and I am not afraid
to add that, amongst democratic nations, they are two unequal
things.

Upon close inspection, it will be seen that there is in
every age some peculiar and preponderating fact with which all
others are connected; this fact almost always gives birth to some
pregnant idea or some ruling passion, which attracts to itself,
and bears away in its course, all the feelings and opinions of
the time: it is like a great stream, towards which each of the
surrounding rivulets seems to flow. Freedom has appeared in the
world at different times and under various forms; it has not been
exclusively bound to any social condition, and it is not confined
to democracies. Freedom cannot, therefore, form the
distinguishing characteristic of democratic ages. The peculiar
and preponderating fact which marks those ages as its own is the
equality of conditions; the ruling passion of men in those
periods is the love of this equality. Ask not what singular
charm the men of democratic ages find in being equal, or what
special reasons they may have for clinging so tenaciously to
equality rather than to the other advantages which society holds
out to them: equality is the distinguishing characteristic of the
age they live in; that, of itself, is enough to explain that they
prefer it to all the rest.

But independently of this reason there are several others,
which will at all times habitually lead men to prefer equality to
freedom. If a people could ever succeed in destroying, or even
in diminishing, the equality which prevails in its own body, this
could only be accomplished by long and laborious efforts. Its
social condition must be modified, its laws abolished, its
opinions superseded, its habits changed, its manners corrupted.
But political liberty is more easily lost; to neglect to hold it
fast is to allow it to escape. Men therefore not only cling to
equality because it is dear to them; they also adhere to it
because they think it will last forever.

That political freedom may compromise in its excesses the
tranquillity, the property, the lives of individuals, is obvious
to the narrowest and most unthinking minds. But, on the
contrary, none but attentive and clear-sighted men perceive the
perils with which equality threatens us, and they commonly avoid
pointing them out. They know that the calamities they apprehend
are remote, and flatter themselves that they will only fall upon
future generations, for which the present generation takes but
little thought. The evils which freedom sometimes brings with it
are immediate; they are apparent to all, and all are more or less
affected by them. The evils which extreme equality may produce
are slowly disclosed; they creep gradually into the social frame;
they are only seen at intervals, and at the moment at which they
become most violent habit already causes them to be no longer
felt. The advantages which freedom brings are only shown by
length of time; and it is always easy to mistake the cause in
which they originate. The advantages of equality are
instantaneous, and they may constantly be traced from their
source. Political liberty bestows exalted pleasures, from time
to time, upon a certain number of citizens. Equality every day
confers a number of small enjoyments on every man. The charms of
equality are every instant felt, and are within the reach of all;
the noblest hearts are not insensible to them, and the most
vulgar souls exult in them. The passion which equality engenders
must therefore be at once strong and general. Men cannot enjoy
political liberty unpurchased by some sacrifices, and they never
obtain it without great exertions. But the pleasures of equality
are self-proffered: each of the petty incidents of life seems to
occasion them, and in order to taste them nothing is required but
to live.

Democratic nations are at all times fond of equality, but
there are certain epochs at which the passion they entertain for
it swells to the height of fury. This occurs at the moment when
the old social system, long menaced, completes its own
destruction after a last intestine struggle, and when the
barriers of rank are at length thrown down. At such times men
pounce upon equality as their booty, and they cling to it as to
some precious treasure which they fear to lose. The passion for
equality penetrates on every side into men's hearts, expands
there, and fills them entirely. Tell them not that by this blind
surrender of themselves to an exclusive passion they risk their
dearest interests: they are deaf. Show them not freedom escaping
from their grasp, whilst they are looking another way: they are
blind - or rather, they can discern but one sole object to be
desired in the universe.

What I have said is applicable to all democratic nations:
what I am about to say concerns the French alone. Amongst most
modern nations, and especially amongst all those of the Continent
of Europe, the taste and the idea of freedom only began to exist
and to extend themselves at the time when social conditions were
tending to equality, and as a consequence of that very equality.
Absolute kings were the most efficient levellers of ranks amongst
their subjects. Amongst these nations equality preceded freedom:
equality was therefore a fact of some standing when freedom was
still a novelty: the one had already created customs, opinions,
and laws belonging to it, when the other, alone and for the first
time, came into actual existence. Thus the latter was still only
an affair of opinion and of taste, whilst the former had already
crept into the habits of the people, possessed itself of their
manners, and given a particular turn to the smallest actions of
their lives. Can it be wondered that the men of our own time
prefer the one to the other?

I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for
freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and
view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their
passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call
for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they
still call for equality in slavery. They will endure poverty,
servitude, barbarism - but they will not endure aristocracy.
This is true at all times, and especially true in our own. All
men and all powers seeking to cope with this irresistible
passion, will be overthrown and destroyed by it. In our age,
freedom cannot be established without it, and despotism itself
cannot reign without its support.

Chapter II: Of Individualism In Democratic Countries

I have shown how it is that in ages of equality every man
seeks for his opinions within himself: I am now about to show how
it is that, in the same ages, all his feelings are turned towards
himselfalone. Individualism *a is a novel expression, to which a
novel idea has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted
with egotism. Egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of
self, which leads a man to connect everything with his own
person, and to prefer himself to everything in the world.
Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each
member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his
fellow-creatures; and to draw apart with his family and his
friends; so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his
own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Egotism
originates in blind instinct: individualism proceeds from
erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it
originates as much in the deficiencies of the mind as in the
perversity of the heart. Egotism blights the germ of all virtue;
individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life;
but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is
at length absorbed in downright egotism. Egotism is a vice as
old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society
more than to another: individualism is of democratic origin, and
it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of
conditions.

[Footnote a: [I adopt the expression of the original, however
strange it may seem to the English ear, partly because it
illustrates the remark on the introduction of general terms into
democratic language which was made in a preceding chapter, and
partly because I know of no English word exactly equivalent to
the expression. The chapter itself defines the meaning attached
to it by the author. - Translator's Note.]]

Amongst aristocratic nations, as families remain for
centuries in the same condition, often on the same spot, all
generations become as it were contemporaneous. A man almost
always knows his forefathers, and respects them: he thinks he
already sees his remote descendants, and he loves them. He
willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the
latter; and he will frequently sacrifice his personal
gratifications to those who went before and to those who will
come after him. Aristocratic institutions have, moreover, the
effect of closely binding every man to several of his
fellow-citizens. As the classes of an aristocratic people are
strongly marked and permanent, each of them is regarded by its
own members as a sort of lesser country, more tangible and more
cherished than the country at large. As in aristocratic
communities all the citizens occupy fixed positions, one above
the other, the result is that each of them always sees a man
above himself whose patronage is necessary to him, and below
himself another man whose co-operation he may claim. Men living
in aristocratic ages are therefore almost always closely attached
to something placed out of their own sphere, and they are often
disposed to forget themselves. It is true that in those ages the
notion of human fellowship is faint, and that men seldom think of
sacrificing themselves for mankind; but they often sacrifice
themselves for other men. In democratic ages, on the contrary,
when the duties of each individual to the race are much more
clear, devoted service to any one man becomes more rare; the bond
of human affection is extended, but it is relaxed.

Amongst democratic nations new families are constantly
springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that
remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant
broken, and the track of generations effaced. Those who went
before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after no one
has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close
propinquity to himself. As each class approximates to other
classes, and intermingles with them, its members become
indifferent and as strangers to one another. Aristocracy had
made a chain of all the members of the community, from the
peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs
every link of it. As social conditions become more equal, the
number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich
enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over
their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained
sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants.
They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man;
they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as
standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole
destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make
every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and
separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever
upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him
entirely within the solitude of his own heart.
Chapter III: Individualism Stronger At The Close Of A Democratic
Revolution Than At Other Periods

The period when the construction of democratic society upon
the ruins of an aristocracy has just been completed, is
especially that at which this separation of men from one another,
and the egotism resulting from it, most forcibly strike the
observation. Democratic communities not only contain a large
number of independent citizens, but they are constantly filled
with men who, having entered but yesterday upon their independent
condition, are intoxicated with their new power. They entertain
a presumptuous confidence in their strength, and as they do not
suppose that they can henceforward ever have occasion to claim
the assistance of their fellow-creatures, they do not scruple to
show that they care for nobody but themselves.

An aristocracy seldom yields without a protracted struggle,
in the course of which implacable animosities are kindled between
the different classes of society. These passions survive the
victory, and traces of them may be observed in the midst of the
democratic confusion which ensues. Those members of the
community who were at the top of the late gradations of rank
cannot immediately forget their former greatness; they will long
regard themselves as aliens in the midst of the newly composed
society. They look upon all those whom this state of society has
made their equals as oppressors, whose destiny can excite no
sympathy; they have lost sight of their former equals, and feel
no longer bound by a common interest to their fate: each of them,
standing aloof, thinks that he is reduced to care for himself
alone. Those, on the contrary, who were formerly at the foot of
the social scale, and who have been brought up to the common
level by a sudden revolution, cannot enjoy their newly acquired
independence without secret uneasiness; and if they meet with
some of their former superiors on the same footing as themselves,
they stand aloof from them with an expression of triumph and of
fear. It is, then, commonly at the outset of democratic society
that citizens are most disposed to live apart. Democracy leads
men not to draw near to their fellow- creatures; but democratic
revolutions lead them to shun each other, and perpetuate in a
state of equality the animosities which the state of inequality
engendered. The great advantage of the Americans is that they
have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a
democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of
becoming so.

Chapter IV: That The Americans Combat The Effects Of
Individualism By Free Institutions

Despotism, which is of a very timorous nature, is never more
secure of continuance than when it can keep men asunder; and all
is influence is commonly exerted for that purpose. No vice of
the human heart is so acceptable to it as egotism: a despot
easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do
not love each other. He does not ask them to assist him in
governing the State; it is enough that they do not aspire to
govern it themselves. He stigmatizes as turbulent and unruly
spirits those who would combine their exertions to promote the
prosperity of the community, and, perverting the natural meaning
of words, he applauds as good citizens those who have no sympathy
for any but themselves. Thus the vices which despotism engenders
are precisely those which equality fosters. These two things
mutually and perniciously complete and assist each other.
Equality places men side by side, unconnected by any common tie;
despotism raises barriers to keep them asunder; the former
predisposes them not to consider their fellow-creatures, the
latter makes general indifference a sort of public virtue.

Despotism then, which is at all times dangerous, is more
particularly to be feared in democratic ages. It is easy to see
that in those same ages men stand most in need of freedom. When
the members of a community are forced to attend to public
affairs, they are necessarily drawn from the circle of their own
interests, and snatched at times from self-observation. As soon
as a man begins to treat of public affairs in public, he begins
to perceive that he is not so independent of his fellow-men as he
had at first imagined, and that, in order to obtain their
support, he must often lend them his co-operation.

When the public is supreme, there is no man who does not
feel the value of public goodwill, or who does not endeavor to
court it by drawing to himself the esteem and affection of those
amongst whom he is to live. Many of the passions which congeal
and keep asunder human hearts, are then obliged to retire and
hide below the surface. Pride must be dissembled; disdain dares
not break out; egotism fears its own self. Under a free
government, as most public offices are elective, the men whose
elevated minds or aspiring hopes are too closely circumscribed in
private life, constantly feel that they cannot do without the
population which surrounds them. Men learn at such times to
think of their fellow- men from ambitious motives; and they
frequently find it, in a manner, their interest to forget
themselves.

I may here be met by an objection derived from
electioneering intrigues, the meannesses of candidates, and the
calumnies of their opponents. These are opportunities for
animosity which occur the oftener the more frequent elections
become. Such evils are doubtless great, but they are transient;
whereas the benefits which attend them remain. The desire of
being elected may lead some men for a time to violent hostility;
but this same desire leads all men in the long run mutually to
support each other; and if it happens that an election
accidentally severs two friends, the electoral system brings a
multitude of citizens permanently together, who would always have
remained unknown to each other. Freedom engenders private
animosities, but despotism gives birth to general indifference.

The Americans have combated by free institutions the
tendency of equality to keep men asunder, and they have subdued
it. The legislators of America did not suppose that a general
representation of the whole nation would suffice to ward off a
disorder at once so natural to the frame of democratic society,
and so fatal: they also thought that it would be well to infuse
political life into each portion of the territory, in order to
multiply to an infinite extent opportunities of acting in concert
for all the members of the community, and to make them constantly
feel their mutual dependence on each other. The plan was a wise
one. The general affairs of a country only engage the attention
of leading politicians, who assemble from time to time in the
same places; and as they often lose sight of each other
afterwards, no lasting ties are established between them. But if
the object be to have the local affairs of a district conducted
by the men who reside there, the same persons are always in
contact, and they are, in a manner, forced to be acquainted, and
to adapt themselves to one another.

It is difficult to draw a man out of his own circle to
interest him in the destiny of the State, because he does not
clearly understand what influence the destiny of the State can
have upon his own lot. But if it be proposed to make a road
cross the end of his estate, he will see at a glance that there
is a connection between this small public affair and his greatest
private affairs; and he will discover, without its being shown to
him, the close tie which unites private to general interest.
Thus, far more may be done by intrusting to the citizens the
administration of minor affairs than by surrendering to them the
control of important ones, towards interesting them in the public
welfare, and convincing them that they constantly stand in need
one of the other in order to provide for it. A brilliant
achievement may win for you the favor of a people at one stroke;
but to earn the love and respect of the population which
surrounds you, a long succession of little services rendered and
of obscure good deeds -a constant habit of kindness, and an
established reputation for disinterestedness - will be required.
Local freedom, then, which leads a great number of citizens to
value the affection of their neighbors and of their kindred,
perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one
another, in spite of the propensities which sever them.

In the United States the more opulent citizens take great
care not to stand aloof from the people; on the contrary, they
constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen
to them, they speak to them every day. They know that the rich
in democracies always stand in need of the poor; and that in
democratic ages you attach a poor man to you more by your manner
than by benefits conferred. The magnitude of such benefits,
which sets off the difference of conditions, causes a secret
irritation to those who reap advantage from them; but the charm
of simplicity of manners is almost irresistible: their affability
carries men away, and even their want of polish is not always
displeasing. This truth does not take root at once in the minds
of the rich. They generally resist it as long as the democratic
revolution lasts, and they do not acknowledge it immediately
after that revolution is accomplished. They are very ready to do
good to the people, but they still choose to keep them at arm's
length; they think that is sufficient, but they are mistaken.
They might spend fortunes thus without warming the hearts of the
population around them; - that population does not ask them for
the sacrifice of their money, but of their pride.

It would seem as if every imagination in the United States
were upon the stretch to invent means of increasing the wealth
and satisfying the wants of the public. The best-informed
inhabitants of each district constantly use their information to
discover new truths which may augment the general prosperity; and
if they have made any such discoveries, they eagerly surrender
them to the mass of the people.

When the vices and weaknesses, frequently exhibited by those
who govern in America, are closely examined, the prosperity of
the people occasions - but improperly occasions - surprise.
Elected magistrates do not make the American democracy flourish;
it flourishes because the magistrates are elective.

It would be unjust to suppose that the patriotism and the
zeal which every American displays for the welfare of his fellow-
citizens are wholly insincere. Although private interest directs
the greater part of human actions in the United States as well as
elsewhere, it does not regulate them all. I must say that I have
often seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public
welfare; and I have remarked a hundred instances in which they
hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to each other. The
free institutions which the inhabitants of the United States
possess, and the political rights of which they make so much use,
remind every citizen, and in a thousand ways, that he lives in
society. They every instant impress upon his mind the notion
that it is the duty, as well as the interest of men, to make
themselves useful to their fellow-creatures; and as he sees no
particular ground of animosity to them, since he is never either
their master or their slave, his heart readily leans to the side
of kindness. Men attend to the interests of the public, first by
necessity, afterwards by choice: what was intentional becomes an
instinct; and by dint of working for the good of one's fellow
citizens, the habit and the taste for serving them is at length
acquired.

Many people in France consider equality of conditions as one
evil, and political freedom as a second. When they are obliged
to yield to the former, they strive at least to escape from the
latter. But I contend that in order to combat the evils which
equality may produce, there is only one effectual remedy -
namely, political freedom.

Book Two - Chapters V-VII

Chapter V: Of The Use Which The Americans Make Of Public
Associations In Civil Life

I do not propose to speak of those political associations -
by the aid of which men endeavor to defend themselves against the
despotic influence of a majority - or against the aggressions of
regal power. That subject I have already treated. If each
citizen did not learn, in proportion as he individually becomes
more feeble, and consequently more incapable of preserving his
freedom single-handed, to combine with his fellow-citizens for
the purpose of defending it, it is clear that tyranny would
unavoidably increase together with equality.

Those associations only which are formed in civil life,
without reference to political objects, are here adverted to.
The political associations which exist in the United States are
only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of
associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all
conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations.
They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in
which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds -
religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted,
enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give
entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build
inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send
missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found
hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance
some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a
great example, they form a society. Wherever, at the head of
some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man
of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find
an association. I met with several kinds of associations in
America, of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have
often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the
United States succeed in proposing a common object to the
exertions of a great many men, and in getting them voluntarily to
pursue it. I have since travelled over England, whence the
Americans have taken some of their laws and many of their
customs; and it seemed to me that the principle of
association was by no means so constantly or so adroitly used in
that country. The English often perform great things singly;
whereas the Americans form associations for the smallest
undertakings. It is evident that the former people consider
association as a powerful means of action, but the latter seem to
regard it as the only means they have of acting.

Thus the most democratic country on the face of the earth is
that in which men have in our time carried to the highest
perfection the art of pursuing in common the object of their
common desires, and have applied this new science to the greatest
number of purposes. Is this the result of accident? or is there
in reality any necessary connection between the principle of
association and that of equality? Aristocratic communities
always contain, amongst a multitude of persons who by themselves
are powerless, a small number of powerful and wealthy citizens,
each of whom can achieve great undertakings single-handed. In
aristocratic societies men do not need to combine in order to
act, because they are strongly held together. Every wealthy and
powerful citizen constitutes the head of a permanent and
compulsory association, composed of all those who are dependent
upon him, or whom he makes subservient to the execution of his
designs. Amongst democratic nations, on the contrary, all the
citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything
by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow-men to lend
him their assistance. They all, therefore, fall into a state of
incapacity, if they do not learn voluntarily to help each other.
If men living in democratic countries had no right and no
inclination to associate for political purposes, their
independence would be in great jeopardy; but they might long
preserve their wealth and their cultivation: whereas if they
never acquired the habit of forming associations in ordinary
life, civilization itself would be endangered. A people amongst
which individuals should lose the power of achieving great things
single-handed, without acquiring the means of producing them by
united exertions, would soon relapse into barbarism.

Unhappily, the same social condition which renders
associations so necessary to democratic nations, renders their
formation more difficult amongst those nations than amongst all
others. When several members of an aristocracy agree to combine,
they easily succeed in doing so; as each of them brings great
strength to the partnership, the number of its members may be
very limited; and when the members of an association are limited
in number, they may easily become mutually acquainted, understand
each other, and establish fixed regulations. The same
opportunities do not occur amongst democratic nations, where the
associated members must always be very numerous for their
association to have any power.

I am aware that many of my countrymen are not in the least
embarrassed by this difficulty. They contend that the more
enfeebled and incompetent the citizens become, the more able and
active the government ought to be rendered, in order that society
at large may execute what individuals can no longer accomplish.
They believe this answers the whole difficulty, but I think they
are mistaken. A government might perform the part of some of the
largest American companies; and several States, members of the
Union, have already attempted it; but what political power could
ever carry on the vast multitude of lesser undertakings which the
American citizens perform every day, with the assistance of the
principle of association? It is easy to foresee that the time is
drawing near when man will be less and less able to produce, of
himself alone, the commonest necessaries of life. The task of
the governing power will therefore perpetually increase, and its
very efforts will extend it every day. The more it stands in the
place of associations, the more will individuals, losing the
notion of combining together, require its assistance: these are
causes and effects which unceasingly engender each other. Will
the administration of the country ultimately assume the
management of all the manufacturers, which no single citizen is
able to carry on? And if a time at length arrives, when, in
consequence of the extreme subdivision of landed property, the
soil is split into an infinite number of parcels, so that it can
only be cultivated by companies of husbandmen, will it be
necessary that the head of the government should leave the helm
of state to follow the plough? The morals and the intelligence of
a democratic people would be as much endangered as its business
and manufactures, if the government ever wholly usurped the place
of private companies.

Feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged,
and the human mind is developed by no other means than by the
reciprocal influence of men upon each other. I have shown that
these influences are almost null in democratic countries; they
must therefore be artificially created, and this can only be
accomplished by associations.

When the members of an aristocratic community adopt a new
opinion, or conceive a new sentiment, they give it a station, as
it were, beside themselves, upon the lofty platform where they
stand; and opinions or sentiments so conspicuous to the eyes of
the multitude are easily introduced into the minds or hearts of
all around. In democratic countries the governing power alone is
naturally in a condition to act in this manner; but it is easy to
see that its action is always inadequate, and often dangerous. A
government can no more be competent to keep alive and to renew
the circulation of opinions and feelings amongst a great people,
than to manage all the speculations of productive industry. No
sooner does a government attempt to go beyond its political
sphere and to enter upon this new track, than it exercises, even
unintentionally, an insupportable tyranny; for a government can
only dictate strict rules, the opinions which it favors are
rigidly enforced, and it is never easy to discriminate between
its advice and its commands. Worse still will be the case if the
government really believes itself interested in preventing all
circulation of ideas; it will then stand motionless, and
oppressed by the heaviness of voluntary torpor. Governments
therefore should not be the only active powers: associations
ought, in democratic nations, to stand in lieu of those powerful
private individuals whom the equality of conditions has swept
away.

As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States
have taken up an opinion or a feeling which they wish to promote
in the world, they look out for mutual assistance; and as soon as
they have found each other out, they combine. From that moment
they are no longer isolated men, but a power seen from afar,
whose actions serve for an example, and whose language is
listened to. The first time I heard in the United States that
100,000 men had bound themselves publicly to abstain from
spirituous liquors, it appeared to me more like a joke than a
serious engagement; and I did not at once perceive why these
temperate citizens could not content themselves with drinking
water by their own firesides. I at last understood that 300,000
Americans, alarmed by the progress of drunkenness around them,
had made up their minds to patronize temperance. They acted just
in the same way as a man of high rank who should dress very
plainly, in order to inspire the humbler orders with a contempt
of luxury. It is probable that if these 100,000 men had lived in
France, each of them would singly have memorialized the
government to watch the publichouses all over the kingdom.

Nothing, in my opinion, is more deserving of our attention
than the intellectual and moral associations of America. The
political and industrial associations of that country strike us
forcibly; but the others elude our observation, or if we discover
them, we understand them imperfectly, because we have hardly ever
seen anything of the kind. It must, however, be acknowledged
that they are as necessary to the American people as the former,
and perhaps more so. In democratic countries the science of
association is the mother of science; the progress of all the
rest depends upon the progress it has made. Amongst the laws
which rule human societies there is one which seems to be more
precise and clear than all others. If men are to remain
civilized, or to become so, the art of associating together must
grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of
conditions is increased.

Chapter VI: Of The Relation Between Public Associations And
Newspapers

When men are no longer united amongst themselves by firm and
lasting ties, it is impossible to obtain the cooperation of any
great number of them, unless you can persuade every man whose
concurrence you require that this private interest obliges him
voluntarily to unite his exertions to the exertions of all the
rest. This can only be habitually and conveniently effected by
means of a newspaper; nothing but a newspaper can drop the same
thought into a thousand minds at the same moment. A newspaper is
an adviser who does not require to be sought, but who comes of
his own accord, and talks to you briefly every day of the common
weal, without distracting you from your private affairs.

Newspapers therefore become more necessary in proportion as
men become more equal, and individualism more to be feared. To
suppose that they only serve to protect freedom would be to
diminish their importance: they maintain civilization. I shall
not deny that in democratic countries newspapers frequently lead
the citizens to launch together in very ill-digested schemes; but
if there were no newspapers there would be no common activity.
The evil which they produce is therefore much less than that
which they cure.

The effect of a newspaper is not only to suggest the same
purpose to a great number of persons, but also to furnish means
for executing in common the designs which they may have singly
conceived. The principal citizens who inhabit an aristocratic
country discern each other from afar; and if they wish to unite
their forces, they move towards each other, drawing a multitude
of men after them. It frequently happens, on the contrary, in
democratic countries, that a great number of men who wish or who
want to combine cannot accomplish it, because as they are very
insignificant and lost amidst the crowd, they cannot see, and
know not where to find, one another. A newspaper then takes up
the notion or the feeling which had occurred simultaneously, but
singly, to each of them. All are then immediately guided towards
this beacon; and these wandering minds, which had long sought
each other in darkness, at length meet and unite.

The newspaper brought them together, and the newspaper is
still necessary to keep them united. In order that an
association amongst a democratic people should have any power, it
must be a numerous body. The persons of whom it is composed are
therefore scattered over a wide extent, and each of them is
detained in the place of his domicile by the narrowness of his
income, or by the small unremitting exertions by which he earns
it. Means then must be found to converse every day without seeing
each other, and to take steps in common without having met. Thus
hardly any democratic association can do without newspapers.
There is consequently a necessary connection between public
associations and newspapers: newspapers make associations, and
associations make newspapers; and if it has been correctly
advanced that associations will increase in number as the
conditions of men become more equal, it is not less certain that
the number of newspapers increases in proportion to that of
associations. Thus it is in America that we find at the same
time the greatest number of associations and of newspapers.

This connection between the number of newspapers and that of
associations leads us to the discovery of a further connection
between the state of the periodical press and the form of the
administration in a country; and shows that the number of
newspapers must diminish or increase amongst a democratic people,
in proportion as its administration is more or less centralized.
For amongst democratic nations the exercise of local powers
cannot be intrusted to the principal members of the community as
in aristocracies. Those powers must either be abolished, or
placed in the hands of very large numbers of men, who then in
fact constitute an association permanently established by law for
the purpose of administering the affairs of a certain extent of
territory; and they require a journal, to bring to them every
day, in the midst of their own minor concerns, some intelligence
of the state of their public weal. The more numerous local
powers are, the greater is the number of men in whom they are
vested by law; and as this want is hourly felt, the more
profusely do newspapers abound.

The extraordinary subdivision of administrative power has
much more to do with the enormous number of American newspapers
than the great political freedom of the country and the absolute
liberty of the press. If all the inhabitants of the Union had
the suffrage - but a suffrage which should only extend to the
choice of their legislators in Congress - they would require but
few newspapers, because they would only have to act together on a
few very important but very rare occasions. But within the pale
of the great association of the nation, lesser associations have
been established by law in every country, every city, and indeed
in every village, for the purposes of local administration. The
laws of the country thus compel every American to co-operate
every day of his life with some of his fellow-citizens for a
common purpose, and each one of them requires a newspaper to
inform him what all the others are doing.

I am of opinion that a democratic people, *a without any
national representative assemblies, but with a great number of
small local powers, would have in the end more newspapers than
another people governed by a centralized administration and an
elective legislation. What best explains to me the enormous
circulation of the daily press in the United States, is that
amongst the Americans I find the utmost national freedom combined
with local freedom of every kind. There is a prevailing opinion
in France and England that the circulation of newspapers would be
indefinitely increased by removing the taxes which have been laid
upon the press. This is a very exaggerated estimate of the
effects of such a reform. Newspapers increase in numbers, not
according to their cheapness, but according to the more or less
frequent want which a great number of men may feel for
intercommunication and combination.

[Footnote a: I say a democratic people: the administration of an
aristocratic people may be the reverse of centralized, and yet
the want of newspapers be little felt, because local powers are
then vested in the hands of a very small number of men, who
either act apart, or who know each other and can easily meet and
come to an understanding.]

In like manner I should attribute the increasing influence
of the daily press to causes more general than those by which it
is commonly explained. A newspaper can only subsist on the
condition of publishing sentiments or principles common to a
large number of men. A newspaper therefore always represents an
association which is composed of its habitual readers. This
association may be more or less defined, more or less restricted,
more or less numerous; but the fact that the newspaper keeps
alive, is a proof that at least the germ of such an association
exists in the minds of its readers.

This leads me to a last reflection, with which I shall
conclude this chapter. The more equal the conditions of men
become, and the less strong men individually are, the more easily
do they give way to the current of the multitude, and the more
difficult is it for them to adhere by themselves to an opinion
which the multitude discard. A newspaper represents an
association; it may be said to address each of its readers in the
name of all the others, and to exert its influence over them in
proportion to their individual weakness. The power of the
newspaper press must therefore increase as the social conditions
of men become more equal.

Chapter VII: Connection Of Civil And Political Associations
There is only one country on the face of the earth where the
citizens enjoy unlimited freedom of association for political
purposes. This same country is the only one in the world where
the continual exercise of the right of association has been
introduced into civil life, and where all the advantages which
civilization can confer are procured by means of it. In all the
countries where political associations are prohibited, civil
associations are rare. It is hardly probable that this is the
result of accident; but the inference should rather be, that
there is a natural, and perhaps a necessary, connection between
these two kinds of associations. Certain men happen to have a
common interest in some concern - either a commercial undertaking
is to be managed, or some speculation in manufactures to be
tried; they meet, they combine, and thus by degrees they become
familiar with the principle of association. The greater is the
multiplicity of small affairs, the more do men, even without
knowing it, acquire facility in prosecuting great undertakings in
common. Civil associations, therefore, facilitate political
association: but, on the other hand, political association
singularly strengthens and improves associations for civil
purposes. In civil life every man may, strictly speaking, fancy
that he can provide for his own wants; in politics, he can fancy
no such thing. When a people, then, have any knowledge of public
life, the notion of association, and the wish to coalesce,
present themselves every day to the minds of the whole community:
whatever natural repugnance may restrain men from acting in
concert, they will always be ready to combine for the sake of a
party. Thus political life makes the love and practice of
association more general; it imparts a desire of union, and
teaches the means of combination to numbers of men who would have
always lived apart.

Politics not only give birth to numerous associations, but
to associations of great extent. In civil life it seldom happens
that any one interest draws a very large number of men to act in
concert; much skill is required to bring such an interest into
existence: but in politics opportunities present themselves every
day. Now it is solely in great associations that the general
value of the principle of association is displayed. Citizens who
are individually powerless, do not very clearly anticipate the
strength which they may acquire by uniting together; it must be
shown to them in order to be understood. Hence it is often
easier to collect a multitude for a public purpose than a few
persons; a thousand citizens do not see what interest they have
in combining together - ten thousand will be perfectly aware of
it. In politics men combine for great undertakings; and the use
they make of the principle of association in important affairs
practically teaches them that it is their interest to help each
other in those of less moment. A political association draws a
number of individuals at the same time out of their own circle:
however they may be naturally kept asunder by age, mind, and
fortune, it places them nearer together and brings them into
contact. Once met, they can always meet again.

Men can embark in few civil partnerships without risking a
portion of their possessions; this is the case with all
manufacturing and trading companies. When men are as yet but
little versed in the art of association, and are unacquainted
with its principal rules, they are afraid, when first they
combine in this manner, of buying their experience dear. They
therefore prefer depriving themselves of a powerful instrument of
success to running the risks which attend the use of it. They
are, however, less reluctant to join political associations,
which appear to them to be without danger, because they adventure
no money in them. But they cannot belong to these associations
for any length of time without finding out how order is
maintained amongst a large number of men, and by what contrivance
they are made to advance, harmoniously and methodically, to the
same object. Thus they learn to surrender their own will to that
of all the rest, and to make their own exertions subordinate to
the common impulse - things which it is not less necessary to
know in civil than in political associations. Political
associations may therefore be considered as large free schools,
where all the members of the community go to learn the general
theory of association.

But even if political association did not directly
contribute to the progress of civil association, to destroy the
former would be to impair the latter. When citizens can only
meet in public for certain purposes, they regard such meetings as
a strange proceeding of rare occurrence, and they rarely think at
all about it. When they are allowed to meet freely for all
purposes, they ultimately look upon public association as the
universal, or in a manner the sole means, which men can employ to
accomplish the different purposes they may have in view. Every
new want instantly revives the notion. The art of association
then becomes, as I have said before, the mother of action,
studied and applied by all.

When some kinds of associations are prohibited and others
allowed, it is difficult to distinguish the former from the
latter, beforehand. In this state of doubt men abstain from them
altogether, and a sort of public opinion passes current which
tends to cause any association whatsoever to be regarded as a
bold and almost an illicit enterprise. *a

[Footnote a: This is more especially true when the executive
government has a discretionary power of allowing or prohibiting
associations. When certain associations are simply prohibited by
law, and the courts of justice have to punish infringements of
that law, the evil is far less considerable. Then every citizen
knows beforehand pretty nearly what he has to expect. He judges
himself before he is judged by the law, and, abstaining from
prohibited associations, he embarks in those which are legally
sanctioned. It is by these restrictions that all free nations
have always admitted that the right of association might be
limited. But if the legislature should invest a man with a power
of ascertaining beforehand which associations are dangerous and
which are useful, and should authorize him to destroy all
associations in the bud or allow them to be formed, as nobody
would be able to foresee in what cases associations might be
established and in what cases they would be put down, the spirit
of association would be entirely paralyzed. The former of these
laws would only assail certain associations; the latter would
apply to society itself, and inflict an injury upon it. I can
conceive that a regular government may have recourse to the
former, but I do not concede that any government has the right of
enacting the latter.]

It is therefore chimerical to suppose that the spirit of
association, when it is repressed on some one point, will
nevertheless display the same vigor on all others; and that if
men be allowed to prosecute certain undertakings in common, that
is quite enough for them eagerly to set about them. When the
members of a community are allowed and accustomed to combine for
all purposes, they will combine as readily for the lesser as for
the more important ones; but if they are only allowed to combine
for small affairs, they will be neither inclined nor able to
effect it. It is in vain that you will leave them entirely free
to prosecute their business on joint-stock account: they will
hardly care to avail themselves of the rights you have granted to
them; and, after having exhausted your strength in vain efforts
to put down prohibited associations, you will be surprised that
you cannot persuade men to form the associations you encourage.

I do not say that there can be no civil associations in a
country where political association is prohibited; for men can
never live in society without embarking in some common
undertakings: but I maintain that in such a country civil
associations will always be few in number, feebly planned,
unskillfully managed, that they will never form any vast designs,
or that they will fail in the execution of them.

This naturally leads me to think that freedom of association
in political matters is not so dangerous to public tranquillity
as is supposed; and that possibly, after having agitated society
for some time, it may strengthen the State in the end. In
democratic countries political associations are, so to speak, the
only powerful persons who aspire to rule the State. Accordingly,
the governments of our time look upon associations of this kind
just as sovereigns in the Middle Ages regarded the great vassals
of the Crown: they entertain a sort of instinctive abhorrence of
them, and they combat them on all occasions. They bear, on the
contrary, a natural goodwill to civil associations, because they
readily discover that, instead of directing the minds of the
community to public affairs, these institutions serve to divert
them from such reflections; and that, by engaging them more and
more in the pursuit of objects which cannot be attained without
public tranquillity, they deter them from revolutions. But these
governments do not attend to the fact that political associations
tend amazingly to multiply and facilitate those of a civil
character, and that in avoiding a dangerous evil they deprive
themselves of an efficacious remedy.

When you see the Americans freely and constantly forming
associations for the purpose of promoting some political
principle, of raising one man to the head of affairs, or of
wresting power from another, you have some difficulty in
understanding that men so independent do not constantly fall into
the abuse of freedom. If, on the other hand, you survey the
infinite number of trading companies which are in operation in
the United States, and perceive that the Americans are on every
side unceasingly engaged in the execution of important and
difficult plans, which the slightest revolution would throw into
confusion, you will readily comprehend why people so well
employed are by no means tempted to perturb the State, nor to
destroy that public tranquillity by which they all profit.

Is it enough to observe these things separately, or should
we not discover the hidden tie which connects them? In their
political associations, the Americans of all conditions, minds,
and ages, daily acquire a general taste for association, and grow
accustomed to the use of it. There they meet together in large
numbers, they converse, they listen to each other, and they are
mutually stimulated to all sorts of undertakings. They
afterwards transfer to civil life the notions they have thus
acquired, and make them subservient to a thousand purposes. Thus
it is by the enjoyment of a dangerous freedom that the Americans
learn the art of rendering the dangers of freedom less
formidable.

If a certain moment in the existence of a nation be
selected, it is easy to prove that political associations perturb
the State, and paralyze productive industry; but take the whole
life of a people, and it may perhaps be easy to demonstrate that
freedom of association in political matters is favorable to the
prosperity and even to the tranquillity of the community.

I said in the former part of this work, "The unrestrained
liberty of political association cannot be entirely assimilated
to the liberty of the press. The one is at the same time less
necessary and more dangerous than the other. A nation may
confine it within certain limits without ceasing to be mistress
of itself; and it may sometimes be obliged to do so in order to
maintain its own authority." And further on I added: "It cannot
be denied that the unrestrained liberty of association for
political purposes is the last degree of liberty which a people
is fit for. If it does not throw them into anarchy, it
perpetually brings them, as it were, to the verge of it." Thus I
do not think that a nation is always at liberty to invest its
citizens with an absolute right of association for political
purposes; and I doubt whether, in any country or in any age, it
be wise to set no limits to freedom of association. A certain
nation, it is said, could not maintain tranquillity in the
community, cause the laws to be respected, or establish a lasting
government, if the right of association were not confined within
narrow limits. These blessings are doubtless invaluable, and I
can imagine that, to acquire or to preserve them, a nation may
impose upon itself severe temporary restrictions: but still it is
well that the nation should know at what price these blessings
are purchased. I can understand that it may be advisable to cut
off a man's arm in order to save his life; but it would be
ridiculous to assert that he will be as dexterous as he was
before he lost it.

Book Two - Chapters VII-XIII

Chapter VIII: The Americans Combat Individualism By The Principle
Of Interest Rightly Understood

When the world was managed by a few rich and powerful
individuals, these persons loved to entertain a lofty idea of the
duties of man. They were fond of professing that it is
praiseworthy to forget one's self, and that good should be done
without hope of reward, as it is by the Deity himself. Such were
the standard opinions of that time in morals. I doubt whether
men were more virtuous in aristocratic ages than in others; but
they were incessantly talking of the beauties of virtue, and its
utility was only studied in secret. But since the imagination
takes less lofty flights and every man's thoughts are centred in
himself, moralists are alarmed by this idea of self-sacrifice,
and they no longer venture to present it to the human mind. They
therefore content themselves with inquiring whether the personal
advantage of each member of the community does not consist in
working for the good of all; and when they have hit upon some
point on which private interest and public interest meet and
amalgamate, they are eager to bring it into notice. Observations
of this kind are gradually multiplied: what was only a single
remark becomes a general principle; and it is held as a truth
that man serves himself in serving his fellow-creatures, and that
his private interest is to do good.

I have already shown, in several parts of this work, by what
means the inhabitants of the United States almost always manage
to combine their own advantage with that of their
fellow-citizens: my present purpose is to point out the general
rule which enables them to do so. In the United States hardly
anybody talks of the beauty of virtue; but they maintain that
virtue is useful, and prove it every day. The American moralists
do not profess that men ought to sacrifice themselves for their
fellow-creatures because it is noble to make such sacrifices; but
they boldly aver that such sacrifices are as necessary to him who
imposes them upon himself as to him for whose sake they are made.
They have found out that in their country and their age man is
brought home to himself by an irresistible force; and losing all
hope of stopping that force, they turn all their thoughts to the
direction of it. They therefore do not deny that every man may
follow his own interest; but they endeavor to prove that it is
the interest of every man to be virtuous. I shall not here enter
into the reasons they allege, which would divert me from my
subject: suffice it to say that they have convinced their
fellow-countrymen.

Montaigne said long ago: "Were I not to follow the straight
road for its straightness, I should follow it for having found by
experience that in the end it is commonly the happiest and most
useful track." The doctrine of interest rightly understood is
not, then, new, but amongst the Americans of our time it finds
universal acceptance: it has become popular there; you may trace
it at the bottom of all their actions, you will remark it in all
they say. It is as often to be met with on the lips of the poor
man as of the rich. In Europe the principle of interest is much
grosser than it is in America, but at the same time it is less
common, and especially it is less avowed; amongst us, men still
constantly feign great abnegation which they no longer feel. The
Americans, on the contrary, are fond of explaining almost all the
actions of their lives by the principle of interest rightly
understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard
for themselves constantly prompts them to assist each other, and
inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and
property to the welfare of the State. In this respect I think
they frequently fail to do themselves justice; for in the United
States, as well as elsewhere, people are sometimes seen to give
way to those disinterested and spontaneous impulses which are
natural to man; but the Americans seldom allow that they yield to
emotions of this kind; they are more anxious to do honor to their
philosophy than to themselves.

I might here pause, without attempting to pass a judgment on
what I have described. The extreme difficulty of the subject
would be my excuse, but I shall not avail myself of it; and I had
rather that my readers, clearly perceiving my object, should
refuse to follow me than that I should leave them in suspense.
The principle of interest rightly understood is not a lofty one,
but it is clear and sure. It does not aim at mighty objects, but
it attains without excessive exertion all those at which it aims.
As it lies within the reach of all capacities, everyone can
without difficulty apprehend and retain it. By its admirable
conformity to human weaknesses, it easily obtains great dominion;
nor is that dominion precarious, since the principle checks one
personal interest by another, and uses, to direct the passions,
the very same instrument which excites them. The principle of
interest rightly understood produces no great acts of
self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial.
By itself it cannot suffice to make a man virtuous, but it
disciplines a number of citizens in habits of regularity,
temperance, moderation, foresight, self-command; and, if it does
not lead men straight to virtue by the will, it gradually draws
them in that direction by their habits. If the principle of
interest rightly understood were to sway the whole moral world,
extraordinary virtues would doubtless be more rare; but I think
that gross depravity would then also be less common. The
principle of interest rightly understood perhaps prevents some
men from rising far above the level of mankind; but a great
number of other men, who were falling far below it, are caught
and restrained by it. Observe some few individuals, they are
lowered by it; survey mankind, it is raised. I am not afraid to
say that the principle of interest, rightly understood, appears
to me the best suited of all philosophical theories to the wants
of the men of our time, and that I regard it as their chief
remaining security against themselves. Towards it, therefore,
the minds of the moralists of our age should turn; even should
they judge it to be incomplete, it must nevertheless be adopted
as necessary.

I do not think upon the whole that there is more egotism
amongst us than in America; the only difference is, that there it
is enlightened - here it is not. Every American will sacrifice a
portion of his private interests to preserve the rest; we would
fain preserve the whole, and oftentimes the whole is lost.
Everybody I see about me seems bent on teaching his
contemporaries, by precept and example, that what is useful is
never wrong. Will nobody undertake to make them understand how
what is right may be useful? No power upon earth can prevent the
increasing equality of conditions from inclining the human mind
to seek out what is useful, or from leading every member of the
community to be wrapped up in himself. It must therefore be
expected that personal interest will become more than ever the
principal, if not the sole, spring of men's actions; but it
remains to be seen how each man will understand his personal
interest. If the members of a community, as they become more
equal, become more ignorant and coarse, it is difficult to
foresee to what pitch of stupid excesses their egotism may lead
them; and no one can foretell into what disgrace and wretchedness
they would plunge themselves, lest they should have to sacrifice
something of their own well-being to the prosperity of their
fellow-creatures. I do not think that the system of interest, as
it is professed in America, is, in all its parts, self-evident;
but it contains a great number of truths so evident that men, if
they are but educated, cannot fail to see them. Educate, then,
at any rate; for the age of implicit self- sacrifice and
instinctive virtues is already flitting far away from us, and the
time is fast approaching when freedom, public peace, and social
order itself will not be able to exist without
education.

Chapter IX: That The Americans Apply The Principle Of Interest
Rightly Understood To Religious Matters

If the principle of interest rightly understood had nothing
but the present world in view, it would be very insufficient; for
there are many sacrifices which can only find their recompense in
another; and whatever ingenuity may be put forth to demonstrate
the utility of virtue, it will never be an easy task to make that
man live aright who has no thoughts of dying. It is therefore
necessary to ascertain whether the principle of interest rightly
understood is easily compatible with religious belief. The
philosophers who inculcate this system of morals tell men, that
to be happy in this life they must watch their own passions and
steadily control their excess; that lasting happiness can only be
secured by renouncing a thousand transient gratifications; and
that a man must perpetually triumph over himself, in order to
secure his own advantage. The founders of almost all religions
have held the same language. The track they point out to man is
the same, only that the goal is more remote; instead of placing
in this world the reward of the sacrifices they impose, they
transport it to another. Nevertheless I cannot believe that all
those who practise virtue from religious motives are only
actuated by the hope of a recompense. I have known zealous
Christians who constantly forgot themselves, to work with greater
ardor for the happiness of their fellow-men; and I have heard
them declare that all they did was only to earn the blessings of
a future state. I cannot but think that they deceive themselves;
I respect them too much to believe them.

Christianity indeed teaches that a man must prefer his
neighbor to himself, in order to gain eternal life; but
Christianity also teaches that men ought to benefit their fellow-
creatures for the love of God. A sublime expression! Man,
searching by his intellect into the divine conception, and seeing
that order is the purpose of God, freely combines to prosecute
the great design; and whilst he sacrifices his personal interests
to this consummate order of all created things, expects no other
recompense than the pleasure of contemplating it. I do not
believe that interest is the sole motive of religious men: but I
believe that interest is the principal means which religions
themselves employ to govern men, and I do not question that this
way they strike into the multitude and become popular. It is not
easy clearly to perceive why the principle of interest rightly
understood should keep aloof from religious opinions; and it
seems to me more easy to show why it should draw men to them.
Let it be supposed that, in order to obtain happiness in this
world, a man combats his instinct on all occasions and
deliberately calculates every action of his life; that, instead
of yielding blindly to the impetuosity of first desires, he has
learned the art of resisting them, and that he has accustomed
himself to sacrifice without an effort the pleasure of a moment
to the lasting interest of his whole life. If such a man believes
in the religion which he professes, it will cost him but little
to submit to the restrictions it may impose. Reason herself
counsels him to obey, and habit has prepared him to endure them.
If he should have conceived any doubts as to the object of his
hopes, still he will not easily allow himself to be stopped by
them; and he will decide that it is wise to risk some of the
advantages of this world, in order to preserve his rights to the
great inheritance promised him in another. "To be mistaken in
believing that the Christian religion is true," says Pascal, "is
no great loss to anyone; but how dreadful to be mistaken in
believing it to be false!"

The Americans do not affect a brutal indifference to a
future state; they affect no puerile pride in despising perils
which they hope to escape from. They therefore profess their
religion without shame and without weakness; but there generally
is, even in their zeal, something so indescribably tranquil,
methodical, and deliberate, that it would seem as if the head,
far more than the heart, brought them to the foot of the altar.
The Americans not only follow their religion from interest, but
they often place in this world the interest which makes them
follow it. In the Middle Ages the clergy spoke of nothing but a
future state; they hardly cared to prove that a sincere Christian
may be a happy man here below. But the American preachers are
constantly referring to the earth; and it is only with great
difficulty that they can divert their attention from it. To
touch their congregations, they always show them how favorable
religious opinions are to freedom and public tranquillity; and it
is often difficult to ascertain from their discourses whether the
principal object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in
the other world, or prosperity in this.

Chapter X: Of The Taste For Physical Well-Being In America

In America the passion for physical well-being is not always
exclusive, but it is general; and if all do not feel it in the
same manner, yet it is felt by all. Carefully to satisfy all,
even the least wants of the body, and to provide the little
conveniences of life, is uppermost in every mind. Something of an
analogous character is more and more apparent in Europe. Amongst
the causes which produce these similar consequences in both
hemispheres, several are so connected with my subject as to
deserve notice.

When riches are hereditarily fixed in families, there are a
great number of men who enjoy the comforts of life without
feeling an exclusive taste for those comforts. The heart of man
is not so much caught by the undisturbed possession of anything
valuable as by the desire, as yet imperfectly satisfied, of
possessing it, and by the incessant dread of losing it. In
aristocratic communities, the wealthy, never having experienced a
condition different from their own, entertain no fear of changing
it; the existence of such conditions hardly occurs to them. The
comforts of life are not to them the end of life, but simply a
way of living; they regard them as existence itself - enjoyed,
but scarcely thought of. As the natural and instinctive taste
which all men feel for being well off is thus satisfied without
trouble and without apprehension, their faculties are turned
elsewhere, and cling to more arduous and more lofty undertakings,
which excite and engross their minds. Hence it is that, in the
midst of physical gratifications, the members of an aristocracy
often display a haughty contempt of these very enjoyments, and
exhibit singular powers of endurance under the privation of them.
All the revolutions which have ever shaken or destroyed
aristocracies, have shown how easily men accustomed to
superfluous luxuries can do without the necessaries of life;
whereas men who have toiled to acquire a competency can hardly
live after they have lost it.

If I turn my observation from the upper to the lower
classes, I find analogous effects produced by opposite causes.
Amongst a nation where aristocracy predominates in society, and
keeps it stationary, the people in the end get as much accustomed
to poverty as the rich to their opulence. The latter bestow no
anxiety on their physical comforts, because they enjoy them
without an effort; the former do not think of things which they
despair of obtaining, and which they hardly know enough of to
desire them. In communities of this kind, the imagination of the
poor is driven to seek another world; the miseries of real life
inclose it around, but it escapes from their control, and flies
to seek its pleasures far beyond. When, on the contrary, the
distinctions of ranks are confounded together and privileges are
destroyed - when hereditary property is subdivided, and education
and freedom widely diffused, the desire of acquiring the comforts
of the world haunts the imagination of the poor, and the dread of
losing them that of the rich. Many scanty fortunes spring up;
those who possess them have a sufficient share of physical
gratifications to conceive a taste for these pleasures - not
enough to satisfy it. They never procure them without exertion,
and they never indulge in them without apprehension. They are
therefore always straining to pursue or to retain gratifications
so delightful, so imperfect, so fugitive.

If I were to inquire what passion is most natural to men who
are stimulated and circumscribed by the obscurity of their birth
or the mediocrity of their fortune, I could discover none more
peculiarly appropriate to their condition than this love of
physical prosperity. The passion for physical comforts is
essentially a passion of the middle classes: with those classes
it grows and spreads, with them it preponderates. From them it
mounts into the higher orders of society, and descends into the
mass of the people. I never met in America with any citizen so
poor as not to cast a glance of hope and envy on the enjoyments
of the rich, or whose imagination did not possess itself by
anticipation of those good things which fate still obstinately
withheld from him. On the other hand, I never perceived amongst
the wealthier inhabitants of the United States that proud
contempt of physical gratifications which is sometimes to be met
with even in the most opulent and dissolute aristocracies. Most
of these wealthy persons were once poor; they have felt the sting
of want; they were long a prey to adverse fortunes; and now that
the victory is won, the passions which accompanied the contest
have survived it: their minds are, as it were, intoxicated by the
small enjoyments which they have pursued for forty years. Not but
that in the United States, as elsewhere, there are a certain
number of wealthy persons who, having come into their property by
inheritance, possess, without exertion, an opulence they have not
earned. But even these men are not less devotedly attached to
the pleasures of material life. The love of well-being is now
become the predominant taste of the nation; the great current of
man's passions runs in that channel, and sweeps everything along
in its course.

Chapter XI: Peculiar Effects Of The Love Of Physical
Gratifications In Democratic Ages

It may be supposed, from what has just been said, that the
love of physical gratifications must constantly urge the
Americans to irregularities in morals, disturb the peace of
families, and threaten the security of society at large. Such is
not the case: the passion for physical gratifications produces in
democracies effects very different from those which it occasions
in aristocratic nations. It sometimes happens that, wearied with
public affairs and sated with opulence, amidst the ruin of
religious belief and the decline of the State, the heart of an
aristocracy may by degrees be seduced to the pursuit of sensual
enjoyments only. At other times the power of the monarch or the
weakness of the people, without stripping the nobility of their
fortune, compels them to stand aloof from the administration of
affairs, and whilst the road to mighty enterprise is closed,
abandons them to the inquietude of their own desires; they then
fall back heavily upon themselves, and seek in the pleasures of
the body oblivion of their former greatness. When the members of
an aristocratic body are thus exclusively devoted to the pursuit
of physical gratifications, they commonly concentrate in that
direction all the energy which they derive from their long
experience of power. Such men are not satisfied with the pursuit
of comfort; they require sumptuous depravity and splendid
corruption. The worship they pay the senses is a gorgeous one;
and they seem to vie with each other in the art of degrading
their own natures. The stronger, the more famous, and the more
free an aristocracy has been, the more depraved will it then
become; and however brilliant may have been the lustre of its
virtues, I dare predict that they will always be surpassed by the
splendor of its vices.

The taste for physical gratifications leads a democratic
people into no such excesses. The love of well-being is there
displayed as a tenacious, exclusive, universal passion; but its
range is confined. To build enormous palaces, to conquer or to
mimic nature, to ransack the world in order to gratify the
passions of a man, is not thought of: but to add a few roods of
land to your field, to plant an orchard, to enlarge a dwelling,
to be always making life more comfortable and convenient, to
avoid trouble, and to satisfy the smallest wants without effort
and almost without cost. These are small objects, but the soul
clings to them; it dwells upon them closely and day by day, till
they at last shut out the rest of the world, and sometimes
intervene between itself and heaven.

This, it may be said, can only be applicable to those
members of the community who are in humble circumstances;
wealthier individuals will display tastes akin to those which
belonged to them in aristocratic ages. I contest the
proposition: in point of physical gratifications, the most
opulent members of a democracy will not display tastes very
different from those of the people; whether it be that, springing
from the people, they really share those tastes, or that they
esteem it a duty to submit to them. In democratic society the
sensuality of the public has taken a moderate and tranquil
course, to which all are bound to conform: it is as difficult to
depart from the common rule by one's vices as by one's virtues.
Rich men who live amidst democratic nations are therefore more
intent on providing for their smallest wants than for their
extraordinary enjoyments; they gratify a number of petty desires,
without indulging in any great irregularities of passion: thus
they are more apt to become enervated than debauched.
The especial taste which the men of democratic ages
entertain for physical enjoyments is not naturally opposed to the
principles of public order; nay, it often stands in need of order
that it may be gratified. Nor is it adverse to regularity of
morals, for good morals contribute to public tranquillity and are
favorable to industry. It may even be frequently combined with a
species of religious morality: men wish to be as well off as they
can in this world, without foregoing their chance of another.
Some physical gratifications cannot be indulged in without crime;
from such they strictly abstain. The enjoyment of others is
sanctioned by religion and morality; to these the heart, the
imagination, and life itself are unreservedly given up; till, in
snatching at these lesser gifts, men lose sight of those more
precious possessions which constitute the glory and the greatness
of mankind. The reproach I address to the principle of equality,
is not that it leads men away in the pursuit of forbidden
enjoyments, but that it absorbs them wholly in quest of those
which are allowed. By these means, a kind of virtuous
materialism may ultimately be established in the world, which
would not corrupt, but enervate the soul, and noiselessly unbend
its springs of action.

Chapter XII: Causes Of Fanatical Enthusiasm In Some Americans

Although the desire of acquiring the good things of this
world is the prevailing passion of the American people, certain
momentary outbreaks occur, when their souls seem suddenly to
burst the bonds of matter by which they are restrained, and to
soar impetuously towards heaven. In all the States of the Union,
but especially in the half-peopled country of the Far West,
wandering preachers may be met with who hawk about the word of
God from place to place. Whole families - old men, women, and
children - cross rough passes and untrodden wilds, coming from a
great distance, to join a camp- meeting, where they totally
forget for several days and nights, in listening to these
discourses, the cares of business and even the most urgent wants
of the body. Here and there, in the midst of American society,
you meet with men, full of a fanatical and almost wild
enthusiasm, which hardly exists in Europe. From time to time
strange sects arise, which endeavor to strike out extraordinary
paths to eternal happiness. Religious insanity is very common in
the United States.

Nor ought these facts to surprise us. It was not man who
implanted in himself the taste for what is infinite and the love
of what is immortal: those lofty instincts are not the offspring
of his capricious will; their steadfast foundation is fixed in
human nature, and they exist in spite of his efforts. He may
cross and distort them - destroy them he cannot. The soul has
wants which must be satisfied; and whatever pains be taken to
divert it from itself, it soon grows weary, restless, and
disquieted amidst the enjoyments of sense. If ever the faculties
of the great majority of mankind were exclusively bent upon the
pursuit of material objects, it might be anticipated that an
amazing reaction would take place in the souls of some men. They
would drift at large in the world of spirits, for fear of
remaining shackled by the close bondage of the body.

It is not then wonderful if, in the midst of a community
whose thoughts tend earthward, a small number of individuals are
to be found who turn their looks to heaven. I should be
surprised if mysticism did not soon make some advance amongst a
people solely engaged in promoting its own worldly welfare. It is
said that the deserts of the Thebaid were peopled by the
persecutions of the emperors and the massacres of the Circus; I
should rather say that it was by the luxuries of Rome and the
Epicurean philosophy of Greece. If their social condition, their
present circumstances, and their laws did not confine the minds
of the Americans so closely to the pursuit of worldly welfare, it
is probable that they would display more reserve and more
experience whenever their attention is turned to things
immaterial, and that they would check themselves without
difficulty. But they feel imprisoned within bounds which they
will apparently never be allowed to pass. As soon as they have
passed these bounds, their minds know not where to fix
themselves, and they often rush unrestrained beyond the range of
common-sense.

Chapter XIII: Causes Of The Restless Spirit Of Americans In The
Midst Of Their Prosperity

In certain remote corners of the Old World you may still
sometimes stumble upon a small district which seems to have been
forgotten amidst the general tumult, and to have remained
stationary whilst everything around it was in motion. The
inhabitants are for the most part extremely ignorant and poor;
they take no part in the business of the country, and they are
frequently oppressed by the government; yet their countenances
are generally placid, and their spirits light. In America I saw
the freest and most enlightened men, placed in the happiest
circumstances which the world affords: it seemed to me as if a
cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious
and almost sad even in their pleasures. The chief reason of this
contrast is that the former do not think of the ills they endure
- the latter are forever brooding over advantages they do not
possess. It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the
Americans pursue their own welfare; and to watch the vague dread
that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen
the shortest path which may lead to it. A native of the United
States clings to this world's goods as if he were certain never
to die; and he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach,
that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living
long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds
nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh
gratifications.

In the United States a man builds a house to spend his
latter years in it, and he sells it before the roof is on: he
plants a garden, and lets it just as the trees are coming into
bearing: he brings a field into tillage, and leaves other men to
gather the crops: he embraces a profession, and gives it up: he
settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves, to carry his
changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him
any leisure, he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics;
and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has
a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the
vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen
hundred miles in a few days, to shake off his happiness. Death at
length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his
bootless chase of that complete felicity which is forever on the
wing.

At first sight there is something surprising in this strange
unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance.
The spectacle itself is however as old as the world; the novelty
is to see a whole people furnish an exemplification of it. Their
taste for physical gratifications must be regarded as the
original source of that secret inquietude which the actions of
the Americans betray, and of that inconstancy of which they
afford fresh examples every day. He who has set his heart
exclusively upon the pursuit of worldly welfare is always in a
hurry, for he has but a limited time at his disposal to reach it,
to grasp it, and to enjoy it. The recollection of the brevity of
life is a constant spur to him. Besides the good things which he
possesses, he every instant fancies a thousand others which death
will prevent him from trying if he does not try them soon. This
thought fills him with anxiety, fear, and regret, and keeps his
mind in ceaseless trepidation, which leads him perpetually to
change his plans and his abode. If in addition to the taste for
physical well-being a social condition be superadded, in which
the laws and customs make no condition permanent, here is a great
additional stimulant to this restlessness of temper. Men will
then be seen continually to change their track, for fear of
missing the shortest cut to happiness. It may readily be
conceived that if men, passionately bent upon physical
gratifications, desire eagerly, they are also easily discouraged:
as their ultimate object is to enjoy, the means to reach that
object must be prompt and easy, or the trouble of acquiring the
gratification would be greater than the gratification itself.
Their prevailing frame of mind then is at once ardent and
relaxed, violent and enervated. Death is often less dreaded than
perseverance in continuous efforts to one end.

The equality of conditions leads by a still straighter road
to several of the effects which I have here described. When all
the privileges of birth and fortune are abolished, when all
professions are accessible to all, and a man's own energies may
place him at the top of any one of them, an easy and unbounded
career seems open to his ambition, and he will readily persuade
himself that he is born to no vulgar destinies. But this is an
erroneous notion, which is corrected by daily experience. The
same equality which allows every citizen to conceive these lofty
hopes, renders all the citizens less able to realize them: it
circumscribes their powers on every side, whilst it gives freer
scope to their desires. Not only are they themselves powerless,
but they are met at every step by immense obstacles, which they
did not at first perceive. They have swept away the privileges
of some of their fellow-creatures which stood in their way, but
they have opened the door to universal competition: the barrier
has changed its shape rather than its position. When men are
nearly alike, and all follow the same track, it is very difficult
for any one individual to walk quick and cleave a way through the
dense throng which surrounds and presses him. This constant
strife between the propensities springing from the equality of
conditions and the means it supplies to satisfy them, harasses
and wearies the mind.

It is possible to conceive men arrived at a degree of
freedom which should completely content them; they would then
enjoy their independence without anxiety and without impatience.
But men will never establish any equality with which they can be
contented. Whatever efforts a people may make, they will never
succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect
level; and even if they unhappily attained that absolute and
complete depression, the inequality of minds would still remain,
which, coming directly from the hand of God, will forever escape
the laws of man. However democratic then the social state and the
political constitution of a people may be, it is certain that
every member of the community will always find out several points
about him which command his own position; and we may foresee that
his looks will be doggedly fixed in that direction. When
inequality of conditions is the common law of society, the most
marked inequalities do not strike the eye: when everything is
nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt
it. Hence the desire of equality always becomes more insatiable
in proportion as equality is more complete.

Amongst democratic nations men easily attain a certain
equality of conditions: they can never attain the equality they
desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet without
hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on.
At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes
at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its
charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully
tasted its delights they die. To these causes must be attributed
that strange melancholy which oftentimes will haunt the
inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of their
abundance, and that disgust at life which sometimes seizes upon
them in the midst of calm and easy circumstances. Complaints are
made in France that the number of suicides increases; in America
suicide is rare, but insanity is said to be more common than
anywhere else. These are all different symptoms of the same
disease. The Americans do not put an end to their lives, however
disquieted they may be, because their religion forbids it; and
amongst them materialism may be said hardly to exist,
notwithstanding the general passion for physical gratification.
The will resists - reason frequently gives way. In democratic
ages enjoyments are more intense than in the ages of aristocracy,
and especially the number of those who partake in them is larger:
but, on the other hand, it must be admitted that man's hopes and
his desires are oftener blasted, the soul is more stricken and
perturbed, and care itself more keen.

Book Two - Chapters XIV-XIII

Chapter XIV: Taste For Physical Gratifications United In America
To Love Of Freedom And Attention To Public Affairs

When a democratic state turns to absolute monarchy, the
activity which was before directed to public and to private
affairs is all at once centred upon the latter: the immediate
consequence is, for some time, great physical prosperity; but
this impulse soon slackens, and the amount of productive industry
is checked. I know not if a single trading or manufacturing
people can be cited, from the Tyrians down to the Florentines and
the English, who were not a free people also. There is therefore
a close bond and necessary relation between these two elements -
freedom and productive industry. This proposition is generally
true of all nations, but especially of democratic nations. I
have already shown that men who live in ages of equality
continually require to form associations in order to procure the
things they covet; and, on the other hand, I have shown how great
political freedom improves and diffuses the art of association.
Freedom, in these ages, is therefore especially favorable to the
production of wealth; nor is it difficult to perceive that
despotism is especially adverse to the same result. The nature of
despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel,
but minute and meddling. Despotism of this kind, though it does
not trample on humanity, is directly opposed to the genius of
commerce and the pursuits of industry.

Thus the men of democratic ages require to be free in order
more readily to procure those physical enjoyments for which they
are always longing. It sometimes happens, however, that the
excessive taste they conceive for these same enjoyments abandons
them to the first master who appears. The passion for worldly
welfare then defeats itself, and, without perceiving it, throws
the object of their desires to a greater distance.

There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of
a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications
amongst such a people has grown more rapidly than their education
and their experience of free institutions, the time will come
when men are carried away, and lose all self-restraint, at the
sight of the new possessions they are about to lay hold upon. In
their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune, they lose
sight of the close connection which exists between the private
fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all. It is not
necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them
of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their
hold. The discharge of political duties appears to them to be a
troublesome annoyance, which diverts them from their occupations
and business. If they be required to elect representatives, to
support the Government by personal service, to meet on public
business, they have no time - they cannot waste their precious
time in useless engagements: such idle amusements are unsuited to
serious men who are engaged with the more important interests of
life. These people think they are following the principle of
self-interest, but the idea they entertain of that principle is a
very rude one; and the better to look after what they call their
business, they neglect their chief business, which is to remain
their own masters.

As the citizens who work do not care to attend to public
business, and as the class which might devote its leisure to
these duties has ceased to exist, the place of the Government is,
as it were, unfilled. If at that critical moment some able and
ambitious man grasps the supreme power, he will find the road to
every kind of usurpation open before him. If he does but attend
for some time to the material prosperity of the country, no more
will be demanded of him. Above all he must insure public
tranquillity: men who are possessed by the passion of physical
gratification generally find out that the turmoil of freedom
disturbs their welfare, before they discover how freedom itself
serves to promote it. If the slightest rumor of public commotion
intrudes into the petty pleasures of private life, they are
aroused and alarmed by it. The fear of anarchy perpetually haunts
them, and they are always ready to fling away their freedom at
the first disturbance.

I readily admit that public tranquillity is a great good;
but at the same time I cannot forget that all nations have been
enslaved by being kept in good order. Certainly it is not to be
inferred that nations ought to despise public tranquillity; but
that state ought not to content them. A nation which asks
nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already
a slave at heart - the slave of its own well-being, awaiting but
the hand that will bind it. By such a nation the despotism of
faction is not less to be dreaded than the despotism of an
individual. When the bulk of the community is engrossed by
private concerns, the smallest parties need not despair of
getting the upper hand in public affairs. At such times it is
not rare to see upon the great stage of the world, as we see at
our theatres, a multitude represented by a few players, who alone
speak in the name of an absent or inattentive crowd: they alone
are in action whilst all are stationary; they regulate everything
by their own caprice; they change the laws, and tyrannize at will
over the manners of the country; and then men wonder to see into
how small a number of weak and worthless hands a great people may
fall.

Hitherto the Americans have fortunately escaped all the
perils which I have just pointed out; and in this respect they
are really deserving of admiration. Perhaps there is no country
in the world where fewer idle men are to be met with than in
America, or where all who work are more eager to promote their
own welfare. But if the passion of the Americans for physical
gratifications is vehement, at least it is not indiscriminating;
and reason, though unable to restrain it, still directs its
course. An American attends to his private concerns as if he
were alone in the world, and the next minute he gives himself up
to the common weal as if he had forgotten them. At one time he
seems animated by the most selfish cupidity, at another by the
most lively patriotism. The human heart cannot be thus divided.
The inhabitants of the United States alternately display so
strong and so similar a passion for their own welfare and for
their freedom, that it may be supposed that these passions are
united and mingled in some part of their character. And indeed
the Americans believe their freedom to be the best instrument and
surest safeguard of their welfare: they are attached to the one
by the other. They by no means think that they are not called
upon to take a part in the public weal; they believe, on the
contrary, that their chief business is to secure for themselves a
government which will allow them to acquire the things they
covet, and which will not debar them from the peaceful enjoyment
of those possessions which they have acquired.

Chapter XV: That Religious Belief Sometimes Turns The Thoughts Of
The Americans To Immaterial Pleasures

In the United States, on the seventh day of every week, the
trading and working life of the nation seems suspended; all
noises cease; a deep tranquillity, say rather the solemn calm of
meditation, succeeds the turmoil of the week, and the soul
resumes possession and contemplation of itself. Upon this day the
marts of traffic are deserted; every member of the community,
accompanied by his children, goes to church, where he listens to
strange language which would seem unsuited to his ear. He is
told of the countless evils caused by pride and covetousness: he
is reminded of the necessity of checking his desires, of the
finer pleasures which belong to virtue alone, and of the true
happiness which attends it. On his return home, he does not turn
to the ledgers of his calling, but he opens the book of Holy
Scripture; there he meets with sublime or affecting descriptions
of the greatness and goodness of the Creator, of the infinite
magnificence of the handiwork of God, of the lofty destinies of
man, of his duties, and of his immortal privileges. Thus it is
that the American at times steals an hour from himself; and
laying aside for a while the petty passions which agitate his
life, and the ephemeral interests which engross it, he strays at
once into an ideal world, where all is great, eternal, and pure.

I have endeavored to point out in another part of this work
the causes to which the maintenance of the political institutions
of the Americans is attributable; and religion appeared to be one
of the most prominent amongst them. I am now treating of the
Americans in an individual capacity, and I again observe that
religion is not less useful to each citizen than to the whole
State. The Americans show, by their practice, that they feel the
high necessity of imparting morality to democratic communities by
means of religion. What they think of themselves in this respect
is a truth of which every democratic nation ought to be
thoroughly persuaded.

I do not doubt that the social and political constitution of
a people predisposes them to adopt a certain belief and certain
tastes, which afterwards flourish without difficulty amongst
them; whilst the same causes may divert a people from certain
opinions and propensities, without any voluntary effort, and, as
it were, without any distinct consciousness, on their part. The
whole art of the legislator is correctly to discern beforehand
these natural inclinations of communities of men, in order to
know whether they should be assisted, or whether it may not be
necessary to check them. For the duties incumbent on the
legislator differ at different times; the goal towards which the
human race ought ever to be tending is alone stationary; the
means of reaching it are perpetually to be varied.

If I had been born in an aristocratic age, in the midst of a
nation where the hereditary wealth of some, and the irremediable
penury of others, should equally divert men from the idea of
bettering their condition, and hold the soul as it were in a
state of torpor fixed on the contemplation of another world, I
should then wish that it were possible for me to rouse that
people to a sense of their wants; I should seek to discover more
rapid and more easy means for satisfying the fresh desires which
I might have awakened; and, directing the most strenuous efforts
of the human mind to physical pursuits, I should endeavor to
stimulate it to promote the well-being of man. If it happened
that some men were immoderately incited to the pursuit of riches,
and displayed an excessive liking for physical gratifications, I
should not be alarmed; these peculiar symptoms would soon be
absorbed in the general aspect of the people.

The attention of the legislators of democracies is called to
other cares. Give democratic nations education and freedom, and
leave them alone. They will soon learn to draw from this world
all the benefits which it can afford; they will improve each of
the useful arts, and will day by day render life more
comfortable, more convenient, and more easy. Their social
condition naturally urges them in this direction; I do not fear
that they will slacken their course.

But whilst man takes delight in this honest and lawful
pursuit of his wellbeing, it is to be apprehended that he may in
the end lose the use of his sublimest faculties; and that whilst
he is busied in improving all around him, he may at length
degrade himself. Here, and here only, does the peril lie. It
should therefore be the unceasing object of the legislators of
democracies, and of all the virtuous and enlightened men who live
there, to raise the souls of their fellow-citizens, and keep them
lifted up towards heaven. It is necessary that all who feel an
interest in the future destinies of democratic society should
unite, and that all should make joint and continual efforts to
diffuse the love of the infinite, a sense of greatness, and a
love of pleasures not of earth. If amongst the opinions of a
democratic people any of those pernicious theories exist which
tend to inculcate that all perishes with the body, let men by
whom such theories are professed be marked as the natural foes of
such a people.

The materialists are offensive to me in many respects; their
doctrines I hold to be pernicious, and I am disgusted at their
arrogance. If their system could be of any utility to man, it
would seem to be by giving him a modest opinion of himself. But
these reasoners show that it is not so; and when they think they
have said enough to establish that they are brutes, they show
themselves as proud as if they had demonstrated that they are
gods. Materialism is, amongst all nations, a dangerous disease of
the human mind; but it is more especially to be dreaded amongst a
democratic people, because it readily amalgamates with that vice
which is most familiar to the heart under such circumstances.
Democracy encourages a taste for physical gratification: this
taste, if it become excessive, soon disposes men to believe that
all is matter only; and materialism, in turn, hurries them back
with mad impatience to these same delights: such is the fatal
circle within which democratic nations are driven round. It were
well that they should see the danger and hold back.

Most religions are only general, simple, and practical means
of teaching men the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
That is the greatest benefit which a democratic people derives,
from its belief, and hence belief is more necessary to such a
people than to all others. When therefore any religion has
struck its roots deep into a democracy, beware lest you disturb
them; but rather watch it carefully, as the most precious bequest
of aristocratic ages. Seek not to supersede the old religious
opinions of men by new ones; lest in the passage from one faith
to another, the soul being left for a while stripped of all
belief, the love of physical gratifications should grow upon it
and fill it wholly.

The doctrine of metempsychosis is assuredly not more
rational than that of materialism; nevertheless if it were
absolutely necessary that a democracy should choose one of the
two, I should not hesitate to decide that the community would run
less risk of being brutalized by believing that the soul of man
will pass into the carcass of a hog, than by believing that the
soul of man is nothing at all. The belief in a supersensual and
immortal principle, united for a time to matter, is so
indispensable to man's greatness, that its effects are striking
even when it is not united to the doctrine of future reward and
punishment; and when it holds no more than that after death the
divine principle contained in man is absorbed in the Deity, or
transferred to animate the frame of some other creature. Men
holding so imperfect a belief will still consider the body as the
secondary and inferior portion of their nature, and they will
despise it even whilst they yield to its influence; whereas they
have a natural esteem and secret admiration for the immaterial
part of man, even though they sometimes refuse to submit to its
dominion. That is enough to give a lofty cast to their opinions
and their tastes, and to bid them tend with no interested motive,
and as it were by impulse, to pure feelings and elevated
thoughts.

It is not certain that Socrates and his followers had very
fixed opinions as to what would befall man hereafter; but the
sole point of belief on which they were determined - that the
soul has nothing in common with the body, and survives it - was
enough to give the Platonic philosophy that sublime aspiration by
which it is distinguished. It is clear from the works of Plato,
that many philosophical writers, his predecessors or
contemporaries, professed materialism. These writers have not
reached us, or have reached us in mere fragments. The same thing
has happened in almost all ages; the greater part of the most
famous minds in literature adhere to the doctrines of a
supersensual philosophy. The instinct and the taste of the human
race maintain those doctrines; they save them oftentimes in spite
of men themselves, and raise the names of their defenders above
the tide of time. It must not then be supposed that at any
period or under any political condition, the passion for physical
gratifications, and the opinions which are superinduced by that
passion, can ever content a whole people. The heart of man is of
a larger mould: it can at once comprise a taste for the
possessions of earth and the love of those of heaven: at times it
may seem to cling devotedly to the one, but it will never be long
without thinking of the other.

If it be easy to see that it is more particularly important
in democratic ages that spiritual opinions should prevail, it is
not easy to say by what means those who govern democratic nations
may make them predominate. I am no believer in the prosperity,
any more than in the durability, of official philosophies; and as
to state religions, I have always held, that if they be sometimes
of momentary service to the interests of political power, they
always, sooner or later, become fatal to the Church. Nor do I
think with those who assert, that to raise religion in the eyes
of the people, and to make them do honor to her spiritual
doctrines, it is desirable indirectly to give her ministers a
political influence which the laws deny them. I am so much alive
to the almost inevitable dangers which beset religious belief
whenever the clergy take part in public affairs, and I am so
convinced that Christianity must be maintained at any cost in the
bosom of modern democracies, that I had rather shut up the
priesthood within the sanctuary than allow them to step beyond
it.

What means then remain in the hands of constituted
authorities to bring men back to spiritual opinions, or to hold
them fast to the religion by which those opinions are suggested?
My answer will do me harm in the eyes of politicians. I believe
that the sole effectual means which governments can employ in
order to have the doctrine of the immortality of the soul duly
respected, is ever to act as if they believed in it themselves;
and I think that it is only by scrupulous conformity to religious
morality in great affairs that they can hope to teach the
community at large to know, to love, and to observe it in the
lesser concerns of life.

Chapter XVI: That Excessive Care Of Worldly Welfare May Impair
That Welfare

There is a closer tie than is commonly supposed between the
improvement of the soul and the amelioration of what belongs to
the body. Man may leave these two things apart, and consider
each of them alternately; but he cannot sever them entirely
without at last losing sight of one and of the other. The beasts
have the same senses as ourselves, and very nearly the same
appetites. We have no sensual passions which are not common to
our race and theirs, and which are not to be found, at least in
the germ, in a dog as well as in a man. Whence is it then that
the animals can only provide for their first and lowest wants,
whereas we can infinitely vary and endlessly increase our
enjoyments?

We are superior to the beasts in this, that we use our souls
to find out those material benefits to which they are only led by
instinct. In man, the angel teaches the brute the art of
contenting its desires. It is because man is capable of rising
above the things of the body, and of contemning life itself, of
which the beasts have not the least notion, that he can multiply
these same things of the body to a degree which inferior races
are equally unable to conceive. Whatever elevates, enlarges, and
expands the soul, renders it more capable of succeeding in those
very undertakings which concern it not. Whatever, on the other
hand, enervates or lowers it, weakens it for all purposes, the
chiefest, as well as the least, and threatens to render it almost
equally impotent for the one and for the other. Hence the soul
must remain great and strong, though it were only to devote its
strength and greatness from time to time to the service of the
body. If men were ever to content themselves with material
objects, it is probable that they would lose by degrees the art
of producing them; and they would enjoy them in the end, like the
brutes, without discernment and without improvement.

Chapter XVII: That In Times Marked By Equality Of Conditions And
Sceptical Opinions, It Is Important To Remove To A Distance The
Objects Of Human Actions

In the ages of faith the final end of life is placed beyond
life. The men of those ages therefore naturally, and in a manner
involuntarily, accustom themselves to fix their gaze for a long
course of years on some immovable object, towards which they are
constantly tending; and they learn by insensible degrees to
repress a multitude of petty passing desires, in order to be the
better able to content that great and lasting desire which
possesses them. When these same men engage in the affairs of
this world, the same habits may be traced in their conduct. They
are apt to set up some general and certain aim and end to their
actions here below, towards which all their efforts are directed:
they do not turn from day to day to chase some novel object of
desire, but they have settled designs which they are never weary
of pursuing. This explains why religious nations have so often
achieved such lasting results: for whilst they were thinking only
of the other world, they had found out the great secret of
success in this. Religions give men a general habit of conducting
themselves with a view to futurity: in this respect they are not
less useful to happiness in this life than to felicity hereafter;
and this is one of their chief political characteristics.

But in proportion as the light of faith grows dim, the range
of man's sight is circumscribed, as if the end and aim of human
actions appeared every day to be more within his reach. When men
have once allowed themselves to think no more of what is to
befall them after life, they readily lapse into that complete and
brutal indifference to futurity, which is but too conformable to
some propensities of mankind. As soon as they have lost the
habit of placing their chief hopes upon remote events, they
naturally seek to gratify without delay their smallest desires;
and no sooner do they despair of living forever, than they are
disposed to act as if they were to exist but for a single day.
In sceptical ages it is always therefore to be feared that men
may perpetually give way to their daily casual desires; and that,
wholly renouncing whatever cannot be acquired without protracted
effort, they may establish nothing great, permanent, and calm.

If the social condition of a people, under these
circumstances, becomes democratic, the danger which I here point
out is thereby increased. When everyone is constantly striving
to change his position - when an immense field for competition is
thrown open to all - when wealth is amassed or dissipated in the
shortest possible space of time amidst the turmoil of democracy,
visions of sudden and easy fortunes - of great possessions easily
won and lost - of chance, under all its forms - haunt the mind.
The instability of society itself fosters the natural instability
of man's desires. In the midst of these perpetual fluctuations
of his lot, the present grows upon his mind, until it conceals
futurity from his sight, and his looks go no further than the
morrow.

In those countries in which unhappily irreligion and
democracy coexist, the most important duty of philosophers and of
those in power is to be always striving to place the objects of
human actions far beyond man's immediate range. Circumscribed by
the character of his country and his age, the moralist must learn
to vindicate his principles in that position. He must constantly
endeavor to show his contemporaries, that, even in the midst of
the perpetual commotion around them, it is easier than they think
to conceive and to execute protracted undertakings. He must
teach them that, although the aspect of mankind may have changed,
the methods by which men may provide for their prosperity in this
world are still the same; and that amongst democratic nations, as
well as elsewhere, it is only by resisting a thousand petty
selfish passions of the hour that the general and unquenchable
passion for happiness can be satisfied.

The task of those in power is not less clearly marked out.
At all times it is important that those who govern nations should
act with a view to the future: but this is even more necessary in
democratic and sceptical ages than in any others. By acting
thus, the leading men of democracies not only make public affairs
prosperous, but they also teach private individuals, by their
example, the art of managing private concerns. Above all they
must strive as much as possible to banish chance from the sphere
of politics. The sudden and undeserved promotion of a courtier
produces only a transient impression in an aristocratic country,
because the aggregate institutions and opinions of the nation
habitually compel men to advance slowly in tracks which they
cannot get out of. But nothing is more pernicious than similar
instances of favor exhibited to the eyes of a democratic people:
they give the last impulse to the public mind in a direction
where everything hurries it onwards. At times of scepticism and
equality more especially, the favor of the people or of the
prince, which chance may confer or chance withhold, ought never
to stand in lieu of attainments or services. It is desirable
that every advancement should there appear to be the result of
some effort; so that no greatness should be of too easy
acquirement, and that ambition should be obliged to fix its gaze
long upon an object before it is gratified. Governments must
apply themselves to restore to men that love of the future with
which religion and the state of society no longer inspire them;
and, without saying so, they must practically teach the community
day by day that wealth, fame, and power are the rewards of labor
- that great success stands at the utmost range of long desires,
and that nothing lasting is obtained but what is obtained by
toil. When men have accustomed themselves to foresee from afar
what is likely to befall in the world and to feed upon hopes,
they can hardly confine their minds within the precise
circumference of life, and they are ready to break the boundary
and cast their looks beyond. I do not doubt that, by training
the members of a community to think of their future condition in
this world, they would be gradually and unconsciously brought
nearer to religious convictions. Thus the means which allow men,
up to a certain point, to go without religion, are perhaps after
all the only means we still possess for bringing mankind back by
a long and roundabout path to a state of faith.

Chapter XVIII: That Amongst The Americans All Honest Callings Are
Honorable

Amongst a democratic people, where there is no hereditary
wealth, every man works to earn a living, or has worked, or is
born of parents who have worked. The notion of labor is
therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary,
natural, and honest condition of human existence. Not only is
labor not dishonorable amongst such a people, but it is held in
honor: the prejudice is not against it, but in its favor. In the
United States a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public
opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or
commercial pursuit, or to public business. He would think
himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living.
It is for the purpose of escaping this obligation to work, that
so many rich Americans come to Europe, where they find some
scattered remains of aristocratic society, amongst which idleness
is still held in honor.

Equality of conditions not only ennobles the notion of labor
in men's estimation, but it raises the notion of labor as a
source of profit. In aristocracies it is not exactly labor that
is despised, but labor with a view to profit. Labor is honorific
in itself, when it is undertaken at the sole bidding of ambition
or of virtue. Yet in aristocratic society it constantly happens
that he who works for honor is not insensible to the attractions
of profit. But these two desires only intermingle in the
innermost depths of his soul: he carefully hides from every eye
the point at which they join; he would fain conceal it from
himself. In aristocratic countries there are few public officers
who do not affect to serve their country without interested
motives. Their salary is an incident of which they think but
little, and of which they always affect not to think at all.
Thus the notion of profit is kept distinct from that of labor;
however they may be united in point of fact, they are not thought
of together.

In democratic communities these two notions are, on the
contrary, always palpably united. As the desire of well-being is
universal - as fortunes are slender or fluctuating - as everyone
wants either to increase his own resources, or to provide fresh
ones for his progeny, men clearly see that it is profit which, if
not wholly, at least partially, leads them to work. Even those
who are principally actuated by the love of fame are necessarily
made familiar with the thought that they are not exclusively
actuated by that motive; and they discover that the desire of
getting a living is mingled in their minds with the desire of
making life
illustrious.

As soon as, on the one hand, labor is held by the whole
community to be an honorable necessity of man's condition, and,
on the other, as soon as labor is always ostensibly performed,
wholly or in part, for the purpose of earning remuneration, the
immense interval which separated different callings in
aristocratic societies disappears. If all are not alike, all at
least have one feature in common. No profession exists in which
men do not work for money; and the remuneration which is common
to them all gives them all an air of resemblance. This serves to
explain the opinions which the Americans entertain with respect
to different callings. In America no one is degraded because he
works, for everyone about him works also; nor is anyone
humiliated by the notion of receiving pay, for the President of
the United States also works for pay. He is paid for commanding,
other men for obeying orders. In the United States professions
are more or less laborious, more or less profitable; but they are
never either high or low: every honest calling is honorable.

Book Two - Chapters XIX-XX

Chapter XIX: That Almost All The Americans Follow Industrial
Callings

Agriculture is, perhaps, of all the useful arts that which
improves most slowly amongst democratic nations. Frequently,
indeed, it would seem to be stationary, because other arts are
making rapid strides towards perfection. On the other hand,
almost all the tastes and habits which the equality of condition
engenders naturally lead men to commercial and industrial
occupations.

Suppose an active, enlightened, and free man, enjoying a
competency, but full of desires: he is too poor to live in
idleness; he is rich enough to feel himself protected from the
immediate fear of want, and he thinks how he can better his
condition. This man has conceived a taste for physical
gratifications, which thousands of his fellow-men indulge in
around him; he has himself begun to enjoy these pleasures, and he
is eager to increase his means of satisfying these tastes more
completely. But life is slipping away, time is urgent - to what
is he to turn? The cultivation of the ground promises an almost
certain result to his exertions, but a slow one; men are not
enriched by it without patience and toil. Agriculture is
therefore only suited to those who have already large,
superfluous wealth, or to those whose penury bids them only seek
a bare subsistence. The choice of such a man as we have supposed
is soon made; he sells his plot of ground, leaves his dwelling,
and embarks in some hazardous but lucrative calling. Democratic
communities abound in men of this kind; and in proportion as the
equality of conditions becomes greater, their multitude
increases. Thus democracy not only swells the number of
workingmen, but it leads men to prefer one kind of labor to
another; and whilst it diverts them from agriculture, it
encourages their taste for commerce and manufactures. *a

[Footnote a: It has often been remarked that manufacturers and
mercantile men are inordinately addicted to physical
gratifications, and this has been attributed to commerce and
manufactures; but that is, I apprehend, to take the effect for
the cause. The taste for physical gratifications is not imparted
to men by commerce or manufactures, but it is rather this taste
which leads men to embark in commerce and manufactures, as a
means by which they hope to satisfy themselves more promptly and
more completely. If commerce and manufactures increase the
desire of well-being, it is because every passion gathers
strength in proportion as it is cultivated, and is increased by
all the efforts made to satiate it. All the causes which make
the love of worldly welfare predominate in the heart of man are
favorable to the growth of commerce and manufactures. Equality
of conditions is one of those causes; it encourages trade, not
directly by giving men a taste for business, but indirectly by
strengthening and expanding in their minds a taste for
prosperity.]

This spirit may be observed even amongst the richest members
of the community. In democratic countries, however opulent a man
is supposed to be, he is almost always discontented with his
fortune, because he finds that he is less rich than his father
was, and he fears that his sons will be less rich than himself.
Most rich men in democracies are therefore constantly haunted by
the desire of obtaining wealth, and they naturally turn their
attention to trade and manufactures, which appear to offer the
readiest and most powerful means of success. In this respect
they share the instincts of the poor, without feeling the same
necessities; say rather, they feel the most imperious of all
necessities, that of not sinking in the world.

In aristocracies the rich are at the same time those who
govern. The attention which they unceasingly devote to important
public affairs diverts them from the lesser cares which trade and
manufactures demand. If the will of an individual happens,
nevertheless, to turn his attention to business, the will of the
body to which he belongs will immediately debar him from pursuing
it; for however men may declaim against the rule of numbers, they
cannot wholly escape their sway; and even amongst those
aristocratic bodies which most obstinately refuse to acknowledge
the rights of the majority of the nation, a private majority is
formed which governs the rest. *b

[Footnote b: Some aristocracies, however, have devoted themselves
eagerly to commerce, and have cultivated manufactures with
success. The history of the world might furnish several
conspicuous examples. But, generally speaking, it may be
affirmed that the aristocratic principle is not favorable to the
growth of trade and manufactures. Moneyed aristocracies are the
only exception to the rule. Amongst such aristocracies there are
hardly any desires which do not require wealth to satisfy them;
the love of riches becomes, so to speak, the high road of human
passions, which is crossed by or connected with all lesser
tracks. The love of money and the thirst for that distinction
which attaches to power, are then so closely intermixed in the
same souls, that it becomes difficult to discover whether men
grow covetous from ambition, or whether they are ambitious from
covetousness. This is the case in England, where men seek to get
rich in order to arrive at distinction, and seek distinctions as
a manifestation of their wealth. The mind is then seized by both
ends, and hurried into trade and manufactures, which are the
shortest roads that lead to opulence.

This, however, strikes me as an exceptional and transitory
circumstance. When wealth is become the only symbol of
aristocracy, it is very difficult for the wealthy to maintain
sole possession of political power, to the exclusion of all other
men. The aristocracy of birth and pure democracy are at the two
extremes of the social and political state of nations: between
them moneyed aristocracy finds its place. The latter
approximates to the aristocracy of birth by conferring great
privileges on a small number of persons; it so far belongs to the
democratic element, that these privileges may be successively
acquired by all. It frequently forms a natural transition
between these two conditions of society, and it is difficult to
say whether it closes the reign of aristocratic institutions, or
whether it already opens the new era of democracy.]

In democratic countries, where money does not lead those who
possess it to political power, but often removes them from it,
the rich do not know how to spend their leisure. They are driven
into active life by the inquietude and the greatness of their
desires, by the extent of their resources, and by the taste for
what is extraordinary, which is almost always felt by those who
rise, by whatsoever means, above the crowd. Trade is the only
road open to them. In democracies nothing is more great or more
brilliant than commerce: it attracts the attention of the public,
and fills the imagination of the multitude; all energetic
passions are directed towards it. Neither their own prejudices,
nor those of anybody else, can prevent the rich from devoting
themselves to it. The wealthy members of democracies never form
a body which has manners and regulations of its own; the opinions
peculiar to their class do not restrain them, and the common
opinions of their country urge them on. Moreover, as all the
large fortunes which are to be met with in a democratic community
are of commercial growth, many generations must succeed each
other before their possessors can have entirely laid aside their
habits of business.

Circumscribed within the narrow space which politics leave
them, rich men in democracies eagerly embark in commercial
enterprise: there they can extend and employ their natural
advantages; and indeed it is even by the boldness and the
magnitude of their industrial speculations that we may measure
the slight esteem in which productive industry would have been
held by them, if they had been born amidst an aristocracy.

A similar observation is likewise applicable to all men
living in democracies, whether they be poor or rich. Those who
live in the midst of democratic fluctuations have always before
their eyes the phantom of chance; and they end by liking all
undertakings in which chance plays a part. They are therefore
all led to engage in commerce, not only for the sake of the
profit it holds out to them, but for the love of the constant
excitement occasioned by that pursuit.

The United States of America have only been emancipated for
half a century [in 1840] from the state of colonial dependence in
which they stood to Great Britain; the number of large fortunes
there is small, and capital is still scarce. Yet no people in
the world has made such rapid progress in trade and manufactures
as the Americans: they constitute at the present day the second
maritime nation in the world; and although their manufactures
have to struggle with almost insurmountable natural impediments,
they are not prevented from making great and daily advances. In
the United States the greatest undertakings and speculations are
executed without difficulty, because the whole population is
engaged in productive industry, and because the poorest as well
as the most opulent members of the commonwealth are ready to
combine their efforts for these purposes. The consequence is,
that a stranger is constantly amazed by the immense public works
executed by a nation which contains, so to speak, no rich men.
The Americans arrived but as yesterday on the territory which
they inhabit, and they have already changed the whole order of
nature for their own advantage. They have joined the Hudson to
the Mississippi, and made the Atlantic Ocean communicate with the
Gulf of Mexico, across a continent of more than five hundred
leagues in extent which separates the two seas. The longest
railroads which have been constructed up to the present time are
in America. But what most astonishes me in the United States, is
not so much the marvellous grandeur of some undertakings, as the
innumerable multitude of small ones. Almost all the farmers of
the United States combine some trade with agriculture; most of
them make agriculture itself a trade. It seldom happens that an
American farmer settles for good upon the land which he occupies:
especially in the districts of the Far West he brings land into
tillage in order to sell it again, and not to farm it: he builds
a farmhouse on the speculation that, as the state of the country
will soon be changed by the increase of population, a good price
will be gotten for it. Every year a swarm of the inhabitants of
the North arrive in the Southern States, and settle in the parts
where the cotton plant and the sugar-cane grow. These men
cultivate the soil in order to make it produce in a few years
enough to enrich them; and they already look forward to the time
when they may return home to enjoy the competency thus acquired.
Thus the Americans carry their business- like qualities into
agriculture; and their trading passions are displayed in that as
in their other pursuits.

The Americans make immense progress in productive industry,
because they all devote themselves to it at once; and for this
same reason they are exposed to very unexpected and formidable
embarrassments. As they are all engaged in commerce, their
commercial affairs are affected by such various and complex
causes that it is impossible to foresee what difficulties may
arise. As they are all more or less engaged in productive
industry, at the least shock given to business all private
fortunes are put in jeopardy at the same time, and the State is
shaken. I believe that the return of these commercial panics is
an endemic disease of the democratic nations of our age. It may
be rendered less dangerous, but it cannot be cured; because it
does not originate in accidental circumstances, but in the
temperament of these nations.

Chapter XX: That Aristocracy May Be Engendered By Manufactures

I have shown that democracy is favorable to the growth of
manufactures, and that it increases without limit the numbers of
the manufacturing classes: we shall now see by what side road
manufacturers may possibly in their turn bring men back to
aristocracy. It is acknowledged that when a workman is engaged
every day upon the same detail, the whole commodity is produced
with greater ease, promptitude, and economy. It is likewise
acknowledged that the cost of the production of manufactured
goods is diminished by the extent of the establishment in which
they are made, and by the amount of capital employed or of
credit. These truths had long been imperfectly discerned, but in
our time they have been demonstrated. They have been already
applied to many very important kinds of manufactures, and the
humblest will gradually be governed by them. I know of nothing
in politics which deserves to fix the attention of the legislator
more closely than these two new axioms of the science of
manufactures.

When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the
fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with
singular dexterity; but at the same time he loses the general
faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. He
every day becomes more adroit and less industrious; so that it
may be said of him, that in proportion as the workman improves
the man is degraded. What can be expected of a man who has spent
twenty years of his life in making heads for pins? and to what
can that mighty human intelligence, which has so often stirred
the world, be applied in him, except it be to investigate the
best method of making pins' heads? When a workman has spent a
considerable portion of his existence in this manner, his
thoughts are forever set upon the object of his daily toil; his
body has contracted certain fixed habits, which it can never
shake off: in a word, he no longer belongs to himself, but to the
calling which he has chosen. It is in vain that laws and manners
have been at the pains to level all barriers round such a man,
and to open to him on every side a thousand different paths to
fortune; a theory of manufactures more powerful than manners and
laws binds him to a craft, and frequently to a spot, which he
cannot leave: it assigns to him a certain place in society,
beyond which he cannot go: in the midst of universal movement it
has rendered him stationary.

In proportion as the principle of the division of labor is
more extensively applied, the workman becomes more weak, more
narrow-minded, and more dependent. The art advances, the artisan
recedes. On the other hand, in proportion as it becomes more
manifest that the productions of manufactures are by so much the
cheaper and better as the manufacture is larger and the amount of
capital employed more considerable, wealthy and educated men come
forward to embark in manufactures which were heretofore abandoned
to poor or ignorant handicraftsmen. The magnitude of the efforts
required, and the importance of the results to be obtained,
attract them. Thus at the very time at which the science of
manufactures lowers the class of workmen, it raises the class of
masters.

Whereas the workman concentrates his faculties more and more
upon the study of a single detail, the master surveys a more
extensive whole, and the mind of the latter is enlarged in
proportion as that of the former is narrowed. In a short time
the one will require nothing but physical strength without
intelligence; the other stands in need of science, and almost of
genius, to insure success. This man resembles more and more the
administrator of a vast empire - that man, a brute. The master
and the workman have then here no similarity, and their
differences increase every day. They are only connected as the
two rings at the extremities of a long chain. Each of them fills
the station which is made for him, and out of which he does not
get: the one is continually, closely, and necessarily dependent
upon the other, and seems as much born to obey as that other is
to command. What is this but aristocracy?

As the conditi