Democrazia in America, vol. 2 - Tocqueville
Anteprima
ESTRATTO DOCUMENTO
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 himself alone.
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.
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.
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 public-houses 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 conditions of men constituting the nation become more and
more equal, the demand for manufactured commodities becomes
more general and more extensive; and the cheapness which places
these objects within the reach of slender fortunes becomes a great
element of success. Hence there are every day more men of great
opulence and education who devote their wealth and knowledge to
manufactures; and who seek, by opening large establishments, and by
a strict division of labor, to meet the fresh demands which are made
on all sides. Thus, in proportion as the mass of the nation turns to
democracy, that particular class which is engaged in manufactures
becomes more aristocratic. Men grow more alike in the one—more
different in the other; and inequality increases in the less numerous
class in the same ratio in which it decreases in the community. Hence
it would appear, on searching to the bottom, that aristocracy should
naturally spring out of the bosom of democracy.
But this kind of aristocracy by no means resembles those kinds
which preceded it. It will be observed at once, that as it applies
exclusively to manufactures and to some manufacturing callings, it is
a monstrous exception in the general aspect of society. The small
aristocratic societies which are formed by some manufacturers in the
midst of the immense democracy of our age, contain, like the great
aristocratic societies of former ages, some men who are very opulent,
and a multitude who are wretchedly poor. The poor have few means
of escaping from their condition and becoming rich; but the rich are
constantly becoming poor, or they give up business when they have
realized a fortune. Thus the elements of which the class of the poor is
composed are fixed; but the elements of which the class of the rich is
composed are not so. To say the truth, though there are rich men, the
class of rich men does not exist; for these rich individuals have no
feelings or purposes in common, no mutual traditions or mutual
hopes; there are therefore members, but no body.
Not only are the rich not compactly united amongst themselves, but
there is no real bond between them and the poor. Their relative
position is not a permanent one; they are constantly drawn together or
separated by their interests. The workman is generally dependent on
the master, but not on any particular master; these two men meet in
the factory, but know not each other elsewhere; and whilst they come
into contact on one point, they stand very wide apart on all others.
The manufacturer asks nothing of the workman but his labor; the
workman expects nothing from him but his wages. The one contracts
no obligation to protect, nor the other to defend; and they are not
permanently connected either by habit or by duty. The aristocracy
created by business rarely settles in the midst of the manufacturing
population which it directs; the object is not to govern that
population, but to use it. An aristocracy thus constituted can have no
great hold upon those whom it employs; and even if it succeed in
retaining them at one moment, they escape the next; it knows not how
to will, and it cannot act. The territorial aristocracy of former ages
was either bound by law, or thought itself bound by usage, to come to
the relief of its serving-men, and to succor their distresses. But the
manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and debases
the men who serve it, and then abandons them to be supported by the
charity of the public. This is a natural consequence of what has been
said before. Between the workmen and the master there are frequent
relations, but no real partnership.
I am of opinion, upon the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy
which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest which ever
existed in the world; but at the same time it is one of the most
confined and least dangerous. Nevertheless the friends of democracy
should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a
permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate
into the world, it may be predicted that this is the channel by which
they will enter.
Book Three: Influence Of
Democracy On Manners, Properly
So Called
Chapter I: That Manners Are
Softened As Social Conditions
Become More Equal
We perceive that for several ages social conditions have tended to
equality, and we discover that in the course of the same period the
manners of society have been softened. Are these two things merely
contemporaneous, or does any secret link exist between them, so that
the one cannot go on without making the other advance? Several
causes may concur to render the manners of a people less rude; but,
of all these causes, the most powerful appears to me to be the equality
of conditions. Equality of conditions and growing civility in manners
are, then, in my eyes, not only contemporaneous occurrences, but
correlative facts. When the fabulists seek to interest us in the actions
of beasts, they invest them with human notions and passions; the
poets who sing of spirits and angels do the same; there is no
wretchedness so deep, nor any happiness so pure, as to fill the human
mind and touch the heart, unless we are ourselves held up to our own
eyes under other features.
This is strictly applicable to the subject upon which we are at
present engaged. When all men are irrevocably marshalled in an
aristocratic community, according to their professions, their property,
and their birth, the members of each class, considering themselves as
children of the same family, cherish a constant and lively sympathy
towards each other, which can never be felt in an equal degree by the
citizens of a democracy. But the same feeling does not exist between
the several classes towards each other. Amongst an aristocratic
people each caste has its own opinions, feelings, rights, manners, and
modes of living. Thus the men of whom each caste is composed do
not resemble the mass of their fellow-citizens; they do not think or
feel in the same manner, and they scarcely believe that they belong to
the same human race. They cannot, therefore, thoroughly understand
what others feel, nor judge of others by themselves. Yet they are
sometimes eager to lend each other mutual aid; but this is not
contrary to my previous observation. These aristocratic institutions,
which made the beings of one and the same race so different,
nevertheless bound them to each other by close political ties.
Although the serf had no natural interest in the fate of nobles, he did
not the less think himself obliged to devote his person to the service
of that noble who happened to be his lord; and although the noble
held himself to be of a different nature from that of his serfs, he
nevertheless held that his duty and his honor constrained him to
defend, at the risk of his own life, those who dwelt upon his domains.
It is evident that these mutual obligations did not originate in the
law of nature, but in the law of society; and that the claim of social
duty was more stringent than that of mere humanity. These services
were not supposed to be due from man to man, but to the vassal or to
the lord. Feudal institutions awakened a lively sympathy for the
sufferings of certain men, but none at all for the miseries of mankind.
They infused generosity rather than mildness into the manners of the
time, and although they prompted men to great acts of self-devotion,
they engendered no real sympathies; for real sympathies can only
exist between those who are alike; and in aristocratic ages men
acknowledge none but the members of their own caste to be like
themselves.
When the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, who all belonged to the
aristocracy by birth or education, relate the tragical end of a noble,
their grief flows apace; whereas they tell you at a breath, and without
wincing, of massacres and tortures inflicted on the common sort of
people. Not that these writers felt habitual hatred or systematic
disdain for the people; war between the several classes of the
community was not yet declared. They were impelled by an instinct
rather than by a passion; as they had formed no clear notion of a poor
man's sufferings, they cared but little for his fate. The same feelings
animated the lower orders whenever the feudal tie was broken. The
same ages which witnessed so many heroic acts of self-devotion on
the part of vassals for their lords, were stained with atrocious
barbarities, exercised from time to time by the lower classes on the
higher. It must not be supposed that this mutual insensibility arose
solely from the absence of public order and education; for traces of it
are to be found in the following centuries, which became tranquil and
enlightened whilst they remained aristocratic. In 1675 the lower
classes in Brittany revolted at the imposition of a new tax. These
disturbances were put down with unexampled atrocity. Observe the
language in which Madame de Sevigne, a witness of these horrors,
relates them to her daughter:—
"Aux Rochers, 30 Octobre, 1675.
"Mon Dieu, ma fille, que votre lettre d'Aix est plaisante! Au moins
relisez vos lettres avant que de les envoyer; laissez-vous surpendre a
leur agrement, et consolez-vous par ce plaisir de la peine que vous
avez d'en tant ecrire. Vous avez donc baise toute la Provence? il n'y
aurait pas satisfaction a baiser toute la Bretagne, a moins qu'on
n'aimat a sentir le vin. . . . Voulez-vous savoir des nouvelles de
Rennes? On a fait une taxe de cent mille ecus sur le bourgeois; et si
on ne trouve point cette somme dans vingt-quatre heures, elle sera
doublee et exigible par les soldats. On a chasse et banni toute une
grand rue, et defendu de les recueillir sous peine de la vie; de sorte
qu'on voyait tous ces miserables, veillards, femmes accouchees,
enfans, errer en pleurs au sortir de cette ville sans savoir ou aller. On
roua avant-hier un violon, qui avait commence la danse et la pillerie
du papier timbre; il a ete ecartele apres sa mort, et ses quatre quartiers
exposes aux quatre coins de la ville. On a pris soixante bourgeois, et
on commence demain les punitions. Cette province est un bel
exemple pour les autres, et surtout de respecter les gouverneurs et les
gouvernantes, et de ne point jeter de pierres dans leur jardin." *a
a [ To feel the point of this joke the reader should
recollect that Madame de Grignan was
Gouvernante de Provence.] "Madame de Tarente
etait hier dans ces bois par un temps enchante: il
n'est question ni de chambre ni de collation; elle
entre par la barriere et s'en retourne de meme. . . ."
In another letter she adds:—
"Vous me parlez bien plaisamment de nos miseres; nous ne
sommes plus si roues; un en huit jours, pour entretenir la justice. Il est
vrai que la penderie me parait maintenant un refraichissement. J'ai
une tout autre idee de la justice, depuis que je suis en ce pays. Vos
galeriens me paraissent une societe d'honnetes gens qui se sont retires
du monde pour mener une vie douce."
It would be a mistake to suppose that Madame de Sevigne, who
wrote these lines, was a selfish or cruel person; she was passionately
attached to her children, and very ready to sympathize in the sorrows
of her friends; nay, her letters show that she treated her vassals and
servants with kindness and indulgence. But Madame de Sevigne had
no clear notion of suffering in anyone who was not a person of
quality.
In our time the harshest man writing to the most insensible person
of his acquaintance would not venture wantonly to indulge in the
cruel jocularity which I have quoted; and even if his own manners
allowed him to do so, the manners of society at large would forbid it.
Whence does this arise? Have we more sensibility than our
forefathers? I know not that we have; but I am sure that our
insensibility is extended to a far greater range of objects. When all the
ranks of a community are nearly equal, as all men think and feel in
nearly the same manner, each of them may judge in a moment of the
sensations of all the others; he casts a rapid glance upon himself, and
that is enough. There is no wretchedness into which he cannot readily
enter, and a secret instinct reveals to him its extent. It signifies not
that strangers or foes be the sufferers; imagination puts him in their
place; something like a personal feeling is mingled with his pity, and
makes himself suffer whilst the body of his fellow-creature is in
torture. In democratic ages men rarely sacrifice themselves for one
another; but they display general compassion for the members of the
human race. They inflict no useless ills; and they are happy to relieve
the griefs of others, when they can do so without much hurting
themselves; they are not disinterested, but they are humane.
Although the Americans have, in a manner, reduced egotism to a
social and philosophical theory, they are nevertheless extremely open
to compassion. In no country is criminal justice administered with
more mildness than in the United States. Whilst the English seem
disposed carefully to retain the bloody traces of the dark ages in their
penal legislation, the Americans have almost expunged capital
punishment from their codes. North America is, I think, the only one
country upon earth in which the life of no one citizen has been taken
for a political offence in the course of the last fifty years. The
circumstance which conclusively shows that this singular mildness of
the Americans arises chiefly from their social condition, is the
manner in which they treat their slaves. Perhaps there is not, upon the
whole, a single European colony in the New World in which the
physical condition of the blacks is less severe than in the United
States; yet the slaves still endure horrid sufferings there, and are
constantly exposed to barbarous punishments. It is easy to perceive
that the lot of these unhappy beings inspires their masters with but
little compassion, and that they look upon slavery, not only as an
institution which is profitable to them, but as an evil which does not
affect them. Thus the same man who is full of humanity towards his
fellow-creatures when they are at the same time his equals, becomes
insensible to their afflictions as soon as that equality ceases. His
mildness should therefore be attributed to the equality of conditions,
rather than to civilization and education.
What I have here remarked of individuals is, to a certain extent,
applicable to nations. When each nation has its distinct opinions,
belief, laws, and customs, it looks upon itself as the whole of
mankind, and is moved by no sorrows but its own. Should war break
out between two nations animated by this feeling, it is sure to be
waged with great cruelty. At the time of their highest culture, the
Romans slaughtered the generals of their enemies, after having
dragged them in triumph behind a car; and they flung their prisoners
to the beasts of the Circus for the amusement of the people. Cicero,
who declaimed so vehemently at the notion of crucifying a Roman
citizen, had not a word to say against these horrible abuses of victory.
It is evident that in his eyes a barbarian did not belong to the same
human race as a Roman. On the contrary, in proportion as nations
become more like each other, they become reciprocally more
compassionate, and the law of nations is mitigated.
Chapter II: That Democracy
Renders The Habitual Intercourse
Of The Americans Simple And
Easy
Democracy does not attach men strongly to each other; but it places
their habitual intercourse upon an easier footing. If two Englishmen
chance to meet at the Antipodes, where they are surrounded by
strangers whose language and manners are almost unknown to them,
they will first stare at each other with much curiosity and a kind of
secret uneasiness; they will then turn away, or, if one accosts the
other, they will take care only to converse with a constrained and
absent air upon very unimportant subjects. Yet there is no enmity
between these men; they have never seen each other before, and each
believes the other to be a respectable person. Why then should they
stand so cautiously apart? We must go back to England to learn the
reason.
When it is birth alone, independent of wealth, which classes men in
society, everyone knows exactly what his own position is upon the
social scale; he does not seek to rise, he does not fear to sink. In a
community thus organized, men of different castes communicate very
little with each other; but if accident brings them together, they are
ready to converse without hoping or fearing to lose their own
position. Their intercourse is not upon a footing of equality, but it is
not constrained. When moneyed aristocracy succeeds to aristocracy
of birth, the case is altered. The privileges of some are still extremely
great, but the possibility of acquiring those privileges is open to all:
whence it follows that those who possess them are constantly haunted
by the apprehension of losing them, or of other men's sharing them;
those who do not yet enjoy them long to possess them at any cost, or,
if they fail to appear at least to possess them—which is not
impossible. As the social importance of men is no longer ostensibly
and permanently fixed by blood, and is infinitely varied by wealth,
ranks still exist, but it is not easy clearly to distinguish at a glance
those who respectively belong to them. Secret hostilities then arise in
the community; one set of men endeavor by innumerable artifices to
penetrate, or to appear to penetrate, amongst those who are above
them; another set are constantly in arms against these usurpers of
their rights; or rather the same individual does both at once, and
whilst he seeks to raise himself into a higher circle, he is always on
the defensive against the intrusion of those below him.
Such is the condition of England at the present time; and I am of
opinion that the peculiarity before adverted to is principally to be
attributed to this cause. As aristocratic pride is still extremely great
amongst the English, and as the limits of aristocracy are ill-defined,
everybody lives in constant dread lest advantage should be taken of
his familiarity. Unable to judge at once of the social position of those
he meets, an Englishman prudently avoids all contact with them. Men
are afraid lest some slight service rendered should draw them into an
unsuitable acquaintance; they dread civilities, and they avoid the
obtrusive gratitude of a stranger quite as much as his hatred. Many
people attribute these singular anti-social propensities, and the
reserved and taciturn bearing of the English, to purely physical
causes. I may admit that there is something of it in their race, but
much more of it is attributable to their social condition, as is proved
by the contrast of the Americans.
In America, where the privileges of birth never existed, and where
riches confer no peculiar rights on their possessors, men unacquainted
with each other are very ready to frequent the same places, and find
neither peril nor advantage in the free interchange of their thoughts. If
they meet by accident, they neither seek nor avoid intercourse; their
manner is therefore natural, frank, and open: it is easy to see that they
hardly expect or apprehend anything from each other, and that they
do not care to display, any more than to conceal, their position in the
world. If their demeanor is often cold and serious, it is never haughty
or constrained; and if they do not converse, it is because they are not
in a humor to talk, not because they think it their interest to be silent.
In a foreign country two Americans are at once friends, simply
because they are Americans. They are repulsed by no prejudice; they
are attracted by their common country. For two Englishmen the same
blood is not enough; they must be brought together by the same rank.
The Americans remark this unsociable mood of the English as much
as the French do, and they are not less astonished by it. Yet the
Americans are connected with England by their origin, their religion,
their language, and partially by their manners; they only differ in their
social condition. It may therefore be inferred that the reserve of the
English proceeds from the constitution of their country much more
than from that of its inhabitants.
Chapter III: Why The Americans
Show So Little Sensitiveness In
Their Own Country, And Are So
Sensitive In Europe
The temper of the Americans is vindictive, like that of all serious
and reflecting nations. They hardly ever forget an offence, but it is
not easy to offend them; and their resentment is as slow to kindle as it
is to abate. In aristocratic communities where a small number of
persons manage everything, the outward intercourse of men is subject
to settled conventional rules. Everyone then thinks he knows exactly
what marks of respect or of condescension he ought to display, and
none are presumed to be ignorant of the science of etiquette. These
usages of the first class in society afterwards serve as a model to all
the others; besides which each of the latter lays down a code of its
own, to which all its members are bound to conform. Thus the rules
of politeness form a complex system of legislation, which it is
difficult to be perfectly master of, but from which it is dangerous for
anyone to deviate; so that men are constantly exposed involuntarily to
inflict or to receive bitter affronts. But as the distinctions of rank are
obliterated, as men differing in education and in birth meet and
mingle in the same places of resort, it is almost impossible to agree
upon the rules of good breeding. As its laws are uncertain, to disobey
them is not a crime, even in the eyes of those who know what they
are; men attach more importance to intentions than to forms, and they
grow less civil, but at the same time less quarrelsome. There are
many little attentions which an American does not care about; he
thinks they are not due to him, or he presumes that they are not
known to be due: he therefore either does not perceive a rudeness or
he forgives it; his manners become less courteous, and his character
more plain and masculine.
The mutual indulgence which the Americans display, and the
manly confidence with which they treat each other, also result from
another deeper and more general cause, which I have already
adverted to in the preceding chapter. In the United States the
distinctions of rank in civil society are slight, in political society they
are null; an American, therefore, does not think himself bound to pay
particular attentions to any of his fellow-citizens, nor does he require
such attentions from them towards himself. As he does not see that it
is his interest eagerly to seek the company of any of his countrymen,
he is slow to fancy that his own company is declined: despising no
one on account of his station, he does not imagine that anyone can
despise him for that cause; and until he has clearly perceived an
insult, he does not suppose that an affront was intended. The social
condition of the Americans naturally accustoms them not to take
offence in small matters; and, on the other hand, the democratic
freedom which they enjoy transfuses this same mildness of temper
into the character of the nation. The political institutions of the United
States constantly bring citizens of all ranks into contact, and compel
them to pursue great undertakings in concert. People thus engaged
have scarcely time to attend to the details of etiquette, and they are
besides too strongly interested in living harmoniously for them to
stick at such things. They therefore soon acquire a habit of
considering the feelings and opinions of those whom they meet more
than their manners, and they do not allow themselves to be annoyed
by trifles.
I have often remarked in the United States that it is not easy to
make a man understand that his presence may be dispensed with;
hints will not always suffice to shake him off. I contradict an
American at every word he says, to show him that his conversation
bores me; he instantly labors with fresh pertinacity to convince me; I
preserve a dogged silence, and he thinks I am meditating deeply on
the truths which he is uttering; at last I rush from his company, and he
supposes that some urgent business hurries me elsewhere. This man
will never understand that he wearies me to extinction unless I tell
him so: and the only way to get rid of him is to make him my enemy
for life.
It appears surprising at first sight that the same man transported to
Europe suddenly becomes so sensitive and captious, that I often find
it as difficult to avoid offending him here as it was to put him out of
countenance. These two opposite effects proceed from the same
cause. Democratic institutions generally give men a lofty notion of
their country and of themselves. An American leaves his country with
a heart swollen with pride; on arriving in Europe he at once finds out
that we are not so engrossed by the United States and the great people
which inhabits them as he had supposed, and this begins to annoy
him. He has been informed that the conditions of society are not equal
in our part of the globe, and he observes that among the nations of
Europe the traces of rank are not wholly obliterated; that wealth and
birth still retain some indeterminate privileges, which force
themselves upon his notice whilst they elude definition. He is
therefore profoundly ignorant of the place which he ought to occupy
in this half-ruined scale of classes, which are sufficiently distinct to
hate and despise each other, yet sufficiently alike for him to be
always confounding them. He is afraid of ranging himself too high—
still more is he afraid of being ranged too low; this twofold peril
keeps his mind constantly on the stretch, and embarrasses all he says
and does. He learns from tradition that in Europe ceremonial
observances were infinitely varied according to different ranks; this
recollection of former times completes his perplexity, and he is the
more afraid of not obtaining those marks of respect which are due to
him, as he does not exactly know in what they consist. He is like a
man surrounded by traps: society is not a recreation for him, but a
serious toil: he weighs your least actions, interrogates your looks, and
scrutinizes all you say, lest there should be some hidden allusion to
affront him. I doubt whether there was ever a provincial man of
quality so punctilious in breeding as he is: he endeavors to attend to
the slightest rules of etiquette, and does not allow one of them to be
waived towards himself: he is full of scruples and at the same time of
pretensions; he wishes to do enough, but fears to do too much; and as
he does not very well know the limits of the one or of the other, he
keeps up a haughty and embarrassed air of reserve.
But this is not all: here is yet another double of the human heart. An
American is forever talking of the admirable equality which prevails
in the United States; aloud he makes it the boast of his country, but in
secret he deplores it for himself; and he aspires to show that, for his
part, he is an exception to the general state of things which he vaunts.
There is hardly an American to be met with who does not claim some
remote kindred with the first founders of the colonies; and as for the
scions of the noble families of England, America seemed to me to be
covered with them. When an opulent American arrives in Europe, his
first care is to surround himself with all the luxuries of wealth: he is
so afraid of being taken for the plain citizen of a democracy, that he
adopts a hundred distorted ways of bringing some new instance of his
wealth before you every day. His house will be in the most
fashionable part of the town: he will always be surrounded by a host
of servants. I have heard an American complain, that in the best
houses of Paris the society was rather mixed; the taste which prevails
there was not pure enough for him; and he ventured to hint that, in his
opinion, there was a want of elegance of manner; he could not
accustom himself to see wit concealed under such unpretending
forms.
These contrasts ought not to surprise us. If the vestiges of former
aristocratic distinctions were not so completely effaced in the United
States, the Americans would be less simple and less tolerant in their
own country—they would require less, and be less fond of borrowed
manners in ours.
Chapter IV: Consequences Of The
Three Preceding Chapters
When men feel a natural compassion for their mutual sufferings—
when they are brought together by easy and frequent intercourse, and
no sensitive feelings keep them asunder—it may readily be supposed
that they will lend assistance to one another whenever it is needed.
When an American asks for the co-operation of his fellow-citizens it
is seldom refused, and I have often seen it afforded spontaneously
and with great goodwill. If an accident happens on the highway,
everybody hastens to help the sufferer; if some great and sudden
calamity befalls a family, the purses of a thousand strangers are at
once willingly opened, and small but numerous donations pour in to
relieve their distress. It often happens amongst the most civilized
nations of the globe, that a poor wretch is as friendless in the midst of
a crowd as the savage in his wilds: this is hardly ever the case in the
United States. The Americans, who are always cold and often coarse
in their manners, seldom show insensibility; and if they do not proffer
services eagerly, yet they do not refuse to render them.
All this is not in contradiction to what I have said before on the
subject of individualism. The two things are so far from combating
each other, that I can see how they agree. Equality of conditions,
whilst it makes men feel their independence, shows them their own
weakness: they are free, but exposed to a thousand accidents; and
experience soon teaches them that, although they do not habitually
require the assistance of others, a time almost always comes when
they cannot do without it. We constantly see in Europe that men of
the same profession are ever ready to assist each other; they are all
exposed to the same ills, and that is enough to teach them to seek
mutual preservatives, however hard-hearted and selfish they may
otherwise be. When one of them falls into danger, from which the
others may save him by a slight transient sacrifice or a sudden effort,
they do not fail to make the attempt. Not that they are deeply
interested in his fate; for if, by chance, their exertions are unavailing,
they immediately forget the object of them, and return to their own
business; but a sort of tacit and almost involuntary agreement has
been passed between them, by which each one owes to the others a
temporary support which he may claim for himself in turn. Extend to
a people the remark here applied to a class, and you will understand
my meaning. A similar covenant exists in fact between all the citizens
of a democracy: they all feel themselves subject to the same weakness
and the same dangers; and their interest, as well as their sympathy,
makes it a rule with them to lend each other mutual assistance when
required. The more equal social conditions become, the more do men
display this reciprocal disposition to oblige each other. In
democracies no great benefits are conferred, but good offices are
constantly rendered: a man seldom displays self-devotion, but all men
are ready to be of service to one another.
Chapter V: How Democracy
Affects the Relation Of Masters
And Servants
An American who had travelled for a long time in Europe once said
to me, "The English treat their servants with a stiffness and
imperiousness of manner which surprise us; but on the other hand the
French sometimes treat their attendants with a degree of familiarity or
of politeness which we cannot conceive. It looks as if they were
afraid to give orders: the posture of the superior and the inferior is ill-
maintained." The remark was a just one, and I have often made it
myself. I have always considered England as the country in the world
where, in our time, the bond of domestic service is drawn most
tightly, and France as the country where it is most relaxed. Nowhere
have I seen masters stand so high or so low as in these two countries.
Between these two extremes the Americans are to be placed. Such is
the fact as it appears upon the surface of things: to discover the causes
of that fact, it is necessary to search the matter thoroughly.
No communities have ever yet existed in which social conditions
have been so equal that there were neither rich nor poor, and
consequently neither masters nor servants. Democracy does not
prevent the existence of these two classes, but it changes their
dispositions and modifies their mutual relations. Amongst aristocratic
nations servants form a distinct class, not more variously composed
than that of masters. A settled order is soon established; in the former
as well as in the latter class a scale is formed, with numerous
distinctions or marked gradations of rank, and generations succeed
each other thus without any change of position. These two
communities are superposed one above the other, always distinct, but
regulated by analogous principles. This aristocratic constitution does
not exert a less powerful influence on the notions and manners of
servants than on those of masters; and, although the effects are
different, the same cause may easily be traced. Both classes constitute
small communities in the heart of the nation, and certain permanent
notions of right and wrong are ultimately engendered amongst them.
The different acts of human life are viewed by one particular and
unchanging light. In the society of servants, as in that of masters, men
exercise a great influence over each other: they acknowledge settled
rules, and in the absence of law they are guided by a sort of public
opinion: their habits are settled, and their conduct is placed under a
certain control.
These men, whose destiny is to obey, certainly do not understand
fame, virtue, honesty, and honor in the same manner as their masters;
but they have a pride, a virtue, and an honesty pertaining to their
condition; and they have a notion, if I may use the expression, of a
sort of servile honor. *a Because a class is mean, it must not be
supposed that all who belong to it are mean-hearted; to think so
would be a great mistake. However lowly it may be, he who is
foremost there, and who has no notion of quitting it, occupies an
aristocratic position which inspires him with lofty feelings, pride, and
self-respect, that fit him for the higher virtues and actions above the
common. Amongst aristocratic nations it was by no means rare to
find men of noble and vigorous minds in the service of the great, who
felt not the servitude they bore, and who submitted to the will of their
masters without any fear of their displeasure. But this was hardly ever
the case amongst the inferior ranks of domestic servants. It may be
imagined that he who occupies the lowest stage of the order of
menials stands very low indeed. The French created a word on
purpose to designate the servants of the aristocracy—they called them
lackeys. This word "lackey" served as the strongest expression, when
all others were exhausted, to designate human meanness. Under the
old French monarchy, to denote by a single expression a low-spirited
contemptible fellow, it was usual to say that he had the "soul of a
lackey"; the term was enough to convey all that was intended.
[Footnote a: If the principal opinions by which men are guided are
examined closely and in detail, the analogy appears still more
striking, and one is surprised to find amongst them, just as much as
amongst the haughtiest scions of a feudal race, pride of birth, respect
for their ancestry and their descendants, disdain of their inferiors, a
dread of contact, a taste for etiquette, precedents, and antiquity.]
The permanent inequality of conditions not only gives servants
certain peculiar virtues and vices, but it places them in a peculiar
relation with respect to their masters. Amongst aristocratic nations the
poor man is familiarized from his childhood with the notion of being
commanded: to whichever side he turns his eyes the graduated
structure of society and the aspect of obedience meet his view. Hence
in those countries the master readily obtains prompt, complete,
respectful, and easy obedience from his servants, because they revere
in him not only their master but the class of masters. He weighs down
their will by the whole weight of the aristocracy. He orders their
actions—to a certain extent he even directs their thoughts. In
aristocracies the master often exercises, even without being aware of
it, an amazing sway over the opinions, the habits, and the manners of
those who obey him, and his influence extends even further than his
authority.
In aristocratic communities there are not only hereditary families of
servants as well as of masters, but the same families of servants
adhere for several generations to the same families of masters (like
two parallel lines which neither meet nor separate); and this
considerably modifies the mutual relations of these two classes of
persons. Thus, although in aristocratic society the master and servant
have no natural resemblance—although, on the contrary, they are
placed at an immense distance on the scale of human beings by their
fortune, education, and opinions—yet time ultimately binds them
together. They are connected by a long series of common
reminiscences, and however different they may be, they grow alike;
whilst in democracies, where they are naturally almost alike, they
always remain strangers to each other. Amongst an aristocratic people
the master gets to look upon his servants as an inferior and secondary
part of himself, and he often takes an interest in their lot by a last
stretch of egotism.
Servants, on their part, are not averse to regard themselves in the
same light; and they sometimes identify themselves with the person
of the master, so that they become an appendage to him in their own
eyes as well as in his. In aristocracies a servant fills a subordinate
position which he cannot get out of; above him is another man,
holding a superior rank which he cannot lose. On one side are
obscurity, poverty, obedience for life; on the other, and also for life,
fame, wealth, and command. The two conditions are always distinct
and always in propinquity; the tie that connects them is as lasting as
they are themselves. In this predicament the servant ultimately
detaches his notion of interest from his own person; he deserts
himself, as it were, or rather he transports himself into the character
of his master, and thus assumes an imaginary personality. He
complacently invests himself with the wealth of those who command
him; he shares their fame, exalts himself by their rank, and feeds his
mind with borrowed greatness, to which he attaches more importance
than those who fully and really possess it. There is something
touching, and at the same time ridiculous, in this strange confusion of
two different states of being. These passions of masters, when they
pass into the souls of menials, assume the natural dimensions of the
place they occupy—they are contracted and lowered. What was pride
in the former becomes puerile vanity and paltry ostentation in the
latter. The servants of a great man are commonly most punctilious as
to the marks of respect due to him, and they attach more importance
to his slightest privileges than he does himself. In France a few of
these old servants of the aristocracy are still to be met with here and
there; they have survived their race, which will soon disappear with
them altogether. In the United States I never saw anyone at all like
them. The Americans are not only unacquainted with the kind of man,
but it is hardly possible to make them understand that such ever
existed. It is scarcely less difficult for them to conceive it, than for us
to form a correct notion of what a slave was amongst the Romans, or
a serf in the Middle Ages. All these men were in fact, though in
different degrees, results of the same cause: they are all retiring from
our sight, and disappearing in the obscurity of the past, together with
the social condition to which they owed their origin.
Equality of conditions turns servants and masters into new beings,
and places them in new relative positions. When social conditions are
nearly equal, men are constantly changing their situations in life:
there is still a class of menials and a class of masters, but these classes
are not always composed of the same individuals, still less of the
same families; and those who command are not more secure of
perpetuity than those who obey. As servants do not form a separate
people, they have no habits, prejudices, or manners peculiar to
themselves; they are not remarkable for any particular turn of mind or
moods of feeling. They know no vices or virtues of their condition,
but they partake of the education, the opinions, the feelings, the
virtues, and the vices of their contemporaries; and they are honest
men or scoundrels in the same way as their masters are. The
conditions of servants are not less equal than those of masters. As no
marked ranks or fixed subordination are to be found amongst them,
they will not display either the meanness or the greatness which
characterizes the aristocracy of menials as well as all other
aristocracies. I never saw a man in the United States who reminded
me of that class of confidential servants of which we still retain a
reminiscence in Europe, neither did I ever meet with such a thing as a
lackey: all traces of the one and of the other have disappeared.
In democracies servants are not only equal amongst themselves, but
it may be said that they are in some sort the equals of their masters.
This requires explanation in order to be rightly understood. At any
moment a servant may become a master, and he aspires to rise to that
condition: the servant is therefore not a different man from the
master. Why then has the former a right to command, and what
compels the latter to obey?—the free and temporary consent of both
their wills. Neither of them is by nature inferior to the other; they
only become so for a time by covenant. Within the terms of this
covenant, the one is a servant, the other a master; beyond it they are
two citizens of the commonwealth—two men. I beg the reader
particularly to observe that this is not only the notion which servants
themselves entertain of their own condition; domestic service is
looked upon by masters in the same light; and the precise limits of
authority and obedience are as clearly settled in the mind of the one
as in that of the other.
When the greater part of the community have long attained a
condition nearly alike, and when equality is an old and acknowledged
fact, the public mind, which is never affected by exceptions, assigns
certain general limits to the value of man, above or below which no
man can long remain placed. It is in vain that wealth and poverty,
authority and obedience, accidentally interpose great distances
between two men; public opinion, founded upon the usual order of
things, draws them to a common level, and creates a species of
imaginary equality between them, in spite of the real inequality of
their conditions. This all-powerful opinion penetrates at length even
into the hearts of those whose interest might arm them to resist it; it
affects their judgment whilst it subdues their will. In their inmost
convictions the master and the servant no longer perceive any deep-
seated difference between them, and they neither hope nor fear to
meet with any such at any time. They are therefore neither subject to
disdain nor to anger, and they discern in each other neither humility
nor pride. The master holds the contract of service to be the only
source of his power, and the servant regards it as the only cause of his
obedience. They do not quarrel about their reciprocal situations, but
each knows his own and keeps it.
In the French army the common soldier is taken from nearly the
same classes as the officer, and may hold the same commissions; out
of the ranks he considers himself entirely equal to his military
superiors, and in point of fact he is so; but when under arms he does
not hesitate to obey, and his obedience is not the less prompt, precise,
and ready, for being voluntary and defined. This example may give a
notion of what takes place between masters and servants in
democratic communities.
It would be preposterous to suppose that those warm and deep-
seated affections, which are sometimes kindled in the domestic
service of aristocracy, will ever spring up between these two men, or
that they will exhibit strong instances of self-sacrifice. In aristocracies
masters and servants live apart, and frequently their only intercourse
is through a third person; yet they commonly stand firmly by one
another. In democratic countries the master and the servant are close
together; they are in daily personal contact, but their minds do not
intermingle; they have common occupations, hardly ever common
interests. Amongst such a people the servant always considers
himself as a sojourner in the dwelling of his masters. He knew
nothing of their forefathers—he will see nothing of their
descendants—he has nothing lasting to expect from their hand. Why
then should he confound his life with theirs, and whence should so
strange a surrender of himself proceed? The reciprocal position of the
two men is changed—their mutual relations must be so too.
I would fain illustrate all these reflections by the example of the
Americans; but for this purpose the distinctions of persons and places
must be accurately traced. In the South of the Union, slavery exists;
all that I have just said is consequently inapplicable there. In the
North, the majority of servants are either freedmen or the children of
freedmen; these persons occupy a contested position in the public
estimation; by the laws they are brought up to the level of their
masters—by the manners of the country they are obstinately detruded
from it. They do not themselves clearly know their proper place, and
they are almost always either insolent or craven. But in the Northern
States, especially in New England, there are a certain number of
whites, who agree, for wages, to yield a temporary obedience to the
will of their fellow-citizens. I have heard that these servants
commonly perform the duties of their situation with punctuality and
intelligence; and that without thinking themselves naturally inferior to
the person who orders them, they submit without reluctance to obey
him. They appear to me to carry into service some of those manly
habits which independence and equality engender. Having once
selected a hard way of life, they do not seek to escape from it by
indirect means; and they have sufficient respect for themselves, not to
refuse to their master that obedience which they have freely
promised. On their part, masters require nothing of their servants but
the faithful and rigorous performance of the covenant: they do not ask
for marks of respect, they do not claim their love or devoted
attachment; it is enough that, as servants, they are exact and honest. It
would not then be true to assert that, in democratic society, the
relation of servants and masters is disorganized: it is organized on
another footing; the rule is different, but there is a rule.
It is not my purpose to inquire whether the new state of things
which I have just described is inferior to that which preceded it, or
simply different. Enough for me that it is fixed and determined: for
what is most important to meet with among men is not any given
ordering, but order. But what shall I say of those sad and troubled
times at which equality is established in the midst of the tumult of
revolution—when democracy, after having been introduced into the
state of society, still struggles with difficulty against the prejudices
and manners of the country? The laws, and partially public opinion,
already declare that no natural or permanent inferiority exists between
the servant and the master. But this new belief has not yet reached the
innermost convictions of the latter, or rather his heart rejects it; in the
secret persuasion of his mind the master thinks that he belongs to a
peculiar and superior race; he dares not say so, but he shudders whilst
he allows himself to be dragged to the same level. His authority over
his servants becomes timid and at the same time harsh: he has already
ceased to entertain for them the feelings of patronizing kindness
which long uncontested power always engenders, and he is surprised
that, being changed himself, his servant changes also. He wants his
attendants to form regular and permanent habits, in a condition of
domestic service which is only temporary: he requires that they
should appear contented with and proud of a servile condition, which
they will one day shake off—that they should sacrifice themselves to
a man who can neither protect nor ruin them—and in short that they
should contract an indissoluble engagement to a being like
themselves, and one who will last no longer than they will.
Amongst aristocratic nations it often happens that the condition of
domestic service does not degrade the character of those who enter
upon it, because they neither know nor imagine any other; and the
amazing inequality which is manifest between them and their master
appears to be the necessary and unavoidable consequence of some
hidden law of Providence. In democracies the condition of domestic
service does not degrade the character of those who enter upon it,
because it is freely chosen, and adopted for a time only; because it is
not stigmatized by public opinion, and creates no permanent
inequality between the servant and the master. But whilst the
transition from one social condition to another is going on, there is
almost always a time when men's minds fluctuate between the
aristocratic notion of subjection and the democratic notion of
obedience. Obedience then loses its moral importance in the eyes of
him who obeys; he no longer considers it as a species of divine
obligation, and he does not yet view it under its purely human aspect;
it has to him no character of sanctity or of justice, and he submits to it
as to a degrading but profitable condition. At that moment a confused
and imperfect phantom of equality haunts the minds of servants; they
do not at once perceive whether the equality to which they are
entitled is to be found within or without the pale of domestic service;
and they rebel in their hearts against a subordination to which they
have subjected themselves, and from which they derive actual profit.
They consent to serve, and they blush to obey; they like the
advantages of service, but not the master; or rather, they are not sure
that they ought not themselves to be masters, and they are inclined to
consider him who orders them as an unjust usurper of their own
rights. Then it is that the dwelling of every citizen offers a spectacle
somewhat analogous to the gloomy aspect of political society. A
secret and intestine warfare is going on there between powers, ever
rivals and suspicious of one another: the master is ill-natured and
weak, the servant ill-natured and intractable; the one constantly
attempts to evade by unfair restrictions his obligation to protect and to
remunerate—the other his obligation to obey. The reins of domestic
government dangle between them, to be snatched at by one or the
other. The lines which divide authority from oppression, liberty from
license, and right from might, are to their eyes so jumbled together
and confused, that no one knows exactly what he is, or what he may
be, or what he ought to be. Such a condition is not democracy, but
revolution.
Chapter VI: That Democratic
Institutions And Manners Tend To
Raise Rents And Shorten The
Terms Of Leases
What has been said of servants and masters is applicable, to a
certain extent, to landowners and farming tenants; but this subject
deserves to be considered by itself. In America there are, properly
speaking, no tenant farmers; every man owns the ground he tills. It
must be admitted that democratic laws tend greatly to increase the
number of landowners, and to diminish that of farming tenants. Yet
what takes place in the United States is much less attributable to the
institutions of the country than to the country itself. In America land
is cheap, and anyone may easily become a landowner; its returns are
small, and its produce cannot well be divided between a landowner
and a farmer. America therefore stands alone in this as well as in
many other respects, and it would be a mistake to take it as an
example.
I believe that in democratic as well as in aristocratic countries there
will be landowners and tenants, but the connection existing between
them will be of a different kind. In aristocracies the hire of a farm is
paid to the landlord, not only in rent, but in respect, regard, and duty;
in democracies the whole is paid in cash. When estates are divided
and passed from hand to hand, and the permanent connection which
existed between families and the soil is dissolved, the landowner and
the tenant are only casually brought into contact. They meet for a
moment to settle the conditions of the agreement, and then lose sight
of each other; they are two strangers brought together by a common
interest, and who keenly talk over a matter of business, the sole object
of which is to make money.
In proportion as property is subdivided and wealth distributed over
the country, the community is filled with people whose former
opulence is declining, and with others whose fortunes are of recent
growth and whose wants increase more rapidly than their resources.
For all such persons the smallest pecuniary profit is a matter of
importance, and none of them feel disposed to waive any of their
claims, or to lose any portion of their income. As ranks are
intermingled, and as very large as well as very scanty fortunes
become more rare, every day brings the social condition of the
landowner nearer to that of the farmer; the one has not naturally any
uncontested superiority over the other; between two men who are
equal, and not at ease in their circumstances, the contract of hire is
exclusively an affair of money. A man whose estate extends over a
whole district, and who owns a hundred farms, is well aware of the
importance of gaining at the same time the affections of some
thousands of men; this object appears to call for his exertions, and to
attain it he will readily make considerable sacrifices. But he who
owns a hundred acres is insensible to similar considerations, and he
cares but little to win the private regard of his tenant.
An aristocracy does not expire like a man in a single day; the
aristocratic principle is slowly undermined in men's opinion, before it
is attacked in their laws. Long before open war is declared against it,
the tie which had hitherto united the higher classes to the lower may
be seen to be gradually relaxed. Indifference and contempt are
betrayed by one class, jealousy and hatred by the others; the
intercourse between rich and poor becomes less frequent and less
kind, and rents are raised. This is not the consequence of a democratic
revolution, but its certain harbinger; for an aristocracy which has lost
the affections of the people, once and forever, is like a tree dead at the
root, which is the more easily torn up by the winds the higher its
branches have spread.
In the course of the last fifty years the rents of farms have
amazingly increased, not only in France but throughout the greater
part of Europe. The remarkable improvements which have taken
place in agriculture and manufactures within the same period do not
suffice in my opinion to explain this fact; recourse must be had to
another cause more powerful and more concealed. I believe that cause
is to be found in the democratic institutions which several European
nations have adopted, and in the democratic passions which more or
less agitate all the rest. I have frequently heard great English
landowners congratulate themselves that, at the present day, they
derive a much larger income from their estates than their fathers did.
They have perhaps good reasons to be glad; but most assuredly they
know not what they are glad of. They think they are making a clear
gain, when it is in reality only an exchange; their influence is what
they are parting with for cash; and what they gain in money will ere
long be lost in power.
There is yet another sign by which it is easy to know that a great
democratic revolution is going on or approaching. In the Middle Ages
almost all lands were leased for lives, or for very long terms; the
domestic economy of that period shows that leases for ninety-nine
years were more frequent then than leases for twelve years are now.
Men then believed that families were immortal; men's conditions
seemed settled forever, and the whole of society appeared to be so
fixed, that it was not supposed that anything would ever be stirred or
shaken in its structure. In ages of equality, the human mind takes a
different bent; the prevailing notion is that nothing abides, and man is
haunted by the thought of mutability. Under this impression the
landowner and the tenant himself are instinctively averse to
protracted terms of obligation; they are afraid of being tied up to-
morrow by the contract which benefits them today. They have vague
anticipations of some sudden and unforeseen change in their
conditions; they mistrust themselves; they fear lest their taste should
change, and lest they should lament that they cannot rid themselves of
what they coveted; nor are such fears unfounded, for in democratic
ages that which is most fluctuating amidst the fluctuation of all
around is the heart of man.
Chapter VII: Influence Of
Democracy On Wages
Most of the remarks which I have already made in speaking of
servants and masters, may be applied to masters and workmen. As the
gradations of the social scale come to be less observed, whilst the
great sink the humble rise, and as poverty as well as opulence ceases
to be hereditary, the distance both in reality and in opinion, which
heretofore separated the workman from the master, is lessened every
day. The workman conceives a more lofty opinion of his rights, of his
future, of himself; he is filled with new ambition and with new
desires, he is harassed by new wants. Every instant he views with
longing eyes the profits of his employer; and in order to share them,
he strives to dispose of his labor at a higher rate, and he generally
succeeds at length in the attempt. In democratic countries, as well as
elsewhere, most of the branches of productive industry are carried on
at a small cost, by men little removed by their wealth or education
above the level of those whom they employ. These manufacturing
speculators are extremely numerous; their interests differ; they cannot
therefore easily concert or combine their exertions. On the other hand
the workmen have almost always some sure resources, which enable
them to refuse to work when they cannot get what they conceive to be
the fair price of their labor. In the constant struggle for wages which
is going on between these two classes, their strength is divided, and
success alternates from one to the other. It is even probable that in the
end the interest of the working class must prevail; for the high wages
which they have already obtained make them every day less
dependent on their masters; and as they grow more independent, they
have greater facilities for obtaining a further increase of wages.
I shall take for example that branch of productive industry which is
still at the present day the most generally followed in France, and in
almost all the countries of the world—I mean the cultivation of the
soil. In France most of those who labor for hire in agriculture, are
themselves owners of certain plots of ground, which just enable them
to subsist without working for anyone else. When these laborers come
to offer their services to a neighboring landowner or farmer, if he
refuses them a certain rate of wages, they retire to their own small
property and await another opportunity.
I think that, upon the whole, it may be asserted that a slow and
gradual rise of wages is one of the general laws of democratic
communities. In proportion as social conditions become more equal,
wages rise; and as wages are higher, social conditions become more
equal. But a great and gloomy exception occurs in our own time. I
have shown in a preceding chapter that aristocracy, expelled from
political society, has taken refuge in certain departments of
productive industry, and has established its sway there under another
form; this powerfully affects the rate of wages. As a large capital is
required to embark in the great manufacturing speculations to which I
allude, the number of persons who enter upon them is exceedingly
limited: as their number is small, they can easily concert together, and
fix the rate of wages as they please. Their workmen on the contrary
are exceedingly numerous, and the number of them is always
increasing; for, from time to time, an extraordinary run of business
takes place, during which wages are inordinately high, and they
attract the surrounding population to the factories. But, when once
men have embraced that line of life, we have already seen that they
cannot quit it again, because they soon contract habits of body and
mind which unfit them for any other sort of toil. These men have
generally but little education and industry, with but few resources;
they stand therefore almost at the mercy of the master. When
competition, or other fortuitous circumstances, lessen his profits, he
can reduce the wages of his workmen almost at pleasure, and make
from them what he loses by the chances of business. Should the
workmen strike, the master, who is a rich man, can very well wait
without being ruined until necessity brings them back to him; but they
must work day by day or they die, for their only property is in their
hands. They have long been impoverished by oppression, and the
poorer they become the more easily may they be oppressed: they can
never escape from this fatal circle of cause and consequence. It is not
then surprising that wages, after having sometimes suddenly risen, are
permanently lowered in this branch of industry; whereas in other
callings the price of labor, which generally increases but little, is
nevertheless constantly augmented.
This state of dependence and wretchedness, in which a part of the
manufacturing population of our time lives, forms an exception to the
general rule, contrary to the state of all the rest of the community; but,
for this very reason, no circumstance is more important or more
deserving of the especial consideration of the legislator; for when the
whole of society is in motion, it is difficult to keep any one class
stationary; and when the greater number of men are opening new
paths to fortune, it is no less difficult to make the few support in
peace their wants and their desires.
Chapter VIII: Influence Of
Democracy On Kindred
I have just examined the changes which the equality of conditions
produces in the mutual relations of the several members of the
community amongst democratic nations, and amongst the Americans
in particular. I would now go deeper, and inquire into the closer ties
of kindred: my object here is not to seek for new truths, but to show
in what manner facts already known are connected with my subject.
It has been universally remarked, that in our time the several
members of a family stand upon an entirely new footing towards each
other; that the distance which formerly separated a father from his
sons has been lessened; and that paternal authority, if not destroyed,
is at least impaired. Something analogous to this, but even more
striking, may be observed in the United States. In America the family,
in the Roman and aristocratic signification of the word, does not
exist. All that remains of it are a few vestiges in the first years of
childhood, when the father exercises, without opposition, that
absolute domestic authority, which the feebleness of his children
renders necessary, and which their interest, as well as his own
incontestable superiority, warrants. But as soon as the young
American approaches manhood, the ties of filial obedience are
relaxed day by day: master of his thoughts, he is soon master of his
conduct. In America there is, strictly speaking, no adolescence: at the
close of boyhood the man appears, and begins to trace out his own
path. It would be an error to suppose that this is preceded by a
domestic struggle, in which the son has obtained by a sort of moral
violence the liberty that his father refused him. The same habits, the
same principles which impel the one to assert his independence,
predispose the other to consider the use of that independence as an
incontestable right. The former does not exhibit any of those
rancorous or irregular passions which disturb men long after they
have shaken off an established authority; the latter feels none of that
bitter and angry regret which is apt to survive a bygone power. The
father foresees the limits of his authority long beforehand, and when
the time arrives he surrenders it without a struggle: the son looks
forward to the exact period at which he will be his own master; and
he enters upon his freedom without precipitation and without effort,
as a possession which is his own and which no one seeks to wrest
from him. *a
a [ The Americans, however, have not yet thought
fit to strip the parent, as has been done in France,
of one of the chief elements of parental authority,
by depriving him of the power of disposing of his
property at his death. In the United States there are
no restrictions on the powers of a testator. In this
respect, as in almost all others, it is easy to
perceive, that if the political legislation of the
Americans is much more democratic than that of
the French, the civil legislation of the latter is
infinitely more democratic than that of the former.
This may easily be accounted for. The civil
legislation of France was the work of a man who
saw that it was his interest to satisfy the
democratic passions of his contemporaries in all
that was not directly and immediately hostile to
his own power. He was willing to allow some
popular principles to regulate the distribution of
property and the government of families, provided
they were not to be introduced into the
administration of public affairs. Whilst the torrent
of democracy overwhelmed the civil laws of the
country, he hoped to find an easy shelter behind
its political institutions. This policy was at once
both adroit and selfish; but a compromise of this
kind could not last; for in the end political
institutions never fail to become the image and
expression of civil society; and in this sense it may
be said that nothing is more political in a nation
than its civil legislation.]
It may perhaps not be without utility to show how these changes
which take place in family relations, are closely connected with the
social and political revolution which is approaching its consummation
under our own observation. There are certain great social principles,
which a people either introduces everywhere, or tolerates nowhere. In
countries which are aristocratically constituted with all the gradations
of rank, the government never makes a direct appeal to the mass of
the governed: as men are united together, it is enough to lead the
foremost, the rest will follow. This is equally applicable to the family,
as to all aristocracies which have a head. Amongst aristocratic
nations, social institutions recognize, in truth, no one in the family but
the father; children are received by society at his hands; society
governs him, he governs them. Thus the parent has not only a natural
right, but he acquires a political right, to command them: he is the
author and the support of his family; but he is also its constituted
ruler. In democracies, where the government picks out every
individual singly from the mass, to make him subservient to the
general laws of the community, no such intermediate person is
required: a father is there, in the eye of the law, only a member of the
community, older and richer than his sons.
When most of the conditions of life are extremely unequal, and the
inequality of these conditions is permanent, the notion of a superior
grows upon the imaginations of men: if the law invested him with no
privileges, custom and public opinion would concede them. When, on
the contrary, men differ but little from each other, and do not always
remain in dissimilar conditions of life, the general notion of a
superior becomes weaker and less distinct: it is vain for legislation to
strive to place him who obeys very much beneath him who
commands; the manners of the time bring the two men nearer to one
another, and draw them daily towards the same level. Although the
legislation of an aristocratic people should grant no peculiar
privileges to the heads of families; I shall not be the less convinced
that their power is more respected and more extensive than in a
democracy; for I know that, whatsoever the laws may be, superiors
always appear higher and inferiors lower in aristocracies than
amongst democratic nations.
When men live more for the remembrance of what has been than
for the care of what is, and when they are more given to attend to
what their ancestors thought than to think themselves, the father is the
natural and necessary tie between the past and the present—the link
by which the ends of these two chains are connected. In aristocracies,
then, the father is not only the civil head of the family, but the oracle
of its traditions, the expounder of its customs, the arbiter of its
manners. He is listened to with deference, he is addressed with
respect, and the love which is felt for him is always tempered with
fear. When the condition of society becomes democratic, and men
adopt as their general principle that it is good and lawful to judge of
all things for one's self, using former points of belief not as a rule of
faith but simply as a means of information, the power which the
opinions of a father exercise over those of his sons diminishes as well
as his legal power.
Perhaps the subdivision of estates which democracy brings with it
contributes more than anything else to change the relations existing
between a father and his children. When the property of the father of
a family is scanty, his son and himself constantly live in the same
place, and share the same occupations: habit and necessity bring them
together, and force them to hold constant communication: the
inevitable consequence is a sort of familiar intimacy, which renders
authority less absolute, and which can ill be reconciled with the
external forms of respect. Now in democratic countries the class of
those who are possessed of small fortunes is precisely that which
gives strength to the notions, and a particular direction to the
manners, of the community. That class makes its opinions
preponderate as universally as its will, and even those who are most
inclined to resist its commands are carried away in the end by its
example. I have known eager opponents of democracy who allowed
their children to address them with perfect colloquial equality.
Thus, at the same time that the power of aristocracy is declining,
the austere, the conventional, and the legal part of parental authority
vanishes, and a species of equality prevails around the domestic
hearth. I know not, upon the whole, whether society loses by the
change, but I am inclined to believe that man individually is a gainer
by it. I think that, in proportion as manners and laws become more
democratic, the relation of father and son becomes more intimate and
more affectionate; rules and authority are less talked of; confidence
and tenderness are oftentimes increased, and it would seem that the
natural bond is drawn closer in proportion as the social bond is
loosened. In a democratic family the father exercises no other power
than that with which men love to invest the affection and the
experience of age; his orders would perhaps be disobeyed, but his
advice is for the most part authoritative. Though he be not hedged in
with ceremonial respect, his sons at least accost him with confidence;
no settled form of speech is appropriated to the mode of addressing
him, but they speak to him constantly, and are ready to consult him
day by day; the master and the constituted ruler have vanished—the
father remains. Nothing more is needed, in order to judge of the
difference between the two states of society in this respect, than to
peruse the family correspondence of aristocratic ages. The style is
always correct, ceremonious, stiff, and so cold that the natural
warmth of the heart can hardly be felt in the language. The language,
on the contrary, addressed by a son to his father in democratic
countries is always marked by mingled freedom, familiarity and
affection, which at once show that new relations have sprung up in
the bosom of the family.
A similar revolution takes place in the mutual relations of children.
In aristocratic families, as well as in aristocratic society, every place
is marked out beforehand. Not only does the father occupy a separate
rank, in which he enjoys extensive privileges, but even the children
are not equal amongst themselves. The age and sex of each
irrevocably determine his rank, and secure to him certain privileges:
most of these distinctions are abolished or diminished by democracy.
In aristocratic families the eldest son, inheriting the greater part of the
property, and almost all the rights of the family, becomes the chief,
and, to a certain extent, the master, of his brothers. Greatness and
power are for him—for them, mediocrity and dependence.
Nevertheless it would be wrong to suppose that, amongst aristocratic
nations, the privileges of the eldest son are advantageous to himself
alone, or that they excite nothing but envy and hatred in those around
him. The eldest son commonly endeavors to procure wealth and
power for his brothers, because the general splendor of the house is
reflected back on him who represents it; the younger sons seek to
back the elder brother in all his undertakings, because the greatness
and power of the head of the family better enable him to provide for
all its branches. The different members of an aristocratic family are
therefore very closely bound together; their interests are connected,
their minds agree, but their hearts are seldom in harmony.
Democracy also binds brothers to each other, but by very different
means. Under democratic laws all the children are perfectly equal,
and consequently independent; nothing brings them forcibly together,
but nothing keeps them apart; and as they have the same origin, as
they are trained under the same roof, as they are treated with the same
care, and as no peculiar privilege distinguishes or divides them, the
affectionate and youthful intimacy of early years easily springs up
between them. Scarcely any opportunities occur to break the tie thus
formed at the outset of life; for their brotherhood brings them daily
together, without embarrassing them. It is not, then, by interest, but
by common associations and by the free sympathy of opinion and of
taste, that democracy unites brothers to each other. It divides their
inheritance, but it allows their hearts and minds to mingle together.
Such is the charm of these democratic manners, that even the
partisans of aristocracy are caught by it; and after having experienced
it for some time, they are by no means tempted to revert to the
respectful and frigid observance of aristocratic families. They would
be glad to retain the domestic habits of democracy, if they might
throw off its social conditions and its laws; but these elements are
indissolubly united, and it is impossible to enjoy the former without
enduring the latter. The remarks I have made on filial love and
fraternal affection are applicable to all the passions which emanate
spontaneously from human nature itself. If a certain mode of thought
or feeling is the result of some peculiar condition of life, when that
condition is altered nothing whatever remains of the thought or
feeling. Thus a law may bind two members of the community very
closely to one another; but that law being abolished, they stand
asunder. Nothing was more strict than the tie which united the vassal
to the lord under the feudal system; at the present day the two men
know not each other; the fear, the gratitude, and the affection which
formerly connected them have vanished, and not a vestige of the tie
remains. Such, however, is not the case with those feelings which are
natural to mankind. Whenever a law attempts to tutor these feelings
in any particular manner, it seldom fails to weaken them; by
attempting to add to their intensity, it robs them of some of their
elements, for they are never stronger than when left to themselves.
Democracy, which destroys or obscures almost all the old
conventional rules of society, and which prevents men from readily
assenting to new ones, entirely effaces most of the feelings to which
these conventional rules have given rise; but it only modifies some
others, and frequently imparts to them a degree of energy and
sweetness unknown before. Perhaps it is not impossible to condense
into a single proposition the whole meaning of this chapter, and of
several others that preceded it. Democracy loosens social ties, but it
draws the ties of nature more tight; it brings kindred more closely
together, whilst it places the various members of the community more
widely apart.
Chapter IX: Education Of Young
Women In The United States
No free communities ever existed without morals; and, as I
observed in the former part of this work, morals are the work of
woman. Consequently, whatever affects the condition of women,
their habits and their opinions, has great political importance in my
eyes. Amongst almost all Protestant nations young women are far
more the mistresses of their own actions than they are in Catholic
countries. This independence is still greater in Protestant countries,
like England, which have retained or acquired the right of self-
government; the spirit of freedom is then infused into the domestic
circle by political habits and by religious opinions. In the United
States the doctrines of Protestantism are combined with great political
freedom and a most democratic state of society; and nowhere are
young women surrendered so early or so completely to their own
guidance. Long before an American girl arrives at the age of
marriage, her emancipation from maternal control begins; she has
scarcely ceased to be a child when she already thinks for herself,
speaks with freedom, and acts on her own impulse. The great scene of
the world is constantly open to her view; far from seeking
concealment, it is every day disclosed to her more completely, and
she is taught to survey it with a firm and calm gaze. Thus the vices
and dangers of society are early revealed to her; as she sees them
clearly, she views them without illusions, and braves them without
fear; for she is full of reliance on her own strength, and her reliance
seems to be shared by all who are about her. An American girl
scarcely ever displays that virginal bloom in the midst of young
desires, or that innocent and ingenuous grace which usually attends
the European woman in the transition from girlhood to youth. It is
rarely that an American woman at any age displays childish timidity
or ignorance. Like the young women of Europe, she seeks to please,
but she knows precisely the cost of pleasing. If she does not abandon
herself to evil, at least she knows that it exists; and she is remarkable
rather for purity of manners than for chastity of mind. I have been
frequently surprised, and almost frightened, at the singular address
and happy boldness with which young women in America contrive to
manage their thoughts and their language amidst all the difficulties of
stimulating conversation; a philosopher would have stumbled at every
step along the narrow path which they trod without accidents and
without effort. It is easy indeed to perceive that, even amidst the
independence of early youth, an American woman is always mistress
of herself; she indulges in all permitted pleasures, without yielding
herself up to any of them; and her reason never allows the reins of
self-guidance to drop, though it often seems to hold them loosely.
In France, where remnants of every age are still so strangely
mingled in the opinions and tastes of the people, women commonly
receive a reserved, retired, and almost cloistral education, as they did
in aristocratic times; and then they are suddenly abandoned, without a
guide and without assistance, in the midst of all the irregularities
inseparable from democratic society. The Americans are more
consistent. They have found out that in a democracy the
independence of individuals cannot fail to be very great, youth
premature, tastes ill-restrained, customs fleeting, public opinion often
unsettled and powerless, paternal authority weak, and marital
authority contested. Under these circumstances, believing that they
had little chance of repressing in woman the most vehement passions
of the human heart, they held that the surer way was to teach her the
art of combating those passions for herself. As they could not prevent
her virtue from being exposed to frequent danger, they determined
that she should know how best to defend it; and more reliance was
placed on the free vigor of her will than on safeguards which have
been shaken or overthrown. Instead, then, of inculcating mistrust of
herself, they constantly seek to enhance their confidence in her own
strength of character. As it is neither possible nor desirable to keep a
young woman in perpetual or complete ignorance, they hasten to give
her a precocious knowledge on all subjects. Far from hiding the
corruptions of the world from her, they prefer that she should see
them at once and train herself to shun them; and they hold it of more
importance to protect her conduct than to be over-scrupulous of her
innocence.
Although the Americans are a very religious people, they do not
rely on religion alone to defend the virtue of woman; they seek to arm
her reason also. In this they have followed the same method as in
several other respects; they first make the most vigorous efforts to
bring individual independence to exercise a proper control over itself,
and they do not call in the aid of religion until they have reached the
utmost limits of human strength. I am aware that an education of this
kind is not without danger; I am sensible that it tends to invigorate the
judgment at the expense of the imagination, and to make cold and
virtuous women instead of affectionate wives and agreeable
companions to man. Society may be more tranquil and better
regulated, but domestic life has often fewer charms. These, however,
are secondary evils, which may be braved for the sake of higher
interests. At the stage at which we are now arrived the time for
choosing is no longer within our control; a democratic education is
indispensable to protect women from the dangers with which
democratic institutions and manners surround them.
Chapter X: The Young Woman In
The Character Of A Wife
In America the independence of woman is irrevocably lost in the
bonds of matrimony: if an unmarried woman is less constrained there
than elsewhere, a wife is subjected to stricter obligations. The former
makes her father's house an abode of freedom and of pleasure; the
latter lives in the home of her husband as if it were a cloister. Yet
these two different conditions of life are perhaps not so contrary as
may be supposed, and it is natural that the American women should
pass through the one to arrive at the other.
Religious peoples and trading nations entertain peculiarly serious
notions of marriage: the former consider the regularity of woman's
life as the best pledge and most certain sign of the purity of her
morals; the latter regard it as the highest security for the order and
prosperity of the household. The Americans are at the same time a
puritanical people and a commercial nation: their religious opinions,
as well as their trading habits, consequently lead them to require
much abnegation on the part of woman, and a constant sacrifice of
her pleasures to her duties which is seldom demanded of her in
Europe. Thus in the United States the inexorable opinion of the public
carefully circumscribes woman within the narrow circle of domestic
interest and duties, and forbids her to step beyond it.
Upon her entrance into the world a young American woman finds
these notions firmly established; she sees the rules which are derived
from them; she is not slow to perceive that she cannot depart for an
instant from the established usages of her contemporaries, without
putting in jeopardy her peace of mind, her honor, nay even her social
existence; and she finds the energy required for such an act of
submission in the firmness of her understanding and in the virile
habits which her education has given her. It may be said that she has
learned by the use of her independence to surrender it without a
struggle and without a murmur when the time comes for making the
sacrifice. But no American woman falls into the toils of matrimony as
into a snare held out to her simplicity and ignorance. She has been
taught beforehand what is expected of her, and voluntarily and freely
does she enter upon this engagement. She supports her new condition
with courage, because she chose it. As in America paternal discipline
is very relaxed and the conjugal tie very strict, a young woman does
not contract the latter without considerable circumspection and
apprehension. Precocious marriages are rare. Thus American women
do not marry until their understandings are exercised and ripened;
whereas in other countries most women generally only begin to
exercise and to ripen their understandings after marriage.
I by no means suppose, however, that the great change which takes
place in all the habits of women in the United States, as soon as they
are married, ought solely to be attributed to the constraint of public
opinion: it is frequently imposed upon themselves by the sole effort
of their own will. When the time for choosing a husband is arrived,
that cold and stern reasoning power which has been educated and
invigorated by the free observation of the world, teaches an American
woman that a spirit of levity and independence in the bonds of
marriage is a constant subject of annoyance, not of pleasure; it tells
her that the amusements of the girl cannot become the recreations of
the wife, and that the sources of a married woman's happiness are in
the home of her husband. As she clearly discerns beforehand the only
road which can lead to domestic happiness, she enters upon it at once,
and follows it to the end without seeking to turn back.
The same strength of purpose which the young wives of America
display, in bending themselves at once and without repining to the
austere duties of their new condition, is no less manifest in all the
great trials of their lives. In no country in the world are private
fortunes more precarious than in the United States. It is not
uncommon for the same man, in the course of his life, to rise and sink
again through all the grades which lead from opulence to poverty.
American women support these vicissitudes with calm and
unquenchable energy: it would seem that their desires contract, as
easily as they expand, with their fortunes. *a
a [ See Appendix S.]
The greater part of the adventurers who migrate every year to
people the western wilds, belong, as I observed in the former part of
this work, to the old Anglo-American race of the Northern States.
Many of these men, who rush so boldly onwards in pursuit of wealth,
were already in the enjoyment of a competency in their own part of
the country. They take their wives along with them, and make them
share the countless perils and privations which always attend the
commencement of these expeditions. I have often met, even on the
verge of the wilderness, with young women, who after having been
brought up amidst all the comforts of the large towns of New
England, had passed, almost without any intermediate stage, from the
wealthy abode of their parents to a comfortless hovel in a forest.
Fever, solitude, and a tedious life had not broken the springs of their
courage. Their features were impaired and faded, but their looks were
firm: they appeared to be at once sad and resolute. I do not doubt that
these young American women had amassed, in the education of their
early years, that inward strength which they displayed under these
circumstances. The early culture of the girl may still therefore be
traced, in the United States, under the aspect of marriage: her part is
changed, her habits are different, but her character is the same.
Chapter XI: That The Equality Of
Conditions Contributes To The
Maintenance Of Good Morals In
America
Some philosophers and historians have said, or have hinted, that the
strictness of female morality was increased or diminished simply by
the distance of a country from the equator. This solution of the
difficulty was an easy one; and nothing was required but a globe and
a pair of compasses to settle in an instant one of the most difficult
problems in the condition of mankind. But I am not aware that this
principle of the materialists is supported by facts. The same nations
have been chaste or dissolute at different periods of their history; the
strictness or the laxity of their morals depended therefore on some
variable cause, not only on the natural qualities of their country,
which were invariable. I do not deny that in certain climates the
passions which are occasioned by the mutual attraction of the sexes
are peculiarly intense; but I am of opinion that this natural intensity
may always be excited or restrained by the condition of society and
by political institutions.
Although the travellers who have visited North America differ on a
great number of points, they all agree in remarking that morals are far
more strict there than elsewhere. It is evident that on this point the
Americans are very superior to their progenitors the English. A
superficial glance at the two nations will establish the fact. In
England, as in all other countries of Europe, public malice is
constantly attacking the frailties of women. Philosophers and
statesmen are heard to deplore that morals are not sufficiently strict,
and the literary productions of the country constantly lead one to
suppose so. In America all books, novels not excepted, suppose
women to be chaste, and no one thinks of relating affairs of gallantry.
No doubt this great regularity of American morals originates partly in
the country, in the race of the people, and in their religion: but all
these causes, which operate elsewhere, do not suffice to account for
it; recourse must be had to some special reason. This reason appears
to me to be the principle of equality and the institutions derived from
it. Equality of conditions does not of itself engender regularity of
morals, but it unquestionably facilitates and increases it. *a [Footnote
a: See Appendix T.]
Amongst aristocratic nations birth and fortune frequently make two
such different beings of man and woman, that they can never be
united to each other. Their passions draw them together, but the
condition of society, and the notions suggested by it, prevent them
from contracting a permanent and ostensible tie. The necessary
consequence is a great number of transient and clandestine
connections. Nature secretly avenges herself for the constraint
imposed upon her by the laws of man. This is not so much the case
when the equality of conditions has swept away all the imaginary, or
the real, barriers which separated man from woman. No girl then
believes that she cannot become the wife of the man who loves her;
and this renders all breaches of morality before marriage very
uncommon: for, whatever be the credulity of the passions, a woman
will hardly be able to persuade herself that she is beloved, when her
lover is perfectly free to marry her and does not.
The same cause operates, though more indirectly, on married life.
Nothing better serves to justify an illicit passion, either to the minds
of those who have conceived it or to the world which looks on, than
compulsory or accidental marriages. *b In a country in which a
woman is always free to exercise her power of choosing, and in
which education has prepared her to choose rightly, public opinion is
inexorable to her faults. The rigor of the Americans arises in part
from this cause. They consider marriages as a covenant which is often
onerous, but every condition of which the parties are strictly bound to
fulfil, because they knew all those conditions beforehand, and were
perfectly free not to have contracted them.
b [ The literature of Europe sufficiently corroborates
this remark. When a European author wishes to
depict in a work of imagination any of these great
catastrophes in matrimony which so frequently
occur amongst us, he takes care to bespeak the
compassion of the reader by bringing before him
ill-assorted or compulsory marriages. Although
habitual tolerance has long since relaxed our
morals, an author could hardly succeed in
interesting us in the misfortunes of his characters,
if he did not first palliate their faults. This artifice
seldom fails: the daily scenes we witness prepare
us long beforehand to be indulgent. But American
writers could never render these palliations
probable to their readers; their customs and laws
are opposed to it; and as they despair of rendering
levity of conduct pleasing, they cease to depict it.
This is one of the causes to which must be
attributed the small number of novels published in
the United States.]
The very circumstances which render matrimonial fidelity more
obligatory also render it more easy. In aristocratic countries the object
of marriage is rather to unite property than persons; hence the
husband is sometimes at school and the wife at nurse when they are
betrothed. It cannot be wondered at if the conjugal tie which holds the
fortunes of the pair united allows their hearts to rove; this is the
natural result of the nature of the contract. When, on the contrary, a
man always chooses a wife for himself, without any external coercion
or even guidance, it is generally a conformity of tastes and opinions
which brings a man and a woman together, and this same conformity
keeps and fixes them in close habits of intimacy.
Our forefathers had conceived a very strange notion on the subject
of marriage: as they had remarked that the small number of love-
matches which occurred in their time almost always turned out ill,
they resolutely inferred that it was exceedingly dangerous to listen to
the dictates of the heart on the subject. Accident appeared to them to
be a better guide than choice. Yet it was not very difficult to perceive
that the examples which they witnessed did in fact prove nothing at
all. For in the first place, if democratic nations leave a woman at
liberty to choose her husband, they take care to give her mind
sufficient knowledge, and her will sufficient strength, to make so
important a choice: whereas the young women who, amongst
aristocratic nations, furtively elope from the authority of their parents
to throw themselves of their own accord into the arms of men whom
they have had neither time to know, nor ability to judge of, are totally
without those securities. It is not surprising that they make a bad use
of their freedom of action the first time they avail themselves of it;
nor that they fall into such cruel mistakes, when, not having received
a democratic education, they choose to marry in conformity to
democratic customs. But this is not all. When a man and woman are
bent upon marriage in spite of the differences of an aristocratic state
of society, the difficulties to be overcome are enormous. Having
broken or relaxed the bonds of filial obedience, they have then to
emancipate themselves by a final effort from the sway of custom and
the tyranny of opinion; and when at length they have succeeded in
this arduous task, they stand estranged from their natural friends and
kinsmen: the prejudice they have crossed separates them from all, and
places them in a situation which soon breaks their courage and sours
their hearts. If, then, a couple married in this manner are first unhappy
and afterwards criminal, it ought not to be attributed to the freedom of
their choice, but rather to their living in a community in which this
freedom of choice is not admitted.
Moreover it should not be forgotten that the same effort which
makes a man violently shake off a prevailing error, commonly impels
him beyond the bounds of reason; that, to dare to declare war, in
however just a cause, against the opinion of one's age and country, a
violent and adventurous spirit is required, and that men of this
character seldom arrive at happiness or virtue, whatever be the path
they follow. And this, it may be observed by the way, is the reason
why in the most necessary and righteous revolutions, it is so rare to
meet with virtuous or moderate revolutionary characters. There is
then no just ground for surprise if a man, who in an age of aristocracy
chooses to consult nothing but his own opinion and his own taste in
the choice of a wife, soon finds that infractions of morality and
domestic wretchedness invade his household: but when this same line
of action is in the natural and ordinary course of things, when it is
sanctioned by parental authority and backed by public opinion, it
cannot be doubted that the internal peace of families will be increased
by it, and conjugal fidelity more rigidly observed.
Almost all men in democracies are engaged in public or
professional life; and on the other hand the limited extent of common
incomes obliges a wife to confine herself to the house, in order to
watch in person and very closely over the details of domestic
economy. All these distinct and compulsory occupations are so many
natural barriers, which, by keeping the two sexes asunder, render the
solicitations of the one less frequent and less ardent—the resistance
of the other more easy.
Not indeed that the equality of conditions can ever succeed in
making men chaste, but it may impart a less dangerous character to
their breaches of morality. As no one has then either sufficient time or
opportunity to assail a virtue armed in self-defence, there will be at
the same time a great number of courtesans and a great number of
virtuous women. This state of things causes lamentable cases of
individual hardship, but it does not prevent the body of society from
being strong and alert: it does not destroy family ties, or enervate the
morals of the nation. Society is endangered not by the great
profligacy of a few, but by laxity of morals amongst all. In the eyes of
a legislator, prostitution is less to be dreaded than intrigue.
The tumultuous and constantly harassed life which equality makes
men lead, not only distracts them from the passion of love, by
denying them time to indulge in it, but it diverts them from it by
another more secret but more certain road. All men who live in
democratic ages more or less contract the ways of thinking of the
manufacturing and trading classes; their minds take a serious,
deliberate, and positive turn; they are apt to relinquish the ideal, in
order to pursue some visible and proximate object, which appears to
be the natural and necessary aim of their desires. Thus the principle of
equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the
level of the earth. No men are less addicted to reverie than the
citizens of a democracy; and few of them are ever known to give way
to those idle and solitary meditations which commonly precede and
produce the great emotions of the heart. It is true they attach great
importance to procuring for themselves that sort of deep, regular, and
quiet affection which constitutes the charm and safeguard of life, but
they are not apt to run after those violent and capricious sources of
excitement which disturb and abridge it.
I am aware that all this is only applicable in its full extent to
America, and cannot at present be extended to Europe. In the course
of the last half-century, whilst laws and customs have impelled
several European nations with unexampled force towards democracy,
we have not had occasion to observe that the relations of man and
woman have become more orderly or more chaste. In some places the
very reverse may be detected: some classes are more strict—the
general morality of the people appears to be more lax. I do not
hesitate to make the remark, for I am as little disposed to flatter my
contemporaries as to malign them. This fact must distress, but it
ought not to surprise us. The propitious influence which a democratic
state of society may exercise upon orderly habits, is one of those
tendencies which can only be discovered after a time. If the equality
of conditions is favorable to purity of morals, the social commotion
by which conditions are rendered equal is adverse to it. In the last
fifty years, during which France has been undergoing this
transformation, that country has rarely had freedom, always
disturbance. Amidst this universal confusion of notions and this
general stir of opinions—amidst this incoherent mixture of the just
and unjust, of truth and falsehood, of right and might—public virtue
has become doubtful, and private morality wavering. But all
revolutions, whatever may have been their object or their agents, have
at first produced similar consequences; even those which have in the
end drawn the bonds of morality more tightly began by loosening
them. The violations of morality which the French frequently witness
do not appear to me to have a permanent character; and this is already
betokened by some curious signs of the times.
Nothing is more wretchedly corrupt than an aristocracy which
retains its wealth when it has lost its power, and which still enjoys a
vast deal of leisure after it is reduced to mere vulgar pastimes. The
energetic passions and great conceptions which animated it
heretofore, leave it then; and nothing remains to it but a host of petty
consuming vices, which cling about it like worms upon a carcass. No
one denies that the French aristocracy of the last century was
extremely dissolute; whereas established habits and ancient belief still
preserved some respect for morality amongst the other classes of
society. Nor will it be contested that at the present day the remnants
of that same aristocracy exhibit a certain severity of morals; whilst
laxity of morals appears to have spread amongst the middle and lower
ranks. So that the same families which were most profligate fifty
years ago are nowadays the most exemplary, and democracy seems
only to have strengthened the morality of the aristocratic classes. The
French Revolution, by dividing the fortunes of the nobility, by
forcing them to attend assiduously to their affairs and to their
families, by making them live under the same roof with their children,
and in short by giving a more rational and serious turn to their minds,
has imparted to them, almost without their being aware of it, a
reverence for religious belief, a love of order, of tranquil pleasures, of
domestic endearments, and of comfort; whereas the rest of the nation,
which had naturally these same tastes, was carried away into excesses
by the effort which was required to overthrow the laws and political
habits of the country. The old French aristocracy has undergone the
consequences of the Revolution, but it neither felt the revolutionary
passions nor shared in the anarchical excitement which produced that
crisis; it may easily be conceived that this aristocracy feels the
salutary influence of the Revolution in its manners, before those who
achieve it. It may therefore be said, though at first it seems
paradoxical, that, at the present day, the most anti-democratic classes
of the nation principally exhibit the kind of morality which may
reasonably be anticipated from democracy. I cannot but think that
when we shall have obtained all the effects of this democratic
Revolution, after having got rid of the tumult it has caused, the
observations which are now only applicable to the few will gradually
become true of the whole community.
Chapter XII: How The Americans
Understand The Equality Of The
Sexes
I Have shown how democracy destroys or modifies the different
inequalities which originate in society; but is this all? or does it not
ultimately affect that great inequality of man and woman which has
seemed, up to the present day, to be eternally based in human nature?
I believe that the social changes which bring nearer to the same level
the father and son, the master and servant, and superiors and inferiors
generally speaking, will raise woman and make her more and more
the equal of man. But here, more than ever, I feel the necessity of
making myself clearly understood; for there is no subject on which
the coarse and lawless fancies of our age have taken a freer range.
There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different
characteristics of the sexes, would make of man and woman beings
not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions,
impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights;
they would mix them in all things—their occupations, their pleasures,
their business. It may readily be conceived, that by thus attempting to
make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded; and from so
preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever
result but weak men and disorderly women. It is not thus that the
Americans understand that species of democratic equality which may
be established between the sexes. They admit, that as nature has
appointed such wide differences between the physical and moral
constitution of man and woman, her manifest design was to give a
distinct employment to their various faculties; and they hold that
improvement does not consist in making beings so dissimilar do
pretty nearly the same things, but in getting each of them to fulfil
their respective tasks in the best possible manner. The Americans
have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy
which governs the manufactures of our age, by carefully dividing the
duties of man from those of woman, in order that the great work of
society may be the better carried on.
In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to
trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes, and to
make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways which
are always different. American women never manage the outward
concerns of the family, or conduct a business, or take a part in
political life; nor are they, on the other hand, ever compelled to
perform the rough labor of the fields, or to make any of those
laborious exertions which demand the exertion of physical strength.
No families are so poor as to form an exception to this rule. If on the
one hand an American woman cannot escape from the quiet circle of
domestic employments, on the other hand she is never forced to go
beyond it. Hence it is that the women of America, who often exhibit a
masculine strength of understanding and a manly energy, generally
preserve great delicacy of personal appearance and always retain the
manners of women, although they sometimes show that they have the
hearts and minds of men.
Nor have the Americans ever supposed that one consequence of
democratic principles is the subversion of marital power, of the
confusion of the natural authorities in families. They hold that every
association must have a head in order to accomplish its object, and
that the natural head of the conjugal association is man. They do not
therefore deny him the right of directing his partner; and they
maintain, that in the smaller association of husband and wife, as well
as in the great social community, the object of democracy is to
regulate and legalize the powers which are necessary, not to subvert
all power. This opinion is not peculiar to one sex, and contested by
the other: I never observed that the women of America consider
conjugal authority as a fortunate usurpation of their rights, nor that
they thought themselves degraded by submitting to it. It appeared to
me, on the contrary, that they attach a sort of pride to the voluntary
surrender of their own will, and make it their boast to bend
themselves to the yoke, not to shake it off. Such at least is the feeling
expressed by the most virtuous of their sex; the others are silent; and
in the United States it is not the practice for a guilty wife to clamor
for the rights of women, whilst she is trampling on her holiest duties.
It has often been remarked that in Europe a certain degree of
contempt lurks even in the flattery which men lavish upon women:
although a European frequently affects to be the slave of woman, it
may be seen that he never sincerely thinks her his equal. In the United
States men seldom compliment women, but they daily show how
much they esteem them. They constantly display an entire confidence
in the understanding of a wife, and a profound respect for her
freedom; they have decided that her mind is just as fitted as that of a
man to discover the plain truth, and her heart as firm to embrace it;
and they have never sought to place her virtue, any more than his,
under the shelter of prejudice, ignorance, and fear. It would seem that
in Europe, where man so easily submits to the despotic sway of
women, they are nevertheless curtailed of some of the greatest
qualities of the human species, and considered as seductive but
imperfect beings; and (what may well provoke astonishment) women
ultimately look upon themselves in the same light, and almost
consider it as a privilege that they are entitled to show themselves
futile, feeble, and timid. The women of America claim no such
privileges.
Again, it may be said that in our morals we have reserved strange
immunities to man; so that there is, as it were, one virtue for his use,
and another for the guidance of his partner; and that, according to the
opinion of the public, the very same act may be punished alternately
as a crime or only as a fault. The Americans know not this iniquitous
division of duties and rights; amongst them the seducer is as much
dishonored as his victim. It is true that the Americans rarely lavish
upon women those eager attentions which are commonly paid them in
Europe; but their conduct to women always implies that they suppose
them to be virtuous and refined; and such is the respect entertained
for the moral freedom of the sex, that in the presence of a woman the
most guarded language is used, lest her ear should be offended by an
expression. In America a young unmarried woman may, alone and
without fear, undertake a long journey.
The legislators of the United States, who have mitigated almost all
the penalties of criminal law, still make rape a capital offence, and no
crime is visited with more inexorable severity by public opinion. This
may be accounted for; as the Americans can conceive nothing more
precious than a woman's honor, and nothing which ought so much to
be respected as her independence, they hold that no punishment is too
severe for the man who deprives her of them against her will. In
France, where the same offence is visited with far milder penalties, it
is frequently difficult to get a verdict from a jury against the prisoner.
Is this a consequence of contempt of decency or contempt of women?
I cannot but believe that it is a contempt of one and of the other.
Thus the Americans do not think that man and woman have either
the duty or the right to perform the same offices, but they show an
equal regard for both their respective parts; and though their lot is
different, they consider both of them as beings of equal value. They
do not give to the courage of woman the same form or the same
direction as to that of man; but they never doubt her courage: and if
they hold that man and his partner ought not always to exercise their
intellect and understanding in the same manner, they at least believe
the understanding of the one to be as sound as that of the other, and
her intellect to be as clear. Thus, then, whilst they have allowed the
social inferiority of woman to subsist, they have done all they could
to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man; and in this
respect they appear to me to have excellently understood the true
principle of democratic improvement. As for myself, I do not hesitate
to avow that, although the women of the United States are confined
within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in
some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen
woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, now that I
am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so
many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular
prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be
attributed, I should reply—to the superiority of their women.
Chapter XIII: That The Principle
Of Equality Naturally Divides The
Americans Into A Number Of
Small Private Circles
It may probably be supposed that the final consequence and
necessary effect of democratic institutions is to confound together all
the members of the community in private as well as in public life, and
to compel them all to live in common; but this would be to ascribe a
very coarse and oppressive form to the equality which originates in
democracy. No state of society or laws can render men so much alike,
but that education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some differences
between them; and, though different men may sometimes find it their
interest to combine for the same purposes, they will never make it
their pleasure. They will therefore always tend to evade the
provisions of legislation, whatever they may be; and departing in
some one respect from the circle within which they were to be
bounded, they will set up, close by the great political community,
small private circles, united together by the similitude of their
conditions, habits, and manners.
In the United States the citizens have no sort of pre-eminence over
each other; they owe each other no mutual obedience or respect; they
all meet for the administration of justice, for the government of the
State, and in general to treat of the affairs which concern their
common welfare; but I never heard that attempts have been made to
bring them all to follow the same diversions, or to amuse themselves
promiscuously in the same places of recreation. The Americans, who
mingle so readily in their political assemblies and courts of justice,
are wont on the contrary carefully to separate into small distinct
circles, in order to indulge by themselves in the enjoyments of private
life. Each of them is willing to acknowledge all his fellow-citizens as
his equals, but he will only receive a very limited number of them
amongst his friends or his guests. This appears to me to be very
natural. In proportion as the circle of public society is extended, it
may be anticipated that the sphere of private intercourse will be
contracted; far from supposing that the members of modern society
will ultimately live in common, I am afraid that they may end by
forming nothing but small coteries.
Amongst aristocratic nations the different classes are like vast
chambers, out of which it is impossible to get, into which it is
impossible to enter. These classes have no communication with each
other, but within their pale men necessarily live in daily contact; even
though they would not naturally suit, the general conformity of a
similar condition brings them nearer together. But when neither law
nor custom professes to establish frequent and habitual relations
between certain men, their intercourse originates in the accidental
analogy of opinions and tastes; hence private society is infinitely
varied. In democracies, where the members of the community never
differ much from each other, and naturally stand in such propinquity
that they may all at any time be confounded in one general mass,
numerous artificial and arbitrary distinctions spring up, by means of
which every man hopes to keep himself aloof, lest he should be
carried away in the crowd against his will. This can never fail to be
the case; for human institutions may be changed, but not man:
whatever may be the general endeavor of a community to render its
members equal and alike, the personal pride of individuals will
always seek to rise above the line, and to form somewhere an
inequality to their own advantage.
In aristocracies men are separated from each other by lofty
stationary barriers; in democracies they are divided by a number of
small and almost invisible threads, which are constantly broken or
moved from place to place. Thus, whatever may be the progress of
equality, in democratic nations a great number of small private
communities will always be formed within the general pale of
political society; but none of them will bear any resemblance in its
manners to the highest class in aristocracies.
Chapter XIV: Some Reflections On
American Manners
Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of
human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store:
they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has
not their own manners. The influence of the social and political state
of a country upon manners is therefore deserving of serious
examination. Manners are, generally, the product of the very basis of
the character of a people, but they are also sometimes the result of an
arbitrary convention between certain men; thus they are at once
natural and acquired. When certain men perceive that they are the
foremost persons in society, without contestation and without effort—
when they are constantly engaged on large objects, leaving the more
minute details to others—and when they live in the enjoyment of
wealth which they did not amass and which they do not fear to lose, it
may be supposed that they feel a kind of haughty disdain of the petty
interests and practical cares of life, and that their thoughts assume a
natural greatness, which their language and their manners denote. In
democratic countries manners are generally devoid of dignity,
because private life is there extremely petty in its character; and they
are frequently low, because the mind has few opportunities of rising
above the engrossing cares of domestic interests. True dignity in
manners consists in always taking one's proper station, neither too
high nor too low; and this is as much within the reach of a peasant as
of a prince. In democracies all stations appear doubtful; hence it is
that the manners of democracies, though often full of arrogance, are
commonly wanting in dignity, and, moreover, they are never either
well disciplined or accomplished.
The men who live in democracies are too fluctuating for a certain
number of them ever to succeed in laying down a code of good
breeding, and in forcing people to follow it. Every man therefore
behaves after his own fashion, and there is always a certain
incoherence in the manners of such times, because they are moulded
upon the feelings and notions of each individual, rather than upon an
ideal model proposed for general imitation. This, however, is much
more perceptible at the time when an aristocracy has just been
overthrown than after it has long been destroyed. New political
institutions and new social elements then bring to the same places of
resort, and frequently compel to live in common, men whose
education and habits are still amazingly dissimilar, and this renders
the motley composition of society peculiarly visible. The existence of
a former strict code of good breeding is still remembered, but what it
contained or where it is to be found is already forgotten. Men have
lost the common law of manners, and they have not yet made up their
minds to do without it; but everyone endeavors to make to himself
some sort of arbitrary and variable rule, from the remnant of former
usages; so that manners have neither the regularity and the dignity
which they often display amongst aristocratic nations, nor the
simplicity and freedom which they sometimes assume in
democracies; they are at once constrained and without constraint.
This, however, is not the normal state of things. When the equality
of conditions is long established and complete, as all men entertain
nearly the same notions and do nearly the same things, they do not
require to agree or to copy from one another in order to speak or act
in the same manner: their manners are constantly characterized by a
number of lesser diversities, but not by any great differences. They
are never perfectly alike, because they do not copy from the same
pattern; they are never very unlike, because their social condition is
the same. At first sight a traveller would observe that the manners of
all the Americans are exactly similar; it is only upon close
examination that the peculiarities in which they differ may be
detected.
The English make game of the manners of the Americans; but it is
singular that most of the writers who have drawn these ludicrous
delineations belonged themselves to the middle classes in England, to
whom the same delineations are exceedingly applicable: so that these
pitiless censors for the most part furnish an example of the very thing
they blame in the United States; they do not perceive that they are
deriding themselves, to the great amusement of the aristocracy of
their own country.
Nothing is more prejudicial to democracy than its outward forms of
behavior: many men would willingly endure its vices, who cannot
support its manners. I cannot, however, admit that there is nothing
commendable in the manners of a democratic people. Amongst
aristocratic nations, all who live within reach of the first class in
society commonly strain to be like it, which gives rise to ridiculous
and insipid imitations. As a democratic people does not possess any
models of high breeding, at least it escapes the daily necessity of
seeing wretched copies of them. In democracies manners are never so
refined as amongst aristocratic nations, but on the other hand they are
never so coarse. Neither the coarse oaths of the populace, nor the
elegant and choice expressions of the nobility are to be heard there:
the manners of such a people are often vulgar, but they are neither
brutal nor mean. I have already observed that in democracies no such
thing as a regular code of good breeding can be laid down; this has
some inconveniences and some advantages. In aristocracies the rules
of propriety impose the same demeanor on everyone; they make all
the members of the same class appear alike, in spite of their private
inclinations; they adorn and they conceal the natural man. Amongst a
democratic people manners are neither so tutored nor so uniform, but
they are frequently more sincere. They form, as it were, a light and
loosely woven veil, through which the real feelings and private
opinions of each individual are easily discernible. The form and the
substance of human actions often, therefore, stand in closer relation;
and if the great picture of human life be less embellished, it is more
true. Thus it may be said, in one sense, that the effect of democracy is
not exactly to give men any particular manners, but to prevent them
from having manners at all.
The feelings, the passions, the virtues, and the vices of an
aristocracy may sometimes reappear in a democracy, but not its
manners; they are lost, and vanish forever, as soon as the democratic
revolution is completed. It would seem that nothing is more lasting
than the manners of an aristocratic class, for they are preserved by
that class for some time after it has lost its wealth and its power—nor
so fleeting, for no sooner have they disappeared than not a trace of
them is to be found; and it is scarcely possible to say what they have
been as soon as they have ceased to be. A change in the state of
society works this miracle, and a few generations suffice to
consummate it. The principal characteristics of aristocracy are handed
down by history after an aristocracy is destroyed, but the light and
exquisite touches of manners are effaced from men's memories
almost immediately after its fall. Men can no longer conceive what
these manners were when they have ceased to witness them; they are
gone, and their departure was unseen, unfelt; for in order to feel that
refined enjoyment which is derived from choice and distinguished
manners, habit and education must have prepared the heart, and the
taste for them is lost almost as easily as the practice of them. Thus not
only a democratic people cannot have aristocratic manners, but they
neither comprehend nor desire them; and as they never have thought
of them, it is to their minds as if such things had never been. Too
much importance should not be attached to this loss, but it may well
be regretted.
I am aware that it has not unfrequently happened that the same men
have had very high-bred manners and very low-born feelings: the
interior of courts has sufficiently shown what imposing externals may
conceal the meanest hearts. But though the manners of aristocracy did
not constitute virtue, they sometimes embellish virtue itself. It was no
ordinary sight to see a numerous and powerful class of men, whose
every outward action seemed constantly to be dictated by a natural
elevation of thought and feeling, by delicacy and regularity of taste,
and by urbanity of manners. Those manners threw a pleasing illusory
charm over human nature; and though the picture was often a false
one, it could not be viewed without a noble satisfaction.
Chapter XV: Of The Gravity Of
The Americans, And Why It Does
Not Prevent Them From Often
Committing Inconsiderate Actions
Men who live in democratic countries do not value the simple,
turbulent, or coarse diversions in which the people indulge in
aristocratic communities: such diversions are thought by them to be
puerile or insipid. Nor have they a greater inclination for the
intellectual and refined amusements of the aristocratic classes. They
want something productive and substantial in their pleasures; they
want to mix actual fruition with their joy. In aristocratic communities
the people readily give themselves up to bursts of tumultuous and
boisterous gayety, which shake off at once the recollection of their
privations: the natives of democracies are not fond of being thus
violently broken in upon, and they never lose sight of their own
selves without regret. They prefer to these frivolous delights those
more serious and silent amusements which are like business, and
which do not drive business wholly from their minds. An American,
instead of going in a leisure hour to dance merrily at some place of
public resort, as the fellows of his calling continue to do throughout
the greater part of Europe, shuts himself up at home to drink. He thus
enjoys two pleasures; he can go on thinking of his business, and he
can get drunk decently by his own fireside.
I thought that the English constituted the most serious nation on the
face of the earth, but I have since seen the Americans and have
changed my opinion. I do not mean to say that temperament has not a
great deal to do with the character of the inhabitants of the United
States, but I think that their political institutions are a still more
influential cause. I believe the seriousness of the Americans arises
partly from their pride. In democratic countries even poor men
entertain a lofty notion of their personal importance: they look upon
themselves with complacency, and are apt to suppose that others are
looking at them, too. With this disposition they watch their language
and their actions with care, and do not lay themselves open so as to
betray their deficiencies; to preserve their dignity they think it
necessary to retain their gravity.
But I detect another more deep-seated and powerful cause which
instinctively produces amongst the Americans this astonishing
gravity. Under a despotism communities give way at times to bursts
of vehement joy; but they are generally gloomy and moody, because
they are afraid. Under absolute monarchies tempered by the customs
and manners of the country, their spirits are often cheerful and even,
because as they have some freedom and a good deal of security, they
are exempted from the most important cares of life; but all free
peoples are serious, because their minds are habitually absorbed by
the contemplation of some dangerous or difficult purpose. This is
more especially the case amongst those free nations which form
democratic communities. Then there are in all classes a very large
number of men constantly occupied with the serious affairs of the
government; and those whose thoughts are not engaged in the
direction of the commonwealth are wholly engrossed by the
acquisition of a private fortune. Amongst such a people a serious
demeanor ceases to be peculiar to certain men, and becomes a habit
of the nation.
We are told of small democracies in the days of antiquity, in which
the citizens met upon the public places with garlands of roses, and
spent almost all their time in dancing and theatrical amusements. I do
not believe in such republics any more than in that of Plato; or, if the
things we read of really happened, I do not hesitate to affirm that
these supposed democracies were composed of very different
elements from ours, and that they had nothing in common with the
latter except their name. But it must not be supposed that, in the midst
of all their toils, the people who live in democracies think themselves
to be pitied; the contrary is remarked to be the case. No men are
fonder of their own condition. Life would have no relish for them if
they were delivered from the anxieties which harass them, and they
show more attachment to their cares than aristocratic nations to their
pleasures.
I am next led to inquire how it is that these same democratic
nations, which are so serious, sometimes act in so inconsiderate a
manner. The Americans, who almost always preserve a staid
demeanor and a frigid air, nevertheless frequently allow themselves
to be borne away, far beyond the bound of reason, by a sudden
passion or a hasty opinion, and they sometimes gravely commit
strange absurdities. This contrast ought not to surprise us. There is
one sort of ignorance which originates in extreme publicity. In
despotic States men know not how to act, because they are told
nothing; in democratic nations they often act at random, because
nothing is to be left untold. The former do not know—the latter
forget; and the chief features of each picture are lost to them in a
bewilderment of details.
It is astonishing what imprudent language a public man may
sometimes use in free countries, and especially in democratic States,
without being compromised; whereas in absolute monarchies a few
words dropped by accident are enough to unmask him forever, and
ruin him without hope of redemption. This is explained by what goes
before. When a man speaks in the midst of a great crowd, many of his
words are not heard, or are forthwith obliterated from the memories
of those who hear them; but amidst the silence of a mute and
motionless throng the slightest whisper strikes the ear.
In democracies men are never stationary; a thousand chances waft
them to and fro, and their life is always the sport of unforeseen or (so
to speak) extemporaneous circumstances. Thus they are often obliged
to do things which they have imperfectly learned, to say things they
imperfectly understand, and to devote themselves to work for which
they are unprepared by long apprenticeship. In aristocracies every
man has one sole object which he unceasingly pursues, but amongst
democratic nations the existence of man is more complex; the same
mind will almost always embrace several objects at the same time,
and these objects are frequently wholly foreign to each other: as it
cannot know them all well, the mind is readily satisfied with
imperfect notions of each.
When the inhabitant of democracies is not urged by his wants, he is
so at least by his desires; for of all the possessions which he sees
around him, none are wholly beyond his reach. He therefore does
everything in a hurry, he is always satisfied with "pretty well," and
never pauses more than an instant to consider what he has been doing.
His curiosity is at once insatiable and cheaply satisfied; for he cares
more to know a great deal quickly than to know anything well: he has
no time and but little taste to search things to the bottom. Thus then
democratic peoples are grave, because their social and political
condition constantly leads them to engage in serious occupations; and
they act inconsiderately, because they give but little time and
attention to each of these occupations. The habit of inattention must
be considered as the greatest bane of the democratic character.
Chapter XVI: Why The National
Vanity Of The Americans Is More
Restless And Captious Than That
Of The English
All free nations are vainglorious, but national pride is not displayed
by all in the same manner. The Americans in their intercourse with
strangers appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of
praise. The most slender eulogium is acceptable to them; the most
exalted seldom contents them; they unceasingly harass you to extort
praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising
themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they
wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes. Their vanity
is not only greedy, but restless and jealous; it will grant nothing,
whilst it demands everything, but is ready to beg and to quarrel at the
same time. If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a
fine one, "Ay," he replies, "there is not its fellow in the world." If I
applaud the freedom which its inhabitants enjoy, he answers,
"Freedom is a fine thing, but few nations are worthy to enjoy it." If I
remark the purity of morals which distinguishes the United States, "I
can imagine," says he, "that a stranger, who has been struck by the
corruption of all other nations, is astonished at the difference." At
length I leave him to the contemplation of himself; but he returns to
the charge, and does not desist till he has got me to repeat all I had
just been saying. It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or
more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to
respect it. *a
a [ See Appendix U.]
Such is not the case with the English. An Englishman calmly
enjoys the real or imaginary advantages which in his opinion his
country possesses. If he grants nothing to other nations, neither does
he solicit anything for his own. The censure of foreigners does not
affect him, and their praise hardly flatters him; his position with
regard to the rest of the world is one of disdainful and ignorant
reserve: his pride requires no sustenance, it nourishes itself. It is
remarkable that two nations, so recently sprung from the same stock,
should be so opposite to one another in their manner of feeling and
conversing.
In aristocratic countries the great possess immense privileges, upon
which their pride rests, without seeking to rely upon the lesser
advantages which accrue to them. As these privileges came to them
by inheritance, they regard them in some sort as a portion of
themselves, or at least as a natural right inherent in their own persons.
They therefore entertain a calm sense of their superiority; they do not
dream of vaunting privileges which everyone perceives and no one
contests, and these things are not sufficiently new to them to be made
topics of conversation. They stand unmoved in their solitary
greatness, well assured that they are seen of all the world without any
effort to show themselves off, and that no one will attempt to drive
them from that position. When an aristocracy carries on the public
affairs, its national pride naturally assumes this reserved, indifferent,
and haughty form, which is imitated by all the other classes of the
nation.
When, on the contrary, social conditions differ but little, the
slightest privileges are of some importance; as every man sees around
himself a million of people enjoying precisely similar or analogous
advantages, his pride becomes craving and jealous, he clings to mere
trifles, and doggedly defends them. In democracies, as the conditions
of life are very fluctuating, men have almost always recently acquired
the advantages which they possess; the consequence is that they feel
extreme pleasure in exhibiting them, to show others and convince
themselves that they really enjoy them. As at any instant these same
advantages may be lost, their possessors are constantly on the alert,
and make a point of showing that they still retain them. Men living in
democracies love their country just as they love themselves, and they
transfer the habits of their private vanity to their vanity as a nation.
The restless and insatiable vanity of a democratic people originates so
entirely in the equality and precariousness of social conditions, that
the members of the haughtiest nobility display the very same passion
in those lesser portions of their existence in which there is anything
fluctuating or contested. An aristocratic class always differs greatly
from the other classes of the nation, by the extent and perpetuity of its
privileges; but it often happens that the only differences between the
members who belong to it consist in small transient advantages,
which may any day be lost or acquired. The members of a powerful
aristocracy, collected in a capital or a court, have been known to
contest with virulence those frivolous privileges which depend on the
caprice of fashion or the will of their master. These persons then
displayed towards each other precisely the same puerile jealousies
which animate the men of democracies, the same eagerness to snatch
the smallest advantages which their equals contested, and the same
desire to parade ostentatiously those of which they were in
possession. If national pride ever entered into the minds of courtiers, I
do not question that they would display it in the same manner as the
members of a democratic community.
Chapter XVII: That The Aspect Of
Society In The United States Is At
Once Excited And Monotonous
It would seem that nothing can be more adapted to stimulate and to
feed curiosity than the aspect of the United States. Fortunes, opinions,
and laws are there in ceaseless variation: it is as if immutable nature
herself were mutable, such are the changes worked upon her by the
hand of man. Yet in the end the sight of this excited community
becomes monotonous, and after having watched the moving pageant
for a time the spectator is tired of it. Amongst aristocratic nations
every man is pretty nearly stationary in his own sphere; but men are
astonishingly unlike each other—their passions, their notions, their
habits, and their tastes are essentially different: nothing changey, but
everything differs. In democracies, on the contrary, all men are alike
and do things pretty nearly alike. It is true that they are subject to
great and frequent vicissitudes; but as the same events of good or
adverse fortune are continually recurring, the name of the actors only
is changed, the piece is always the same. The aspect of American
society is animated, because men and things are always changing; but
it is monotonous, because all these changes are alike.
Men living in democratic ages have many passions, but most of
their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed from it. The
cause of this is, not that their souls are narrower, but that the
importance of money is really greater at such times. When all the
members of a community are independent of or indifferent to each
other, the co-operation of each of them can only be obtained by
paying for it: this infinitely multiplies the purposes to which wealth
may be applied, and increases its value. When the reverence which
belonged to what is old has vanished, birth, condition, and profession
no longer distinguish men, or scarcely distinguish them at all: hardly
anything but money remains to create strongly marked differences
between them, and to raise some of them above the common level.
The distinction originating in wealth is increased by the
disappearance and diminution of all other distinctions. Amongst
aristocratic nations money only reaches to a few points on the vast
circle of man's desires—in democracies it seems to lead to all. The
love of wealth is therefore to be traced, either as a principal or an
accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do: this
gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness, and soon renders
the survey of them exceedingly wearisome. This perpetual recurrence
of the same passion is monotonous; the peculiar methods by which
this passion seeks its own gratification are no less so.
In an orderly and constituted democracy like the United States,
where men cannot enrich themselves by war, by public office, or by
political confiscation, the love of wealth mainly drives them into
business and manufactures. Although these pursuits often bring about
great commotions and disasters, they cannot prosper without strictly
regular habits and a long routine of petty uniform acts. The stronger
the passion is, the more regular are these habits, and the more
uniform are these acts. It may be said that it is the vehemence of their
desires which makes the Americans so methodical; it perturbs their
minds, but it disciplines their lives.
The remark I here apply to America may indeed be addressed to
almost all our contemporaries. Variety is disappearing from the
human race; the same ways of acting, thinking, and feeling are to be
met with all over the world. This is not only because nations work
more upon each other, and are more faithful in their mutual imitation;
but as the men of each country relinquish more and more the peculiar
opinions and feelings of a caste, a profession, or a family, they
simultaneously arrive at something nearer to the constitution of man,
which is everywhere the same. Thus they become more alike, even
without having imitated each other. Like travellers scattered about
some large wood, which is intersected by paths converging to one
point, if all of them keep, their eyes fixed upon that point and advance
towards it, they insensibly draw nearer together—though they seek
not, though they see not, though they know not each other; and they
will be surprised at length to find themselves all collected on the
same spot. All the nations which take, not any particular man, but
man himself, as the object of their researches and their imitations, are
tending in the end to a similar state of society, like these travellers
converging to the central plot of the forest.
Chapter XVIII: Of Honor In The
United States And In Democratic
Communities
It would seem that men employ two very distinct methods in the
public estimation *a of the actions of their fellowmen; at one time
they judge them by those simple notions of right and wrong which are
diffused all over the world; at another they refer their decision to a
few very special notions which belong exclusively to some particular
age and country. It often happens that these two rules differ; they
sometimes conflict: but they are never either entirely identified or
entirely annulled by one another. Honor, at the periods of its greatest
power, sways the will more than the belief of men; and even whilst
they yield without hesitation and without a murmur to its dictates,
they feel notwithstanding, by a dim but mighty instinct, the existence
of a more general, more ancient, and more holy law, which they
sometimes disobey although they cease not to acknowledge it. Some
actions have been held to be at the same time virtuous and
dishonorable—a refusal to fight a duel is a case in point.
a [ The word "honor" is not always used in the same
sense either in French or English. I. It first
signifies the dignity, glory, or reverence which a
man receives from his kind; and in this sense a
man is said to acquire honor. 2. Honor signifies
the aggregate of those rules by the assistance of
which this dignity, glory, or reverence is obtained.
Thus we say that a man has always strictly obeyed
the laws of honor; or a man has violated his honor.
In this chapter the word is always used in the latter
sense.]
I think these peculiarities may be otherwise explained than by the
mere caprices of certain individuals and nations, as has hitherto been
the customary mode of reasoning on the subject. Mankind is subject
to general and lasting wants that have engendered moral laws, to the
neglect of which men have ever and in all places attached the notion
of censure and shame: to infringe them was "to do ill"—"to do well"
was to conform to them. Within the bosom of this vast association of
the human race, lesser associations have been formed which are
called nations; and amidst these nations further subdivisions have
assumed the names of classes or castes. Each of these associations
forms, as it were, a separate species of the human race; and though it
has no essential difference from the mass of mankind, to a certain
extent it stands apart and has certain wants peculiar to itself. To these
special wants must be attributed the modifications which affect in
various degrees and in different countries the mode of considering
human actions, and the estimate which ought to be formed of them. It
is the general and permanent interest of mankind that men should not
kill each other: but it may happen to be the peculiar and temporary
interest of a people or a class to justify, or even to honor, homicide.
Honor is simply that peculiar rule, founded upon a peculiar state of
society, by the application of which a people or a class allot praise or
blame. Nothing is more unproductive to the mind than an abstract
idea; I therefore hasten to call in the aid of facts and examples to
illustrate my meaning.
I select the most extraordinary kind of honor which was ever
known in the world, and that which we are best acquainted with, viz.,
aristocratic honor springing out of feudal society. I shall explain it by
means of the principle already laid down, and I shall explain the
principle by means of the illustration. I am not here led to inquire
when and how the aristocracy of the Middle Ages came into
existence, why it was so deeply severed from the remainder of the
nation, or what founded and consolidated its power. I take its
existence as an established fact, and I am endeavoring to account for
the peculiar view which it took of the greater part of human actions.
The first thing that strikes me is, that in the feudal world actions were
not always praised or blamed with reference to their intrinsic worth,
but that they were sometimes appreciated exclusively with reference
to the person who was the actor or the object of them, which is
repugnant to the general conscience of mankind. Thus some of the
actions which were indifferent on the part of a man in humble life,
dishonored a noble; others changed their whole character according
as the person aggrieved by them belonged or did not belong to the
aristocracy. When these different notions first arose, the nobility
formed a distinct body amidst the people, which it commanded from
the inaccessible heights where it was ensconced. To maintain this
peculiar position, which constituted its strength, it not only required
political privileges, but it required a standard of right and wrong for
its own especial use. That some particular virtue or vice belonged to
the nobility rather than to the humble classes—that certain actions
were guiltless when they affected the villain, which were criminal
when they touched the noble—these were often arbitrary matters; but
that honor or shame should be attached to a man's actions according
to his condition, was a result of the internal constitution of an
aristocratic community. This has been actually the case in all the
countries which have had an aristocracy; as long as a trace of the
principle remains, these peculiarities will still exist; to debauch a
woman of color scarcely injures the reputation of an American—to
marry her dishonors him.
In some cases feudal honor enjoined revenge, and stigmatized the
forgiveness of insults; in others it imperiously commanded men to
conquer their own passions, and imposed forgetfulness of self. It did
not make humanity or kindness its law, but it extolled generosity; it
set more store on liberality than on benevolence; it allowed men to
enrich themselves by gambling or by war, but not by labor; it
preferred great crimes to small earnings; cupidity was less distasteful
to it than avarice; violence it often sanctioned, but cunning and
treachery it invariably reprobated as contemptible. These fantastical
notions did not proceed exclusively from the caprices of those who
entertained them. A class which has succeeded in placing itself at the
head of and above all others, and which makes perpetual exertions to
maintain this lofty position, must especially honor those virtues
which are conspicuous for their dignity and splendor, and which may
be easily combined with pride and the love of power. Such men
would not hesitate to invert the natural order of the conscience in
order to give those virtues precedence before all others. It may even
be conceived that some of the more bold and brilliant vices would
readily be set above the quiet, unpretending virtues. The very
existence of such a class in society renders these things unavoidable.
The nobles of the Middle Ages placed military courage foremost
amongst virtues, and in lieu of many of them. This was again a
peculiar opinion which arose necessarily from the peculiarity of the
state of society. Feudal aristocracy existed by war and for war; its
power had been founded by arms, and by arms that power was
maintained; it therefore required nothing more than military courage,
and that quality was naturally exalted above all others; whatever
denoted it, even at the expense of reason and humanity, was therefore
approved and frequently enjoined by the manners of the time. Such
was the main principle; the caprice of man was only to be traced in
minuter details. That a man should regard a tap on the cheek as an
unbearable insult, and should be obliged to kill in single combat the
person who struck him thus lightly, is an arbitrary rule; but that a
noble could not tranquilly receive an insult, and was dishonored if he
allowed himself to take a blow without fighting, were direct
consequences of the fundamental principles and the wants of military
aristocracy.
Thus it was true to a certain extent to assert that the laws of honor
were capricious; but these caprices of honor were always confined
within certain necessary limits. The peculiar rule, which was called
honor by our forefathers, is so far from being an arbitrary law in my
eyes, that I would readily engage to ascribe its most incoherent and
fantastical injunctions to a small number of fixed and invariable
wants inherent in feudal society.
If I were to trace the notion of feudal honor into the domain of
politics, I should not find it more difficult to explain its dictates. The
state of society and the political institutions of the Middle Ages were
such, that the supreme power of the nation never governed the
community directly. That power did not exist in the eyes of the
people: every man looked up to a certain individual whom he was
bound to obey; by that intermediate personage he was connected with
all the others. Thus in feudal society the whole system of the
commonwealth rested upon the sentiment of fidelity to the person of
the lord: to destroy that sentiment was to open the sluices of anarchy.
Fidelity to a political superior was, moreover, a sentiment of which
all the members of the aristocracy had constant opportunities of
estimating the importance; for every one of them was a vassal as well
as a lord, and had to command as well as to obey. To remain faithful
to the lord, to sacrifice one's self for him if called upon, to share his
good or evil fortunes, to stand by him in his undertakings whatever
they might be—such were the first injunctions of feudal honor in
relation to the political institutions of those times. The treachery of a
vassal was branded with extraordinary severity by public opinion, and
a name of peculiar infamy was invented for the offence which was
called "felony."
On the contrary, few traces are to be found in the Middle Ages of
the passion which constituted the life of the nations of antiquity—I
mean patriotism; the word itself is not of very ancient date in the
language. *b Feudal institutions concealed the country at large from
men's sight, and rendered the love of it less necessary. The nation was
forgotten in the passions which attached men to persons. Hence it was
no part of the strict law of feudal honor to remain faithful to one's
country. Not indeed that the love of their country did not exist in the
hearts of our forefathers; but it constituted a dim and feeble instinct,
which has grown more clear and strong in proportion as aristocratic
classes have been abolished, and the supreme power of the nation
centralized. This may be clearly seen from the contrary judgments
which European nations have passed upon the various events of their
histories, according to the generations by which such judgments have
been formed. The circumstance which most dishonored the Constable
de Bourbon in the eyes of his contemporaries was that he bore arms
against his king: that which most dishonors him in our eyes, is that he
made war against his country; we brand him as deeply as our
forefathers did, but for different reasons.
b [ Even the word "patrie" was not used by the
French writers until the sixteenth century.]
I have chosen the honor of feudal times by way of illustration of
my meaning, because its characteristics are more distinctly marked
and more familiar to us than those of any other period; but I might
have taken an example elsewhere, and I should have reached the
same conclusion by a different road. Although we are less perfectly
acquainted with the Romans than with our own ancestors, yet we
know that certain peculiar notions of glory and disgrace obtained
amongst them, which were not solely derived from the general
principles of right and wrong. Many human actions were judged
differently, according as they affected a Roman citizen or a stranger,
a freeman or a slave; certain vices were blazoned abroad, certain
virtues were extolled above all others. "In that age," says Plutarch in
the life of Coriolanus, "martial prowess was more honored and prized
in Rome than all the other virtues, insomuch that it was called virtus,
the name of virtue itself, by applying the name of the kind to this
particular species; so that virtue in Latin was as much as to say
valor." Can anyone fail to recognize the peculiar want of that singular
community which was formed for the conquest of the world?
Any nation would furnish us with similar grounds of observation;
for, as I have already remarked, whenever men collect together as a
distinct community, the notion of honor instantly grows up amongst
them; that is to say, a system of opinions peculiar to themselves as to
what is blamable or commendable; and these peculiar rules always
originate in the special habits and special interests of the community.
This is applicable to a certain extent to democratic communities as
well as to others, as we shall now proceed to prove by the example of
the Americans. *c Some loose notions of the old aristocratic honor of
Europe are still to be found scattered amongst the opinions of the
Americans; but these traditional opinions are few in number, they
have but little root in the country, and but little power. They are like a
religion which has still some temples left standing, though men have
ceased to believe in it. But amidst these half-obliterated notions of
exotic honor, some new opinions have sprung up, which constitute
what may be termed in our days American honor. I have shown how
the Americans are constantly driven to engage in commerce and
industry. Their origin, their social condition, their political
institutions, and even the spot they inhabit, urge them irresistibly in
this direction. Their present condition is then that of an almost
exclusively manufacturing and commercial association, placed in the
midst of a new and boundless country, which their principal object is
to explore for purposes of profit. This is the characteristic which most
peculiarly distinguishes the American people from all others at the
present time. All those quiet virtues which tend to give a regular
movement to the community, and to encourage business, will
therefore be held in peculiar honor by that people, and to neglect
those virtues will be to incur public contempt. All the more turbulent
virtues, which often dazzle, but more frequently disturb society, will
on the contrary occupy a subordinate rank in the estimation of this
same people: they may be neglected without forfeiting the esteem of
the community—to acquire them would perhaps be to run a risk of
losing it.
c [ I speak here of the Americans inhabiting those
States where slavery does not exist; they alone can
be said to present a complete picture of
democratic society.]
The Americans make a no less arbitrary classification of men's
vices. There are certain propensities which appear censurable to the
general reason and the universal conscience of mankind, but which
happen to agree with the peculiar and temporary wants of the
American community: these propensities are lightly reproved,
sometimes even encouraged; for instance, the love of wealth and the
secondary propensities connected with it may be more particularly
cited. To clear, to till, and to transform the vast uninhabited continent
which is his domain, the American requires the daily support of an
energetic passion; that passion can only be the love of wealth; the
passion for wealth is therefore not reprobated in America, and
provided it does not go beyond the bounds assigned to it for public
security, it is held in honor. The American lauds as a noble and
praiseworthy ambition what our own forefathers in the Middle Ages
stigmatized as servile cupidity, just as he treats as a blind and
barbarous frenzy that ardor of conquest and martial temper which
bore them to battle. In the United States fortunes are lost and regained
without difficulty; the country is boundless, and its resources
inexhaustible. The people have all the wants and cravings of a
growing creature; and whatever be their efforts, they are always
surrounded by more than they can appropriate. It is not the ruin of a
few individuals which may be soon repaired, but the inactivity and
sloth of the community at large which would be fatal to such a
people. Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid
progress, its strength, and its greatness. Commercial business is there
like a vast lottery, by which a small number of men continually lose,
but the State is always a gainer; such a people ought therefore to
encourage and do honor to boldness in commercial speculations. But
any bold speculation risks the fortune of the speculator and of all
those who put their trust in him. The Americans, who make a virtue
of commercial temerity, have no right in any case to brand with
disgrace those who practise it. Hence arises the strange indulgence
which is shown to bankrupts in the United States; their honor does
not suffer by such an accident. In this respect the Americans differ,
not only from the nations of Europe, but from all the commercial
nations of our time, and accordingly they resemble none of them in
their position or their wants.
In America all those vices which tend to impair the purity of
morals, and to destroy the conjugal tie, are treated with a degree of
severity which is unknown in the rest of the world. At first sight this
seems strangely at variance with the tolerance shown there on other
subjects, and one is surprised to meet with a morality so relaxed and
so austere amongst the selfsame people. But these things are less
incoherent than they seem to be. Public opinion in the United States
very gently represses that love of wealth which promotes the
commercial greatness and the prosperity of the nation, and it
especially condemns that laxity of morals which diverts the human
mind from the pursuit of well-being, and disturbs the internal order of
domestic life which is so necessary to success in business. To earn the
esteem of their countrymen, the Americans are therefore constrained
to adapt themselves to orderly habits—and it may be said in this
sense that they make it a matter of honor to live chastely.
On one point American honor accords with the notions of honor
acknowledged in Europe; it places courage as the highest virtue, and
treats it as the greatest of the moral necessities of man; but the notion
of courage itself assumes a different aspect. In the United States
martial valor is but little prized; the courage which is best known and
most esteemed is that which emboldens men to brave the dangers of
the ocean, in order to arrive earlier in port—to support the privations
of the wilderness without complaint, and solitude more cruel than
privations—the courage which renders them almost insensible to the
loss of a fortune laboriously acquired, and instantly prompts to fresh
exertions to make another. Courage of this kind is peculiarly
necessary to the maintenance and prosperity of the American
communities, and it is held by them in peculiar honor and estimation;
to betray a want of it is to incur certain disgrace.
I have yet another characteristic point which may serve to place the
idea of this chapter in stronger relief. In a democratic society like that
of the United States, where fortunes are scanty and insecure,
everybody works, and work opens a way to everything: this has
changed the point of honor quite round, and has turned it against
idleness. I have sometimes met in America with young men of
wealth, personally disinclined to all laborious exertion, but who had
been compelled to embrace a profession. Their disposition and their
fortune allowed them to remain without employment; public opinion
forbade it, too imperiously to be disobeyed. In the European
countries, on the contrary, where aristocracy is still struggling with
the flood which overwhelms it, I have often seen men, constantly
spurred on by their wants and desires, remain in idleness, in order not
to lose the esteem of their equals; and I have known them submit to
ennui and privations rather than to work. No one can fail to perceive
that these opposite obligations are two different rules of conduct, both
nevertheless originating in the notion of honor.
What our forefathers designated as honor absolutely was in reality
only one of its forms; they gave a generic name to what was only a
species. Honor therefore is to be found in democratic as well as in
aristocratic ages, but it will not be difficult to show that it assumes a
different aspect in the former. Not only are its injunctions different,
but we shall shortly see that they are less numerous, less precise, and
that its dictates are less rigorously obeyed. The position of a caste is
always much more peculiar than that of a people. Nothing is so much
out of the way of the world as a small community invariably
composed of the same families (as was for instance the aristocracy of
the Middle Ages), whose object is to concentrate and to retain,
exclusively and hereditarily, education, wealth, and power amongst
its own members. But the more out of the way the position of a
community happens to be, the more numerous are its special wants,
and the more extensive are its notions of honor corresponding to
those wants. The rules of honor will therefore always be less
numerous amongst a people not divided into castes than amongst any
other. If ever any nations are constituted in which it may even be
difficult to find any peculiar classes of society, the notion of honor
will be confined to a small number of precepts, which will be more
and more in accordance with the moral laws adopted by the mass of
mankind. Thus the laws of honor will be less peculiar and less
multifarious amongst a democratic people than in an aristocracy.
They will also be more obscure; and this is a necessary consequence
of what goes before; for as the distinguishing marks of honor are less
numerous and less peculiar, it must often be difficult to distinguish
them. To this, other reasons may be added. Amongst the aristocratic
nations of the Middle Ages, generation succeeded generation in vain;
each family was like a never-dying, ever-stationary man, and the state
of opinions was hardly more changeable than that of conditions.
Everyone then had always the same objects before his eyes, which he
contemplated from the same point; his eyes gradually detected the
smallest details, and his discernment could not fail to become in the
end clear and accurate. Thus not only had the men of feudal times
very extraordinary opinions in matters of honor, but each of those
opinions was present to their minds under a clear and precise form.
This can never be the case in America, where all men are in
constant motion; and where society, transformed daily by its own
operations, changes its opinions together with its wants. In such a
country men have glimpses of the rules of honor, but they have
seldom time to fix attention upon them.
But even if society were motionless, it would still be difficult to
determine the meaning which ought to be attached to the word
"honor." In the Middle Ages, as each class had its own honor, the
same opinion was never received at the same time by a large number
of men; and this rendered it possible to give it a determined and
accurate form, which was the more easy, as all those by whom it was
received, having a perfectly identical and most peculiar position, were
naturally disposed to agree upon the points of a law which was made
for themselves alone. Thus the code of honor became a complete and
detailed system, in which everything was anticipated and provided for
beforehand, and a fixed and always palpable standard was applied to
human actions. Amongst a democratic nation, like the Americans, in
which ranks are identified, and the whole of society forms one single
mass, composed of elements which are all analogous though not
entirely similar, it is impossible ever to agree beforehand on what
shall or shall not be allowed by the laws of honor. Amongst that
people, indeed, some national wants do exist which give rise to
opinions common to the whole nation on points of honor; but these
opinions never occur at the same time, in the same manner, or with
the same intensity to the minds of the whole community; the law of
honor exists, but it has no organs to promulgate it.
The confusion is far greater still in a democratic country like
France, where the different classes of which the former fabric of
society was composed, being brought together but not yet mingled,
import day by day into each other's circles various and sometimes
conflicting notions of honor—where every man, at his own will and
pleasure, forsakes one portion of his forefathers' creed, and retains
another; so that, amidst so many arbitrary measures, no common rule
can ever be established, and it is almost impossible to predict which
actions will be held in honor and which will be thought disgraceful.
Such times are wretched, but they are of short duration.
As honor, amongst democratic nations, is imperfectly defined, its
influence is of course less powerful; for it is difficult to apply with
certainty and firmness a law which is not distinctly known. Public
opinion, the natural and supreme interpreter of the laws of honor, not
clearly discerning to which side censure or approval ought to lean,
can only pronounce a hesitating judgment. Sometimes the opinion of
the public may contradict itself; more frequently it does not act, and
lets things pass.
The weakness of the sense of honor in democracies also arises from
several other causes. In aristocratic countries, the same notions of
honor are always entertained by only a few persons, always limited in
number, often separated from the rest of their fellow-citizens. Honor
is easily mingled and identified in their minds with the idea of all that
distinguishes their own position; it appears to them as the chief
characteristic of their own rank; they apply its different rules with all
the warmth of personal interest, and they feel (if I may use the
expression) a passion for complying with its dictates. This truth is
extremely obvious in the old black-letter lawbooks on the subject of
"trial by battel." The nobles, in their disputes, were bound to use the
lance and sword; whereas the villains used only sticks amongst
themselves, "inasmuch as," to use the words of the old books,
"villains have no honor." This did not mean, as it may be imagined at
the present day, that these people were contemptible; but simply that
their actions were not to be judged by the same rules which were
applied to the actions of the aristocracy.
It is surprising, at first sight, that when the sense of honor is most
predominant, its injunctions are usually most strange; so that the
further it is removed from common reason the better it is obeyed;
whence it has sometimes been inferred that the laws of honor were
strengthened by their own extravagance. The two things indeed
originate from the same source, but the one is not derived from the
other. Honor becomes fantastical in proportion to the peculiarity of
the wants which it denotes, and the paucity of the men by whom
those wants are felt; and it is because it denotes wants of this kind
that its influence is great. Thus the notion of honor is not the stronger
for being fantastical, but it is fantastical and strong from the selfsame
cause.
Further, amongst aristocratic nations each rank is different, but all
ranks are fixed; every man occupies a place in his own sphere which
he cannot relinquish, and he lives there amidst other men who are
bound by the same ties. Amongst these nations no man can either
hope or fear to escape being seen; no man is placed so low but that he
has a stage of his own, and none can avoid censure or applause by his
obscurity. In democratic States on the contrary, where all the
members of the community are mingled in the same crowd and in
constant agitation, public opinion has no hold on men; they disappear
at every instant, and elude its power. Consequently the dictates of
honor will be there less imperious and less stringent; for honor acts
solely for the public eye—differing in this respect from mere virtue,
which lives upon itself contented with its own approval.
If the reader has distinctly apprehended all that goes before, he will
understand that there is a close and necessary relation between the
inequality of social conditions and what has here been styled honor—
a relation which, if I am not mistaken, had not before been clearly
pointed out. I shall therefore make one more attempt to illustrate it
satisfactorily. Suppose a nation stands apart from the rest of mankind:
independently of certain general wants inherent in the human race, it
will also have wants and interests peculiar to itself: certain opinions
of censure or approbation forthwith arise in the community, which are
peculiar to itself, and which are styled honor by the members of that
community. Now suppose that in this same nation a caste arises,
which, in its turn, stands apart from all the other classes, and contracts
certain peculiar wants, which give rise in their turn to special
opinions. The honor of this caste, composed of a medley of the
peculiar notions of the nation, and the still more peculiar notions of
the caste, will be as remote as it is possible to conceive from the
simple and general opinions of men.
Having reached this extreme point of the argument, I now return.
When ranks are commingled and privileges abolished, the men of
whom a nation is composed being once more equal and alike, their
interests and wants become identical, and all the peculiar notions
which each caste styled honor successively disappear: the notion of
honor no longer proceeds from any other source than the wants
peculiar to the nation at large, and it denotes the individual character
of that nation to the world. Lastly, if it be allowable to suppose that
all the races of mankind should be commingled, and that all the
peoples of earth should ultimately come to have the same interests,
the same wants, undistinguished from each other by any characteristic
peculiarities, no conventional value whatever would then be attached
to men's actions; they would all be regarded by all in the same light;
the general necessities of mankind, revealed by conscience to every
man, would become the common standard. The simple and general
notions of right and wrong only would then be recognized in the
world, to which, by a natural and necessary tie, the idea of censure or
approbation would be attached. Thus, to comprise all my meaning in
a single proposition, the dissimilarities and inequalities of men gave
rise to the notion of honor; that notion is weakened in proportion as
these differences are obliterated, and with them it would disappear.
Chapter XIX: Why So Many
Ambitious Men And So Little Lofty
Ambition Are To Be Found In The
United States
The first thing which strikes a traveller in the United States is the
innumerable multitude of those who seek to throw off their original
condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be
observed in the midst of the universally ambitious stir of society. No
Americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise; but hardly any
appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude, or to drive at very lofty
aims. All are constantly seeking to acquire property, power, and
reputation—few contemplate these things upon a great scale; and this
is the more surprising, as nothing is to be discerned in the manners or
laws of America to limit desire, or to prevent it from spreading its
impulses in every direction. It seems difficult to attribute this singular
state of things to the equality of social conditions; for at the instant
when that same equality was established in France, the flight of
ambition became unbounded. Nevertheless, I think that the principal
cause which may be assigned to this fact is to be found in the social
condition and democratic manners of the Americans.
All revolutions enlarge the ambition of men: this proposition is
more peculiarly true of those revolutions which overthrow an
aristocracy. When the former barriers which kept back the multitude
from fame and power are suddenly thrown down, a violent and
universal rise takes place towards that eminence so long coveted and
at length to be enjoyed. In this first burst of triumph nothing seems
impossible to anyone: not only are desires boundless, but the power
of satisfying them seems almost boundless, too. Amidst the general
and sudden renewal of laws and customs, in this vast confusion of all
men and all ordinances, the various members of the community rise
and sink again with excessive rapidity; and power passes so quickly
from hand to hand that none need despair of catching it in turn. It
must be recollected, moreover, that the people who destroy an
aristocracy have lived under its laws; they have witnessed its
splendor, and they have unconsciously imbibed the feelings and
notions which it entertained. Thus at the moment when an aristocracy
is dissolved, its spirit still pervades the mass of the community, and
its tendencies are retained long after it has been defeated. Ambition is
therefore always extremely great as long as a democratic revolution
lasts, and it will remain so for some time after the revolution is
consummated. The reminiscence of the extraordinary events which
men have witnessed is not obliterated from their memory in a day.
The passions which a revolution has roused do not disappear at its
close. A sense of instability remains in the midst of re-established
order: a notion of easy success survives the strange vicissitudes which
gave it birth; desires still remain extremely enlarged, when the means
of satisfying them are diminished day by day. The taste for large
fortunes subsists, though large fortunes are rare: and on every side we
trace the ravages of inordinate and hapless ambition kindled in hearts
which they consume in secret and in vain.
At length, however, the last vestiges of the struggle are effaced; the
remains of aristocracy completely disappear; the great events by
which its fall was attended are forgotten; peace succeeds to war, and
the sway of order is restored in the new realm; desires are again
adapted to the means by which they may be fulfilled; the wants, the
opinions, and the feelings of men cohere once more; the level of the
community is permanently determined, and democratic society
established. A democratic nation, arrived at this permanent and
regular state of things, will present a very different spectacle from
that which we have just described; and we may readily conclude that,
if ambition becomes great whilst the conditions of society are
growing equal, it loses that quality when they have grown so. As
wealth is subdivided and knowledge diffused, no one is entirely
destitute of education or of property; the privileges and
disqualifications of caste being abolished, and men having shattered
the bonds which held them fixed, the notion of advancement suggests
itself to every mind, the desire to rise swells in every heart, and all
men want to mount above their station: ambition is the universal
feeling.
But if the equality of conditions gives some resources to all the
members of the community, it also prevents any of them from having
resources of great extent, which necessarily circumscribes their
desires within somewhat narrow limits. Thus amongst democratic
nations ambition is ardent and continual, but its aim is not habitually
lofty; and life is generally spent in eagerly coveting small objects
which are within reach. What chiefly diverts the men of democracies
from lofty ambition is not the scantiness of their fortunes, but the
vehemence of the exertions they daily make to improve them. They
strain their faculties to the utmost to achieve paltry results, and this
cannot fail speedily to limit their discernment and to circumscribe
their powers. They might be much poorer and still be greater. The
small number of opulent citizens who are to be found amidst a
democracy do not constitute an exception to this rule. A man who
raises himself by degrees to wealth and power, contracts, in the
course of this protracted labor, habits of prudence and restraint which
he cannot afterwards shake off. A man cannot enlarge his mind as he
would his house. The same observation is applicable to the sons of
such a man; they are born, it is true, in a lofty position, but their
parents were humble; they have grown up amidst feelings and notions
which they cannot afterwards easily get rid of; and it may be
presumed that they will inherit the propensities of their father as well
as his wealth. It may happen, on the contrary, that the poorest scion of
a powerful aristocracy may display vast ambition, because the
traditional opinions of his race and the general spirit of his order still
buoy him up for some time above his fortune. Another thing which
prevents the men of democratic periods from easily indulging in the
pursuit of lofty objects, is the lapse of time which they foresee must
take place before they can be ready to approach them. "It is a great
advantage," says Pascal, "to be a man of quality, since it brings one
man as forward at eighteen or twenty as another man would be at
fifty, which is a clear gain of thirty years." Those thirty years are
commonly wanting to the ambitious characters of democracies. The
principle of equality, which allows every man to arrive at everything,
prevents all men from rapid advancement.
In a democratic society, as well as elsewhere, there are only a
certain number of great fortunes to be made; and as the paths which
lead to them are indiscriminately open to all, the progress of all must
necessarily be slackened. As the candidates appear to be nearly alike,
and as it is difficult to make a selection without infringing the
principle of equality, which is the supreme law of democratic
societies, the first idea which suggests itself is to make them all
advance at the same rate and submit to the same probation. Thus in
proportion as men become more alike, and the principle of equality is
more peaceably and deeply infused into the institutions and manners
of the country, the rules of advancement become more inflexible,
advancement itself slower, the difficulty of arriving quickly at a
certain height far greater. From hatred of privilege and from the
embarrassment of choosing, all men are at last constrained, whatever
may be their standard, to pass the same ordeal; all are
indiscriminately subjected to a multitude of petty preliminary
exercises, in which their youth is wasted and their imagination
quenched, so that they despair of ever fully attaining what is held out
to them; and when at length they are in a condition to perform any
extraordinary acts, the taste for such things has forsaken them.
In China, where the equality of conditions is exceedingly great and
very ancient, no man passes from one public office to another without
undergoing a probationary trial. This probation occurs afresh at every
stage of his career; and the notion is now so rooted in the manners of
the people that I remember to have read a Chinese novel, in which the
hero, after numberless crosses, succeeds at length in touching the
heart of his mistress by taking honors. A lofty ambition breathes with
difficulty in such an atmosphere.
The remark I apply to politics extends to everything; equality
everywhere produces the same effects; where the laws of a country do
not regulate and retard the advancement of men by positive
enactment, competition attains the same end. In a well-established
democratic community great and rapid elevation is therefore rare; it
forms an exception to the common rule; and it is the singularity of
such occurrences that makes men forget how rarely they happen. Men
living in democracies ultimately discover these things; they find out
at last that the laws of their country open a boundless field of action
before them, but that no one can hope to hasten across it. Between
them and the final object of their desires, they perceive a multitude of
small intermediate impediments, which must be slowly surmounted:
this prospect wearies and discourages their ambition at once. They
therefore give up hopes so doubtful and remote, to search nearer to
themselves for less lofty and more easy enjoyments. Their horizon is
not bounded by the laws but narrowed by themselves.
I have remarked that lofty ambitions are more rare in the ages of
democracy than in times of aristocracy: I may add that when, in spite
of these natural obstacles, they do spring into existence, their
character is different. In aristocracies the career of ambition is often
wide, but its boundaries are determined. In democracies ambition
commonly ranges in a narrower field, but if once it gets beyond that,
hardly any limits can be assigned to it. As men are individually
weak—as they live asunder, and in constant motion—as precedents
are of little authority and laws but of short duration, resistance to
novelty is languid, and the fabric of society never appears perfectly
erect or firmly consolidated. So that, when once an ambitious man
has the power in his grasp, there is nothing he may noted are; and
when it is gone from him, he meditates the overthrow of the State to
regain it. This gives to great political ambition a character of
revolutionary violence, which it seldom exhibits to an equal degree in
aristocratic communities. The common aspect of democratic nations
will present a great number of small and very rational objects of
ambition, from amongst which a few ill-controlled desires of a larger
growth will at intervals break out: but no such a thing as ambition
conceived and contrived on a vast scale is to be met with there.
I have shown elsewhere by what secret influence the principle of
equality makes the passion for physical gratifications and the
exclusive love of the present predominate in the human heart: these
different propensities mingle with the sentiment of ambition, and
tinge it, as it were, with their hues. I believe that ambitious men in
democracies are less engrossed than any others with the interests and
the judgment of posterity; the present moment alone engages and
absorbs them. They are more apt to complete a number of
undertakings with rapidity than to raise lasting monuments of their
achievements; and they care much more for success than for fame.
What they most ask of men is obedience—what they most covet is
empire. Their manners have in almost all cases remained below the
height of their station; the consequence is that they frequently carry
very low tastes into their extraordinary fortunes, and that they seem to
have acquired the supreme power only to minister to their coarse or
paltry pleasures.
I think that in our time it is very necessary to cleanse, to regulate,
and to adapt the feeling of ambition, but that it would be extremely
dangerous to seek to impoverish and to repress it over-much. We
should attempt to lay down certain extreme limits, which it should
never be allowed to outstep; but its range within those established
limits should not be too much checked. I confess that I apprehend
much less for democratic society from the boldness than from the
mediocrity of desires. What appears to me most to be dreaded is that,
in the midst of the small incessant occupations of private life,
ambition should lose its vigor and its greatness—that the passions of
man should abate, but at the same time be lowered, so that the march
of society should every day become more tranquil and less aspiring. I
think then that the leaders of modern society would be wrong to seek
to lull the community by a state of too uniform and too peaceful
happiness; and that it is well to expose it from time to time to matters
of difficulty and danger, in order to raise ambition and to give it a
field of action. Moralists are constantly complaining that the ruling
vice of the present time is pride. This is true in one sense, for indeed
no one thinks that he is not better than his neighbor, or consents to
obey his superior: but it is extremely false in another; for the same
man who cannot endure subordination or equality, has so
contemptible an opinion of himself that he thinks he is only born to
indulge in vulgar pleasures. He willingly takes up with low desires,
without daring to embark in lofty enterprises, of which he scarcely
dreams. Thus, far from thinking that humility ought to be preached to
our contemporaries, I would have endeavors made to give them a
more enlarged idea of themselves and of their kind. Humility is
unwholesome to them; what they most want is, in my opinion, pride. I
would willingly exchange several of our small virtues for this one
vice.
Chapter XX: The Trade Of Place-
Hunting In Certain Democratic
Countries
In the United States as soon as a man has acquired some education
and pecuniary resources, he either endeavors to get rich by commerce
or industry, or he buys land in the bush and turns pioneer. All that he
asks of the State is not to be disturbed in his toil, and to be secure of
his earnings. Amongst the greater part of European nations, when a
man begins to feel his strength and to extend his desires, the first
thing that occurs to him is to get some public employment. These
opposite effects, originating in the same cause, deserve our passing
notice.
When public employments are few in number, ill-paid and
precarious, whilst the different lines of business are numerous and
lucrative, it is to business, and not to official duties, that the new and
eager desires engendered by the principle of equality turn from every
side. But if, whilst the ranks of society are becoming more equal, the
education of the people remains incomplete, or their spirit the reverse
of bold—if commerce and industry, checked in their growth, afford
only slow and arduous means of making a fortune—the various
members of the community, despairing of ameliorating their own
condition, rush to the head of the State and demand its assistance. To
relieve their own necessities at the cost of the public treasury, appears
to them to be the easiest and most open, if not the only, way they
have to rise above a condition which no longer contents them; place-
hunting becomes the most generally followed of all trades. This must
especially be the case, in those great centralized monarchies in which
the number of paid offices is immense, and the tenure of them
tolerably secure, so that no one despairs of obtaining a place, and of
enjoying it as undisturbedly as a hereditary fortune.
I shall not remark that the universal and inordinate desire for place
is a great social evil; that it destroys the spirit of independence in the
citizen, and diffuses a venal and servile humor throughout the frame
of society; that it stifles the manlier virtues: nor shall I be at the pains
to demonstrate that this kind of traffic only creates an unproductive
activity, which agitates the country without adding to its resources: all
these things are obvious. But I would observe, that a government
which encourages this tendency risks its own tranquillity, and places
its very existence in great jeopardy. I am aware that at a time like our
own, when the love and respect which formerly clung to authority are
seen gradually to decline, it may appear necessary to those in power
to lay a closer hold on every man by his own interest, and it may
seem convenient to use his own passions to keep him in order and in
silence; but this cannot be so long, and what may appear to be a
source of strength for a certain time will assuredly become in the end
a great cause of embarrassment and weakness.
Amongst democratic nations, as well as elsewhere, the number of
official appointments has in the end some limits; but amongst those
nations, the number of aspirants is unlimited; it perpetually increases,
with a gradual and irresistible rise in proportion as social conditions
become more equal, and is only checked by the limits of the
population. Thus, when public employments afford the only outlet for
ambition, the government necessarily meets with a permanent
opposition at last; for it is tasked to satisfy with limited means
unlimited desires. It is very certain that of all people in the world the
most difficult to restrain and to manage are a people of solicitants.
Whatever endeavors are made by rulers, such a people can never be
contented; and it is always to be apprehended that they will ultimately
overturn the constitution of the country, and change the aspect of the
State, for the sole purpose of making a clearance of places. The
sovereigns of the present age, who strive to fix upon themselves alone
all those novel desires which are aroused by equality, and to satisfy
them, will repent in the end, if I am not mistaken, that they ever
embarked in this policy: they will one day discover that they have
hazarded their own power, by making it so necessary; and that the
more safe and honest course would have been to teach their subjects
the art of providing for themselves. *a
a [ As a matter of fact, more recent experience has
shown that place-hunting is quite as intense in the
United States as in any country in Europe. It is
regarded by the Americans themselves as one of
the great evils of their social condition, and it
powerfully affects their political institutions. But
the American who seeks a place seeks not so
much a means of subsistence as the distinction
which office and public employment confer. In the
absence of any true aristocracy, the public service
creates a spurious one, which is as much an object
of ambition as the distinctions of rank in
aristocratic countries.—Translator's Note.]
Chapter XXI: Why Great
Revolutions Will Become More
Rare
A people which has existed for centuries under a system of castes
and classes can only arrive at a democratic state of society by passing
through a long series of more or less critical transformations,
accomplished by violent efforts, and after numerous vicissitudes; in
the course of which, property, opinions, and power are rapidly
transferred from one hand to another. Even after this great revolution
is consummated, the revolutionary habits engendered by it may long
be traced, and it will be followed by deep commotion. As all this
takes place at the very time at which social conditions are becoming
more equal, it is inferred that some concealed relation and secret tie
exist between the principle of equality itself and revolution, insomuch
that the one cannot exist without giving rise to the other.
On this point reasoning may seem to lead to the same result as
experience. Amongst a people whose ranks are nearly equal, no
ostensible bond connects men together, or keeps them settled in their
station. None of them have either a permanent right or power to
command—none are forced by their condition to obey; but every
man, finding himself possessed of some education and some
resources, may choose his won path and proceed apart from all his
fellow-men. The same causes which make the members of the
community independent of each other, continually impel them to new
and restless desires, and constantly spur them onwards. It therefore
seems natural that, in a democratic community, men, things, and
opinions should be forever changing their form and place, and that
democratic ages should be times of rapid and incessant
transformation.
But is this really the case? does the equality of social conditions
habitually and permanently lead men to revolution? does that state of
society contain some perturbing principle which prevents the
community from ever subsiding into calm, and disposes the citizens
to alter incessantly their laws, their principles, and their manners? I
do not believe it; and as the subject is important, I beg for the reader's
close attention. Almost all the revolutions which have changed the
aspect of nations have been made to consolidate or to destroy social
inequality. Remove the secondary causes which have produced the
great convulsions of the world, and you will almost always find the
principle of inequality at the bottom. Either the poor have attempted
to plunder the rich, or the rich to enslave the poor. If then a state of
society can ever be founded in which every man shall have something
to keep, and little to take from others, much will have been done for
the peace of the world. I am aware that amongst a great democratic
people there will always be some members of the community in great
poverty, and others in great opulence; but the poor, instead of forming
the immense majority of the nation, as is always the case in
aristocratic communities, are comparatively few in number, and the
laws do not bind them together by the ties of irremediable and
hereditary penury. The wealthy, on their side, are scarce and
powerless; they have no privileges which attract public observation;
even their wealth, as it is no longer incorporated and bound up with
the soil, is impalpable, and as it were invisible. As there is no longer a
race of poor men, so there is no longer a race of rich men; the latter
spring up daily from the multitude, and relapse into it again. Hence
they do not form a distinct class, which may be easily marked out and
plundered; and, moreover, as they are connected with the mass of
their fellow-citizens by a thousand secret ties, the people cannot assail
them without inflicting an injury upon itself. Between these two
extremes of democratic communities stand an innumerable multitude
of men almost alike, who, without being exactly either rich or poor,
are possessed of sufficient property to desire the maintenance of
order, yet not enough to excite envy. Such men are the natural
enemies of violent commotions: their stillness keeps all beneath them
and above them still, and secures the balance of the fabric of society.
Not indeed that even these men are contented with what they have
gotten, or that they feel a natural abhorrence for a revolution in which
they might share the spoil without sharing the calamity; on the
contrary, they desire, with unexampled ardor, to get rich, but the
difficulty is to know from whom riches can be taken. The same state
of society which constantly prompts desires, restrains these desires
within necessary limits: it gives men more liberty of changing and
less interest in change.
Not only are the men of democracies not naturally desirous of
revolutions, but they are afraid of them. All revolutions more or less
threaten the tenure of property: but most of those who live in
democratic countries are possessed of property—not only are they
possessed of property, but they live in the condition of men who set
the greatest store upon their property. If we attentively consider each
of the classes of which society is composed, it is easy to see that the
passions engendered by property are keenest and most tenacious
amongst the middle classes. The poor often care but little for what
they possess, because they suffer much more from the want of what
they have not, than they enjoy the little they have. The rich have
many other passions besides that of riches to satisfy; and, besides, the
long and arduous enjoyment of a great fortune sometimes makes
them in the end insensible to its charms. But the men who have a
competency, alike removed from opulence and from penury, attach an
enormous value to their possessions. As they are still almost within
the reach of poverty, they see its privations near at hand, and dread
them; between poverty and themselves there is nothing but a scanty
fortune, upon which they immediately fix their apprehensions and
their hopes. Every day increases the interest they take in it, by the
constant cares which it occasions; and they are the more attached to it
by their continual exertions to increase the amount. The notion of
surrendering the smallest part of it is insupportable to them, and they
consider its total loss as the worst of misfortunes. Now these eager
and apprehensive men of small property constitute the class which is
constantly increased by the equality of conditions. Hence, in
democratic communities, the majority of the people do not clearly see
what they have to gain by a revolution, but they continually and in a
thousand ways feel that they might lose by one.
I have shown in another part of this work that the equality of
conditions naturally urges men to embark in commercial and
industrial pursuits, and that it tends to increase and to distribute real
property: I have also pointed out the means by which it inspires every
man with an eager and constant desire to increase his welfare.
Nothing is more opposed to revolutionary passions than these things.
It may happen that the final result of a revolution is favorable to
commerce and manufactures; but its first consequence will almost
always be the ruin of manufactures and mercantile men, because it
must always change at once the general principles of consumption,
and temporarily upset the existing proportion between supply and
demand. I know of nothing more opposite to revolutionary manners
than commercial manners. Commerce is naturally adverse to all the
violent passions; it loves to temporize, takes delight in compromise,
and studiously avoids irritation. It is patient, insinuating, flexible, and
never has recourse to extreme measures until obliged by the most
absolute necessity. Commerce renders men independent of each
other, gives them a lofty notion of their personal importance, leads
them to seek to conduct their own affairs, and teaches how to conduct
them well; it therefore prepares men for freedom, but preserves them
from revolutions. In a revolution the owners of personal property
have more to fear than all others; for on the one hand their property is
often easy to seize, and on the other it may totally disappear at any
moment—a subject of alarm to which the owners of real property are
less exposed, since, although they may lose the income of their
estates, they may hope to preserve the land itself through the greatest
vicissitudes. Hence the former are much more alarmed at the
symptoms of revolutionary commotion than the latter. Thus nations
are less disposed to make revolutions in proportion as personal
property is augmented and distributed amongst them, and as the
number of those possessing it increases. Moreover, whatever
profession men may embrace, and whatever species of property they
may possess, one characteristic is common to them all. No one is
fully contented with his present fortune—all are perpetually striving
in a thousand ways to improve it. Consider any one of them at any
period of his life, and he will be found engaged with some new
project for the purpose of increasing what he has; talk not to him of
the interests and the rights of mankind: this small domestic concern
absorbs for the time all his thoughts, and inclines him to defer
political excitement to some other season. This not only prevents men
from making revolutions, but deters men from desiring them. Violent
political passions have but little hold on those who have devoted all
their faculties to the pursuit of their well-being. The ardor which they
display in small matters calms their zeal for momentous undertakings.
From time to time indeed, enterprising and ambitious men will
arise in democratic communities, whose unbounded aspirations
cannot be contented by following the beaten track. Such men like
revolutions and hail their approach; but they have great difficulty in
bringing them about, unless unwonted events come to their
assistance. No man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of
his age and country; and, however powerful he may be supposed to
be, he will find it difficult to make his contemporaries share in
feelings and opinions which are repugnant to t all their feelings and
desires.
It is a mistake to believe that, when once the equality of conditions
has become the old and uncontested state of society, and has imparted
its characteristics to the manners of a nation, men will easily allow
themselves to be thrust into perilous risks by an imprudent leader or a
bold innovator. Not indeed that they will resist him openly, by well-
contrived schemes, or even by a premeditated plan of resistance.
They will not struggle energetically against him, sometimes they will
even applaud him—but they do not follow him. To his vehemence
they secretly oppose their inertia; to his revolutionary tendencies their
conservative interests; their homely tastes to his adventurous
passions; their good sense to the flights of his genius; to his poetry
their prose. With immense exertion he raises them for an instant, but
they speedily escape from him, and fall back, as it were, by their own
weight. He strains himself to rouse the indifferent and distracted
multitude, and finds at last that he is reduced to impotence, not
because he is conquered, but because he is alone.
I do not assert that men living in democratic communities are
naturally stationary; I think, on the contrary, that a perpetual stir
prevails in the bosom of those societies, and that rest is unknown
there; but I think that men bestir themselves within certain limits
beyond which they hardly ever go. They are forever varying, altering,
and restoring secondary matters; but they carefully abstain from
touching what is fundamental. They love change, but they dread
revolutions. Although the Americans are constantly modifying or
abrogating some of their laws, they by no means display
revolutionary passions. It may be easily seen, from the promptitude
with which they check and calm themselves when public excitement
begins to grow alarming, and at the very moment when passions seem
most roused, that they dread a revolution as the worst of misfortunes,
and that every one of them is inwardly resolved to make great
sacrifices to avoid such a catastrophe. In no country in the world is
the love of property more active and more anxious than in the United
States; nowhere does the majority display less inclination for those
principles which threaten to alter, in whatever manner, the laws of
property. I have often remarked that theories which are of a
revolutionary nature, since they cannot be put in practice without a
complete and sometimes a sudden change in the state of property and
persons, are much less favorably viewed in the United States than in
the great monarchical countries of Europe: if some men profess them,
the bulk of the people reject them with instinctive abhorrence. I do
not hesitate to say that most of the maxims commonly called
democratic in France would be proscribed by the democracy of the
United States. This may easily be understood: in America men have
the opinions and passions of democracy, in Europe we have still the
passions and opinions of revolution. If ever America undergoes great
revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black
race on the soil of the United States—that is to say, they will owe
their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality, of conditions.
When social conditions are equal, every man is apt to live apart,
centred in himself and forgetful of the public. If the rulers of
democratic nations were either to neglect to correct this fatal
tendency, or to encourage it from a notion that it weans men from
political passions and thus wards off revolutions, they might
eventually produce the evil they seek to avoid, and a time might come
when the inordinate passions of a few men, aided by the unintelligent
selfishness or the pusillanimity of the greater number, would
ultimately compel society to pass through strange vicissitudes. In
democratic communities revolutions are seldom desired except by a
minority; but a minority may sometimes effect them. I do not assert
that democratic nations are secure from revolutions; I merely say that
the state of society in those nations does not lead to revolutions, but
rather wards them off. A democratic people left to itself will not
easily embark in great hazards; it is only led to revolutions unawares;
it may sometimes undergo them, but it does not make them; and I will
add that, when such a people has been allowed to acquire sufficient
knowledge and experience, it will not suffer them to be made. I am
well aware that it this respect public institutions may themselves do
much; they may encourage or repress the tendencies which originate
in the state of society. I therefore do not maintain, I repeat, that a
people is secure from revolutions simply because conditions are equal
in the community; but I think that, whatever the institutions of such a
people may be, great revolutions will always be far less violent and
less frequent than is supposed; and I can easily discern a state of
polity, which, when combined with the principle of equality, would
render society more stationary than it has ever been in our western
apart of the world.
The observations I have here made on events may also be applied
in part to opinions. Two things are surprising in the United States—
the mutability of the greater part of human actions, and the singular
stability of certain principles. Men are in constant motion; the mind
of man appears almost unmoved. When once an opinion has spread
over the country and struck root there, it would seem that no power
on earth is strong enough to eradicate it. In the United States, general
principles in religion, philosophy, morality, and even politics, do not
vary, or at least are only modified by a hidden and often an
imperceptible process: even the grossest prejudices are obliterated
with incredible slowness, amidst the continual friction of men and
things. I hear it said that it is in the nature and the habits of
democracies to be constantly changing their opinions and feelings.
This may be true of small democratic nations, like those of the
ancient world, in which the whole community could be assembled in
a public place and then excited at will by an orator. But I saw nothing
of the kind amongst the great democratic people which dwells upon
the opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean. What struck me in the
United States was the difficulty in shaking the majority in an opinion
once conceived, or of drawing it off from a leader once adopted.
Neither speaking nor writing can accomplish it; nothing but
experience will avail, and even experience must be repeated. This is
surprising at first sight, but a more attentive investigation explains the
fact. I do not think that it is as easy as is supposed to uproot the
prejudices of a democratic people—to change its belief—to supersede
principles once established, by new principles in religion, politics,
and morals—in a word, to make great and frequent changes in men's
minds. Not that the human mind is there at rest—it is in constant
agitation; but it is engaged in infinitely varying the consequences of
known principles, and in seeking for new consequences, rather than
in seeking for new principles. Its motion is one of rapid
circumvolution, rather than of straightforward impulse by rapid and
direct effort; it extends its orbit by small continual and hasty
movements, but it does not suddenly alter its position.
Men who are equal in rights, in education, in fortune, or, to
comprise all in one word, in their social condition, have necessarily
wants, habits, and tastes which are hardly dissimilar. As they look at
objects under the same aspect, their minds naturally tend to analogous
conclusions; and, though each of them may deviate from his
contemporaries and from opinions of his own, they will involuntarily
and unconsciously concur in a certain number of received opinions.
The more attentively I consider the effects of equality upon the mind,
the more am I persuaded that the intellectual anarchy which we
witness about us is not, as many men suppose, the natural state of
democratic nations. I think it is rather to be regarded as an accident
peculiar to their youth, and that it only breaks out at that period of
transition when men have already snapped the former ties which
bound them together, but are still amazingly different in origin,
education, and manners; so that, having retained opinions,
propensities and tastes of great diversity, nothing any longer prevents
men from avowing them openly. The leading opinions of men
become similar in proportion as their conditions assimilate; such
appears to me to be the general and permanent law—the rest is casual
and transient.
I believe that it will rarely happen to any man amongst a
democratic community, suddenly to frame a system of notions very
remote from that which his contemporaries have adopted; and if some
such innovator appeared, I apprehend that he would have great
difficulty in finding listeners, still more in finding believers. When
the conditions of men are almost equal, they do not easily allow
themselves to be persuaded by each other. As they all live in close
intercourse, as they have learned the same things together, and as they
lead the same life, they are not naturally disposed to take one of
themselves for a guide, and to follow him implicitly. Men seldom
take the opinion of their equal, or of a man like themselves, upon
trust. Not only is confidence in the superior attainments of certain
individuals weakened amongst democratic nations, as I have
elsewhere remarked, but the general notion of the intellectual
superiority which any man whatsoever may acquire in relation to the
rest of the community is soon overshadowed. As men grow more like
each other, the doctrine of the equality of the intellect gradually
infuses itself into their opinions; and it becomes more difficult for any
innovator to acquire or to exert much influence over the minds of a
people. In such communities sudden intellectual revolutions will
therefore be rare; for, if we read aright the history of the world, we
shall find that great and rapid changes in human opinions have been
produced far less by the force of reasoning than by the authority of a
name. Observe, too, that as the men who live in democratic societies
are not connected with each other by any tie, each of them must be
convinced individually; whilst in aristocratic society it is enough to
convince a few—the rest follow. If Luther had lived in an age of
equality, and had not had princes and potentates for his audience, he
would perhaps have found it more difficult to change the aspect of
Europe. Not indeed that the men of democracies are naturally
strongly persuaded of the certainty of their opinions, or are
unwavering in belief; they frequently entertain doubts which no one,
in their eyes, can remove. It sometimes happens at such times that the
human mind would willingly change its position; but as nothing urges
or guides it forwards, it oscillates to and fro without progressive
motion. *a
a [ If I inquire what state of society is most
favorable to the great revolutions of the mind, I
find that it occurs somewhere between the
complete equality of the whole community and the
absolute separation of ranks. Under a system of
castes generations succeed each other without
altering men's positions; some have nothing more,
others nothing better, to hope for. The imagination
slumbers amidst this universal silence and
stillness, and the very idea of change fades from
the human mind. When ranks have been abolished
and social conditions are almost equalized, all
men are in ceaseless excitement, but each of them
stands alone, independent and weak. This latter
state of things is excessively different from the
former one; yet it has one point of analogy—great
revolutions of the human mind seldom occur in it.
But between these two extremes of the history of
nations is an intermediate period—a period as
glorious as it is agitated—when the conditions of
men are not sufficiently settled for the mind to be
lulled in torpor, when they are sufficiently unequal
for men to exercise a vast power on the minds of
one another, and when some few may modify the
convictions of all. It is at such times that great
reformers start up, and new opinions suddenly
change the face of the world.]
Even when the reliance of a democratic people has been won, it is
still no easy matter to gain their attention. It is extremely difficult to
obtain a hearing from men living in democracies, unless it be to speak
to them of themselves. They do not attend to the things said to them,
because they are always fully engrossed with the things they are
doing. For indeed few men are idle in democratic nations; life is
passed in the midst of noise and excitement, and men are so engaged
in acting that little remains to them for thinking. I would especially
remark that they are not only employed, but that they are passionately
devoted to their employments. They are always in action, and each of
their actions absorbs their faculties: the zeal which they display in
business puts out the enthusiasm they might otherwise entertain for
idea. I think that it is extremely difficult to excite the enthusiasm of a
democratic people for any theory which has not a palpable, direct,
and immediate connection with the daily occupations of life:
therefore they will not easily forsake their old opinions; for it is
enthusiasm which flings the minds of men out of the beaten track, and
effects the great revolutions of the intellect as well as the great
revolutions of the political world. Thus democratic nations have
neither time nor taste to go in search of novel opinions. Even when
those they possess become doubtful, they still retain them, because it
would take too much time and inquiry to change them—they retain
them, not as certain, but as established.
There are yet other and more cogent reasons which prevent any
great change from being easily effected in the principles of a
democratic people. I have already adverted to them at the
commencement of this part of my work. If the influence of
individuals is weak and hardly perceptible amongst such a people, the
power exercised by the mass upon the mind of each individual is
extremely great—I have already shown for what reasons. I would
now observe that it is wrong to suppose that this depends solely upon
the form of government, and that the majority would lose its
intellectual supremacy if it were to lose its political power. In
aristocracies men have often much greatness and strength of their
own: when they find themselves at variance with the greater number
of their fellow-countrymen, they withdraw to their own circle, where
they support and console themselves. Such is not the case in a
democratic country; there public favor seems as necessary as the air
we breathe, and to live at variance with the multitude is, as it were,
not to live. The multitude requires no laws to coerce those who think
not like itself: public disapprobation is enough; a sense of their
loneliness and impotence overtakes them and drives them to despair.
Whenever social conditions are equal, public opinion presses with
enormous weight upon the mind of each individual; it surrounds,
directs, and oppresses him; and this arises from the very constitution
of society, much more than from its political laws. As men grow
more alike, each man feels himself weaker in regard to all the rest; as
he discerns nothing by which he is considerably raised above them, or
distinguished from them, he mistrusts himself as soon as they assail
him. Not only does he mistrust his strength, but he even doubts of his
right; and he is very near acknowledging that he is in the wrong,
when the greater number of his countrymen assert that he is so. The
majority do not need to constrain him—they convince him. In
whatever way then the powers of a democratic community may be
organized and balanced, it will always be extremely difficult to
believe what the bulk of the people reject, or to profess what they
condemn.
This circumstance is extraordinarily favorable to the stability of
opinions. When an opinion has taken root amongst a democratic
people, and established itself in the minds of the bulk of the
community, it afterwards subsists by itself and is maintained without
effort, because no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as
false, ultimately receive it as the general impression; and those who
still dispute it in their hearts, conceal their dissent; they are careful
not to engage in a dangerous and useless conflict. It is true, that when
the majority of a democratic people change their opinions, they may
suddenly and arbitrarily effect strange revolutions in men's minds; but
their opinions do not change without much difficulty, and it is almost
as difficult to show that they are changed.
Time, events, or the unaided individual action of the mind, will
sometimes undermine or destroy an opinion, without any outward
sign of the change. It has not been openly assailed, no conspiracy has
been formed to make war on it, but its followers one by one
noiselessly secede—day by day a few of them abandon it, until last it
is only professed by a minority. In this state it will still continue to
prevail. As its enemies remain mute, or only interchange their
thoughts by stealth, they are themselves unaware for a long period
that a great revolution has actually been effected; and in this state of
uncertainly they take no steps—they observe each other and are
silent. The majority have ceased to believe what they believed before;
but they still affect to believe, and this empty phantom of public
opinion in strong enough to chill innovators, and to keep them silent
and at respectful distance. We live at a time which has witnessed the
most rapid changes of opinion in the minds of men; nevertheless it
may be that the leading opinions of society will ere long be more
settled than they have been for several centuries in our history: that
time is not yet come, but it may perhaps be approaching. As I
examine more closely the natural wants and tendencies of democratic
nations, I grow persuaded that if ever social equality is generally and
permanently established in the world, great intellectual and political
revolutions will become more difficult and less frequent than is
supposed. Because the men of democracies appear always excited,
uncertain, eager, changeable in their wills and in their positions, it is
imagined that they are suddenly to abrogate their laws, to adopt new
opinions, and to assume new manners. But if the principle of equality
predisposes men to change, it also suggests to them certain interests
and tastes which cannot be satisfied without a settled order of things;
equality urges them on, but at the same time it holds them back; it
spurs them, but fastens them to earth;—it kindles their desires, but
limits their powers. This, however, is not perceived at first; the
passions which tend to sever the citizens of a democracy are obvious
enough; but the hidden force which restrains and unites them is not
discernible at a glance.
Amidst the ruins which surround me, shall I dare to say that
revolutions are not what I most fear coming generations? If men
continue to shut themselves more closely within the narrow circle of
domestic interests and to live upon that kind of excitement, it is to be
apprehended that they may ultimately become inaccessible to those
great and powerful public emotions which perturb nations—but
which enlarge them and recruit them. When property becomes so
fluctuating, and the love of property so restless and so ardent, I
cannot but fear that men may arrive at such a state as to regard every
new theory as a peril, every innovation as an irksome toil, every
social improvement as a stepping-stone to revolution, and so refuse to
move altogether for fear of being moved too far. I dread, and I
confess it, lest they should at last so entirely give way to a cowardly
love of present enjoyment, as to lose sight of the interests of their
future selves and of those of their descendants; and to prefer to glide
along the easy current of life, rather than to make, when it is
necessary, a strong and sudden effort to a higher purpose. It is
believed by some that modern society will be ever changing its
aspect; for myself, I fear that it will ultimately be too invariably fixed
in the same institutions, the same prejudices, the same manners, so
that mankind will be stopped and circumscribed; that the mind will
swing backwards and forwards forever, without begetting fresh ideas;
that man will waste his strength in bootless and solitary trifling; and,
though in continual motion, that humanity will cease to advance.
Chapter XXII: Why Democratic
Nations Are Naturally Desirous Of
Peace, And Democratic Armies Of
War
The same interests, the same fears, the same passions which deter
democratic nations from revolutions, deter them also from war; the
spirit of military glory and the spirit of revolution are weakened at the
same time and by the same causes. The ever-increasing numbers of
men of property—lovers of peace, the growth of personal wealth
which war so rapidly consumes, the mildness of manners, the
gentleness of heart, those tendencies to pity which are engendered by
the equality of conditions, that coolness of understanding which
renders men comparatively insensible to the violent and poetical
excitement of arms—all these causes concur to quench the military
spirit. I think it may be admitted as a general and constant rule, that,
amongst civilized nations, the warlike passions will become more
rare and less intense in proportion as social conditions shall be more
equal. War is nevertheless an occurrence to which all nations are
subject, democratic nations as well as others. Whatever taste they
may have for peace, they must hold themselves in readiness to repel
aggression, or in other words they must have an army.
Fortune, which has conferred so many peculiar benefits upon the
inhabitants of the United States, has placed them in the midst of a
wilderness, where they have, so to speak, no neighbors: a few
thousand soldiers are sufficient for their wants; but this is peculiar to
America, not to democracy. The equality of conditions, and the
manners as well as the institutions resulting from it, do not exempt a
democratic people from the necessity of standing armies, and their
armies always exercise a powerful influence over their fate. It is
therefore of singular importance to inquire what are the natural
propensities of the men of whom these armies are composed.
Amongst aristocratic nations, especially amongst those in which
birth is the only source of rank, the same inequality exists in the army
as in the nation; the officer is noble, the soldier is a serf; the one is
naturally called upon to command, the other to obey. In aristocratic
armies, the private soldier's ambition is therefore circumscribed
within very narrow limits. Nor has the ambition of the officer an
unlimited range. An aristocratic body not only forms a part of the
scale of ranks in the nation, but it contains a scale of ranks within
itself: the members of whom it is composed are placed one above
another, in a particular and unvarying manner. Thus one man is born
to the command of a regiment, another to that of a company; when
once they have reached the utmost object of their hopes, they stop of
their own accord, and remain contented with their lot. There is,
besides, a strong cause, which, in aristocracies, weakens the officer's
desire of promotion. Amongst aristocratic nations, an officer,
independently of his rank in the army, also occupies an elevated rank
in society; the former is almost always in his eyes only an appendage
to the latter. A nobleman who embraces the profession of arms
follows it less from motives of ambition than from a sense of the
duties imposed on him by his birth. He enters the army in order to
find an honorable employment for the idle years of his youth, and to
be able to bring back to his home and his peers some honorable
recollections of military life; but his principal object is not to obtain
by that profession either property, distinction, or power, for he
possesses these advantages in his own right, and enjoys them without
leaving his home.
In democratic armies all the soldiers may become officers, which
makes the desire of promotion general, and immeasurably extends the
bounds of military ambition. The officer, on his part, sees nothing
which naturally and necessarily stops him at one grade more than at
another; and each grade has immense importance in his eyes, because
his rank in society almost always depends on his rank in the army.
Amongst democratic nations it often happens that an officer has no
property but his pay, and no distinction but that of military honors:
consequently as often as his duties change, his fortune changes, and
he becomes, as it were, a new man. What was only an appendage to
his position in aristocratic armies, has thus become the main point,
the basis of his whole condition. Under the old French monarchy
officers were always called by their titles of nobility; they are now
always called by the title of their military rank. This little change in
the forms of language suffices to show that a great revolution has
taken place in the constitution of society and in that of the army. In
democratic armies the desire of advancement is almost universal: it is
ardent, tenacious, perpetual; it is strengthened by all other desires,
and only extinguished with life itself. But it is easy to see, that of all
armies in the world, those in which advancement must be slowest in
time of peace are the armies of democratic countries. As the number
of commissions is naturally limited, whilst the number of competitors
is almost unlimited, and as the strict law of equality is over all alike,
none can make rapid progress—many can make no progress at all.
Thus the desire of advancement is greater, and the opportunities of
advancement fewer, there than elsewhere. All the ambitious spirits of
a democratic army are consequently ardently desirous of war, because
war makes vacancies, and warrants the violation of that law of
seniority which is the sole privilege natural to democracy.
We thus arrive at this singular consequence, that of all armies those
most ardently desirous of war are democratic armies, and of all
nations those most fond of peace are democratic nations: and, what
makes these facts still more extraordinary, is that these contrary
effects are produced at the same time by the principle of equality.
All the members of the community, being alike, constantly harbor
the wish, and discover the possibility, of changing their condition and
improving their welfare: this makes them fond of peace, which is
favorable to industry, and allows every man to pursue his own little
undertakings to their completion. On the other hand, this same
equality makes soldiers dream of fields of battle, by increasing the
value of military honors in the eyes of those who follow the
profession of arms, and by rendering those honors accessible to all. In
either case the inquietude of the heart is the same, the taste for
enjoyment as insatiable, the ambition of success as great—the means
of gratifying it are alone different.
These opposite tendencies of the nation and the army expose
democratic communities to great dangers. When a military spirit
forsakes a people, the profession of arms immediately ceases to be
held in honor, and military men fall to the lowest rank of the public
servants: they are little esteemed, and no longer understood. The
reverse of what takes place in aristocratic ages then occurs; the men
who enter the army are no longer those of the highest, but of the
lowest rank. Military ambition is only indulged in when no other is
possible. Hence arises a circle of cause and consequence from which
it is difficult to escape: the best part of the nation shuns the military
profession because that profession is not honored, and the profession
is not honored because the best part of the nation has ceased to follow
it. It is then no matter of surprise that democratic armies are often
restless, ill-tempered, and dissatisfied with their lot, although their
physical condition is commonly far better, and their discipline less
strict than in other countries. The soldier feels that he occupies an
inferior position, and his wounded pride either stimulates his taste for
hostilities which would render his services necessary, or gives him a
turn for revolutions, during which he may hope to win by force of
arms the political influence and personal importance now denied him.
The composition of democratic armies makes this last-mentioned
danger much to be feared. In democratic communities almost every
man has some property to preserve; but democratic armies are
generally led by men without property, most of whom have little to
lose in civil broils. The bulk of the nation is naturally much more
afraid of revolutions than in the ages of aristocracy, but the leaders of
the army much less so.
Moreover, as amongst democratic nations (to repeat what I have
just remarked) the wealthiest, the best educated, and the most able
men seldom adopt the military profession, the army, taken
collectively, eventually forms a small nation by itself, where the mind
is less enlarged, and habits are more rude than in the nation at large.
Now, this small uncivilized nation has arms in its possession, and
alone knows how to use them: for, indeed, the pacific temper of the
community increases the danger to which a democratic people is
exposed from the military and turbulent spirit of the army. Nothing is
so dangerous as an army amidst an unwarlike nation; the excessive
love of the whole community for quiet continually puts its
constitution at the mercy of the soldiery. It may therefore be asserted,
generally speaking, that if democratic nations are naturally prone to
peace from their interests and their propensities, they are constantly
drawn to war and revolutions by their armies. Military revolutions,
which are scarcely ever to be apprehended in aristocracies, are always
to be dreaded amongst democratic nations. These perils must be
reckoned amongst the most formidable which beset their future fate,
and the attention of statesmen should be sedulously applied to find a
remedy for the evil.
When a nation perceives that it is inwardly affected by the restless
ambition of its army, the first thought which occurs is to give this
inconvenient ambition an object by going to war. I speak no ill of
war: war almost always enlarges the mind of a people, and raises their
character. In some cases it is the only check to the excessive growth
of certain propensities which naturally spring out of the equality of
conditions, and it must be considered as a necessary corrective to
certain inveterate diseases to which democratic communities are
liable. War has great advantages, but we must not flatter ourselves
that it can diminish the danger I have just pointed out. That peril is
only suspended by it, to return more fiercely when the war is over; for
armies are much more impatient of peace after having tasted military
exploits. War could only be a remedy for a people which should
always be athirst for military glory. I foresee that all the military
rulers who may rise up in great democratic nations, will find it easier
to conquer with their armies, than to make their armies live at peace
after conquest. There are two things which a democratic people will
always find very difficult—to begin a war, and to end it.
Again, if war has some peculiar advantages for democratic nations,
on the other hand it exposes them to certain dangers which
aristocracies have no cause to dread to an equal extent. I shall only
point out two of these. Although war gratifies the army, it
embarrasses and often exasperates that countless multitude of men
whose minor passions every day require peace in order to be satisfied.
Thus there is some risk of its causing, under another form, the
disturbance it is intended to prevent. No protracted war can fail to
endanger the freedom of a democratic country. Not indeed that after
every victory it is to be apprehended that the victorious generals will
possess themselves by force of the supreme power, after the manner
of Sylla and Caesar: the danger is of another kind. War does not
always give over democratic communities to military government,
but it must invariably and immeasurably increase the powers of civil
government; it must almost compulsorily concentrate the direction of
all men and the management of all things in the hands of the
administration. If it lead not to despotism by sudden violence, it
prepares men for it more gently by their habits. All those who seek to
destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is
the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it. This is the first
axiom of the science.
One remedy, which appears to be obvious when the ambition of
soldiers and officers becomes the subject of alarm, is to augment the
number of commissions to be distributed by increasing the army. This
affords temporary relief, but it plunges the country into deeper
difficulties at some future period. To increase the army may produce
a lasting effect in an aristocratic community, because military
ambition is there confined to one class of men, and the ambition of
each individual stops, as it were, at a certain limit; so that it may be
possible to satisfy all who feel its influence. But nothing is gained by
increasing the army amongst a democratic people, because the
number of aspirants always rises in exactly the same ratio as the army
itself. Those whose claims have been satisfied by the creation of new
commissions are instantly succeeded by a fresh multitude beyond all
power of satisfaction; and even those who were but now satisfied
soon begin to crave more advancement; for the same excitement
prevails in the ranks of the army as in the civil classes of democratic
society, and what men want is not to reach a certain grade, but to
have constant promotion. Though these wants may not be very vast,
they are perpetually recurring. Thus a democratic nation, by
augmenting its army, only allays for a time the ambition of the
military profession, which soon becomes even more formidable,
because the number of those who feel it is increased. I am of opinion
that a restless and turbulent spirit is an evil inherent in the very
constitution of democratic armies, and beyond hope of cure. The
legislators of democracies must not expect to devise any military
organization capable by its influence of calming and restraining the
military profession: their efforts would exhaust their powers, before
the object is attained.
The remedy for the vices of the army is not to be found in the army
itself, but in the country. Democratic nations are naturally afraid of
disturbance and of despotism; the object is to turn these natural
instincts into well-digested, deliberate, and lasting tastes. When men
have at last learned to make a peaceful and profitable use of freedom,
and have felt its blessings—when they have conceived a manly love
of order, and have freely submitted themselves to discipline—these
same men, if they follow the profession of arms, bring into it,
unconsciously and almost against their will, these same habits and
manners. The general spirit of the nation being infused into the spirit
peculiar to the army, tempers the opinions and desires engendered by
military life, or represses them by the mighty force of public opinion.
Teach but the citizens to be educated, orderly, firm, and free, the
soldiers will be disciplined and obedient. Any law which, in
repressing the turbulent spirit of the army, should tend to diminish the
spirit of freedom in the nation, and to overshadow the notion of law
and right, would defeat its object: it would do much more to favor,
than to defeat, the establishment of military tyranny.
After all, and in spite of all precautions, a large army amidst a
democratic people will always be a source of great danger; the most
effectual means of diminishing that danger would be to reduce the
army, but this is a remedy which all nations have it not in their power
to use.
Chapter XXIII: Which Is The Most
Warlike And Most Revolutionary
Class In Democratic Armies?
It is a part of the essence of a democratic army to be very numerous
in proportion to the people to which it belongs, as I shall hereafter
show. On the other hand, men living in democratic times seldom
choose a military life. Democratic nations are therefore soon led to
give up the system of voluntary recruiting for that of compulsory
enlistment. The necessity of their social condition compels them to
resort to the latter means, and it may easily be foreseen that they will
all eventually adopt it. When military service is compulsory, the
burden is indiscriminately and equally borne by the whole
community. This is another necessary consequence of the social
condition of these nations, and of their notions. The government may
do almost whatever it pleases, provided it appeals to the whole
community at once: it is the unequal distribution of the weight, not
the weight itself, which commonly occasions resistance. But as
military service is common to all the citizens, the evident
consequence is that each of them remains but for a few years on
active duty. Thus it is in the nature of things that the soldier in
democracies only passes through the army, whilst among most
aristocratic nations the military profession is one which the soldier
adopts, or which is imposed upon him, for life.
This has important consequences. Amongst the soldiers of a
democratic army, some acquire a taste for military life, but the
majority, being enlisted against their will, and ever ready to go back
to their homes, do not consider themselves as seriously engaged in
the military profession, and are always thinking of quitting it. Such
men do not contract the wants, and only half partake in the passions,
which that mode of life engenders. They adapt themselves to their
military duties, but their minds are still attached to the interests and
the duties which engaged them in civil life. They do not therefore
imbibe the spirit of the army—or rather, they infuse the spirit of the
community at large into the army, and retain it there. Amongst
democratic nations the private soldiers remain most like civilians:
upon them the habits of the nation have the firmest hold, and public
opinion most influence. It is by the instrumentality of the private
soldiers especially that it may be possible to infuse into a democratic
army the love of freedom and the respect of rights, if these principles
have once been successfully inculcated on the people at large. The
reverse happens amongst aristocratic nations, where the soldiery have
eventually nothing in common with their fellow-citizens, and where
they live amongst them as strangers, and often as enemies. In
aristocratic armies the officers are the conservative element, because
the officers alone have retained a strict connection with civil society,
and never forego their purpose of resuming their place in it sooner or
later: in democratic armies the private soldiers stand in this position,
and from the same cause.
It often happens, on the contrary, that in these same democratic
armies the officers contract tastes and wants wholly distinct from
those of the nation—a fact which may be thus accounted for.
Amongst democratic nations, the man who becomes an officer severs
all the ties which bound him to civil life; he leaves it forever; he has
no interest to resume it. His true country is the army, since he owes
all he has to the rank he has attained in it; he therefore follows the
fortunes of the army, rises or sinks with it, and henceforward directs
all his hopes to that quarter only. As the wants of an officer are
distinct from those of the country, he may perhaps ardently desire
war, or labor to bring about a revolution at the very moment when the
nation is most desirous of stability and peace. There are, nevertheless,
some causes which allay this restless and warlike spirit. Though
ambition is universal and continual amongst democratic nations, we
have seen that it is seldom great. A man who, being born in the lower
classes of the community, has risen from the ranks to be an officer,
has already taken a prodigious step. He has gained a footing in a
sphere above that which he filled in civil life, and he has acquired
rights which most democratic nations will ever consider as
inalienable. *a He is willing to pause after so great an effort, and to
enjoy what he has won. The fear of risking what he has already
obtained damps the desire of acquiring what he has not got. Having
conquered the first and greatest impediment which opposed his
advancement, he resigns himself with less impatience to the slowness
of his progress. His ambition will be more and more cooled in
proportion as the increasing distinction of his rank teaches him that he
has more to put in jeopardy. If I am not mistaken, the least warlike,
and also the least revolutionary part, of a democratic army, will
always be its chief commanders. [Footnote a: The position of officers
is indeed much more secure amongst democratic nations than
elsewhere; the lower the personal standing of the man, the greater is
the comparative importance of his military grade, and the more just
and necessary is it that the enjoyment of that rank should be secured
by the laws.]
But the remarks I have just made on officers and soldiers are not
applicable to a numerous class which in all armies fills the
intermediate space between them—I mean the class of non-
commissioned officers. This class of non-commissioned officers
which have never acted a part in history until the present century, is
henceforward destined, I think, to play one of some importance. Like
the officers, non-commissioned officers have broken, in their minds,
all the ties which bound them to civil life; like the former, they devote
themselves permanently to the service, and perhaps make it even
more exclusively the object of all their desires: but non-
commissioned officers are men who have not yet reached a firm and
lofty post at which they may pause and breathe more freely, ere they
can attain further promotion. By the very nature of his duties, which
is invariable, a non-commissioned officer is doomed to lead an
obscure, confined, comfortless, and precarious existence; as yet he
sees nothing of military life but its dangers; he knows nothing but its
privations and its discipline—more difficult to support than dangers:
he suffers the more from his present miseries, from knowing that the
constitution of society and of the army allow him to rise above them;
he may, indeed, at any time obtain his commission, and enter at once
upon command, honors, independence, rights, and enjoyments. Not
only does this object of his hopes appear to him of immense
importance, but he is never sure of reaching it till it is actually his
own; the grade he fills is by no means irrevocable; he is always
entirely abandoned to the arbitrary pleasure of his commanding
officer, for this is imperiously required by the necessity of discipline:
a slight fault, a whim, may always deprive him in an instant of the
fruits of many years of toil and endeavor; until he has reached the
grade to which he aspires he has accomplished nothing; not till he
reaches that grade does his career seem to begin. A desperate
ambition cannot fail to be kindled in a man thus incessantly goaded
on by his youth, his wants, his passions, the spirit of his age, his
hopes, and his age, his hopes, and his fears. Non-commissioned
officers are therefore bent on war—on war always, and at any cost;
but if war be denied them, then they desire revolutions to suspend the
authority of established regulations, and to enable them, aided by the
general confusion and the political passions of the time, to get rid of
their superior officers and to take their places. Nor is it impossible for
them to bring about such a crisis, because their common origin and
habits give them much influence over the soldiers, however different
may be their passions and their desires.
It would be an error to suppose that these various characteristics of
officers, non-commissioned officers, and men, belong to any
particular time or country; they will always occur at all times, and
amongst all democratic nations. In every democratic army the non-
commissioned officers will be the worst representatives of the pacific
and orderly spirit of the country, and the private soldiers will be the
best. The latter will carry with them into military life the strength or
weakness of the manners of the nation; they will display a faithful
reflection of the community: if that community is ignorant and weak,
they will allow themselves to be drawn by their leaders into
disturbances, either unconsciously or against their will; if it is
enlightened and energetic, the community will itself keep them within
the bounds of order.
Chapter XXIV: Causes Which
Render Democratic Armies
Weaker Than Other Armies At
The Outset Of A Campaign, And
More Formidable In Protracted
Warfare
Any army is in danger of being conquered at the outset of a
campaign, after a long peace; any army which has long been engaged
in warfare has strong chances of victory: this truth is peculiarly
applicable to democratic armies. In aristocracies the military
profession, being a privileged career, is held in honor even in time of
peace. Men of great talents, great attainments, and great ambition
embrace it; the army is in all respects on a level with the nation, and
frequently above it. We have seen, on the contrary, that amongst a
democratic people the choicer minds of the nation are gradually
drawn away from the military profession, to seek by other paths,
distinction, power, and especially wealth. After a long peace—and in
democratic ages the periods of peace are long—the army is always
inferior to the country itself. In this state it is called into active
service; and until war has altered it, there is danger for the country as
well as for the army.
I have shown that in democratic armies, and in time of peace, the
rule of seniority is the supreme and inflexible law of advancement.
This is not only a consequence, as I have before observed, of the
constitution of these armies, but of the constitution of the people, and
it will always occur. Again, as amongst these nations the officer
derives his position in the country solely from his position in the
army, and as he draws all the distinction and the competency he
enjoys from the same source, he does not retire from his profession,
or is not super-annuated, till towards the extreme close of life. The
consequence of these two causes is, that when a democratic people
goes to war after a long interval of peace all the leading officers of
the army are old men. I speak not only of the generals, but of the non-
commissioned officers, who have most of them been stationary, or
have only advanced step by step. It may be remarked with surprise,
that in a democratic army after a long peace all the soldiers are mere
boys, and all the superior officers in declining years; so that the
former are wanting in experience, the latter in vigor. This is a strong
element of defeat, for the first condition of successful generalship is
youth: I should not have ventured to say so if the greatest captain of
modern times had not made the observation. These two causes do not
act in the same manner upon aristocratic armies: as men are promoted
in them by right of birth much more than by right of seniority, there
are in all ranks a certain number of young men, who bring to their
profession all the early vigor of body and mind. Again, as the men
who seek for military honors amongst an aristocratic people, enjoy a
settled position in civil society, they seldom continue in the army
until old age overtakes them. After having devoted the most vigorous
years of youth to the career of arms, they voluntarily retire, and spend
at home the remainder of their maturer years.
A long peace not only fills democratic armies with elderly officers,
but it also gives to all the officers habits both of body and mind which
render them unfit for actual service. The man who has long lived
amidst the calm and lukewarm atmosphere of democratic manners
can at first ill adapt himself to the harder toils and sterner duties of
warfare; and if he has not absolutely lost the taste for arms, at least he
has assumed a mode of life which unfits him for conquest.
Amongst aristocratic nations, the ease of civil life exercises less
influence on the manners of the army, because amongst those nations
the aristocracy commands the army: and an aristocracy, however
plunged in luxurious pleasures, has always many other passions
besides that of its own well-being, and to satisfy those passions more
thoroughly its well-being will be readily sacrificed. *a
a [ See Appendix V.]
I have shown that in democratic armies, in time of peace,
promotion is extremely slow. The officers at first support this state of
things with impatience, they grow excited, restless, exasperated, but
in the end most of them make up their minds to it. Those who have
the largest share of ambition and of resources quit the army; others,
adapting their tastes and their desires to their scanty fortunes,
ultimately look upon the military profession in a civil point of view.
The quality they value most in it is the competency and security
which attend it: their whole notion of the future rests upon the
certainty of this little provision, and all they require is peaceably to
enjoy it. Thus not only does a long peace fill an army with old men,
but it is frequently imparts the views of old men to those who are still
in the prime of life.
I have also shown that amongst democratic nations in time of peace
the military profession is held in little honor and indifferently
followed. This want of public favor is a heavy discouragement to the
army; it weighs down the minds of the troops, and when war breaks
out at last, they cannot immediately resume their spring and vigor. No
similar cause of moral weakness occurs in aristocratic armies: there
the officers are never lowered either in their own eyes or in those of
their countrymen, because, independently of their military greatness,
they are personally great. But even if the influence of peace operated
on the two kinds of armies in the same manner, the results would still
be different. When the officers of an aristocratic army have lost their
warlike spirit and the desire of raising themselves by service, they
still retain a certain respect for the honor of their class, and an old
habit of being foremost to set an example. But when the officers of a
democratic army have no longer the love of war and the ambition of
arms, nothing whatever remains to them.
I am therefore of opinion that, when a democratic people engages
in a war after a long peace, it incurs much more risk of defeat than
any other nation; but it ought not easily to be cast down by its
reverses, for the chances of success for such an army are increased by
the duration of the war. When a war has at length, by its long
continuance, roused the whole community from their peaceful
occupations and ruined their minor undertakings, the same passions
which made them attach so much importance to the maintenance of
peace will be turned to arms. War, after it has destroyed all modes of
speculation, becomes itself the great and sole speculation, to which
all the ardent and ambitious desires which equality engenders are
exclusively directed. Hence it is that the selfsame democratic nations
which are so reluctant to engage in hostilities, sometimes perform
prodigious achievements when once they have taken the field. As the
war attracts more and more of public attention, and is seen to create
high reputations and great fortunes in a short space of time, the
choicest spirits of the nation enter the military profession: all the
enterprising, proud, and martial minds, no longer of the aristocracy
solely, but of the whole country, are drawn in this direction. As the
number of competitors for military honors is immense, and war drives
every man to his proper level, great generals are always sure to spring
up. A long war produces upon a democratic army the same effects
that a revolution produces upon a people; it breaks through
regulations, and allows extraordinary men to rise above the common
level. Those officers whose bodies and minds have grown old in
peace, are removed, or superannuated, or they die. In their stead a
host of young men are pressing on, whose frames are already
hardened, whose desires are extended and inflamed by active service.
They are bent on advancement at all hazards, and perpetual
advancement; they are followed by others with the same passions and
desires, and after these are others yet unlimited by aught but the size
of the army. The principle of equality opens the door of ambition to
all, and death provides chances for ambition. Death is constantly
thinning the ranks, making vacancies, closing and opening the career
of arms.
There is moreover a secret connection between the military
character and the character of democracies, which war brings to light.
The men of democracies are naturally passionately eager to acquire
what they covet, and to enjoy it on easy conditions. They for the most
part worship chance, and are much less afraid of death than of
difficulty. This is the spirit which they bring to commerce and
manufactures; and this same spirit, carried with them to the field of
battle, induces them willingly to expose their lives in order to secure
in a moment the rewards of victory. No kind of greatness is more
pleasing to the imagination of a democratic people than military
greatness—a greatness of vivid and sudden lustre, obtained without
toil, by nothing but the risk of life. Thus, whilst the interests and the
tastes of the members of a democratic community divert them from
war, their habits of mind fit them for carrying on war well; they soon
make good soldiers, when they are roused from their business and
their enjoyments. If peace is peculiarly hurtful to democratic armies,
war secures to them advantages which no other armies ever possess;
and these advantages, however little felt at first, cannot fail in the end
to give them the victory. An aristocratic nation, which in a contest
with a democratic people does not succeed in ruining the latter at the
outset of the war, always runs a great risk of being conquered by it.
Chapter XXV: Of Discipline In
Democratic Armies
It is a very general opinion, especially in aristocratic countries, that
the great social equality which prevails in democracies ultimately
renders the private soldier independent of the officer, and thus
destroys the bond of discipline. This is a mistake, for there are two
kinds of discipline, which it is important not to confound. When the
officer is noble and the soldier a serf—one rich, the other poor—the
former educated and strong, the latter ignorant and weak—the
strictest bond of obedience may easily be established between the two
men. The soldier is broken in to military discipline, as it were, before
he enters the army; or rather, military discipline is nothing but an
enhancement of social servitude. In aristocratic armies the soldier will
soon become insensible to everything but the orders of his superior
officers; he acts without reflection, triumphs without enthusiasm, and
dies without complaint: in this state he is no longer a man, but he is
still a most formidable animal trained for war.
A democratic people must despair of ever obtaining from soldiers
that blind, minute, submissive, and invariable obedience which an
aristocratic people may impose on them without difficulty. The state
of society does not prepare them for it, and the nation might be in
danger of losing its natural advantages if it sought artificially to
acquire advantages of this particular kind. Amongst democratic
communities, military discipline ought not to attempt to annihilate the
free spring of the faculties; all that can be done by discipline is to
direct it; the obedience thus inculcated is less exact, but it is more
eager and more intelligent. It has its root in the will of him who
obeys: it rests not only on his instinct, but on his reason; and
consequently it will often spontaneously become more strict as
danger requires it. The discipline of an aristocratic army is apt to be
relaxed in war, because that discipline is founded upon habits, and
war disturbs those habits. The discipline of a democratic army on the
contrary is strengthened in sight of the enemy, because every soldier
then clearly perceives that he must be silent and obedient in order to
conquer.
The nations which have performed the greatest warlike
achievements knew no other discipline than that which I speak of.
Amongst the ancients none were admitted into the armies but freemen
and citizens, who differed but little from one another, and were
accustomed to treat each other as equals. In this respect it may be said
that the armies of antiquity were democratic, although they came out
of the bosom of aristocracy; the consequence was that in those armies
a sort of fraternal familiarity prevailed between the officers and the
men. Plutarch's lives of great commanders furnish convincing
instances of the fact: the soldiers were in the constant habit of freely
addressing their general, and the general listened to and answered
whatever the soldiers had to say: they were kept in order by language
and by example, far more than by constraint or punishment; the
general was as much their companion as their chief. I know not
whether the soldiers of Greece and Rome ever carried the minutiae of
military discipline to the same degree of perfection as the Russians
have done; but this did not prevent Alexander from conquering
Asia—and Rome, the world.
Chapter XXVI: Some
Considerations On War In
Democratic Communities
When the principle of equality is in growth, not only amongst a
single nation, but amongst several neighboring nations at the same
time, as is now the case in Europe, the inhabitants of these different
countries, notwithstanding the dissimilarity of language, of customs,
and of laws, nevertheless resemble each other in their equal dread of
war and their common love of peace. *a It is in vain that ambition or
anger puts arms in the hands of princes; they are appeased in spite of
themselves by a species of general apathy and goodwill, which makes
the sword drop from their grasp, and wars become more rare. As the
spread of equality, taking place in several countries at once,
simultaneously impels their various inhabitants to follow
manufactures and commerce, not only do their tastes grow alike, but
their interests are so mixed and entangled with one another that no
nation can inflict evils on other nations without those evils falling
back upon itself; and all nations ultimately regard war as a calamity,
almost as severe to the conqueror as to the conquered. Thus, on the
one hand, it is extremely difficult in democratic ages to draw nations
into hostilities; but on the other hand, it is almost impossible that any
two of them should go to war without embroiling the rest. The
interests of all are so interlaced, their opinions and their wants so
much alike, that none can remain quiet when the others stir. Wars
therefore become more rare, but when they break out they spread
over a larger field. Neighboring democratic nations not only become
alike in some respects, but they eventually grow to resemble each
other in almost all. *b This similitude of nations has consequences of
great importance in relation to war.
a [ It is scarcely necessary for me to observe that the
dread of war displayed by the nations of Europe is
not solely attributable to the progress made by the
principle of equality amongst them; independently
of this permanent cause several other accidental
causes of great weight might be pointed out, and I
may mention before all the rest the extreme
lassitude which the wars of the Revolution and the
Empire have left behind them.]
b [ This is not only because these nations have the
same social condition, but it arises from the very
nature of that social condition which leads men to
imitate and identify themselves with each other.
When the members of a community are divided
into castes and classes, they not only differ from
one another, but they have no taste and no desire
to be alike; on the contrary, everyone endeavors,
more and more, to keep his own opinions
undisturbed, to retain his own peculiar habits, and
to remain himself. The characteristics of
individuals are very strongly marked. When the
state of society amongst a people is democratic—
that is to say, when there are no longer any castes
or classes in the community, and all its members
are nearly equal in education and in property—the
human mind follows the opposite direction. Men
are much alike, and they are annoyed, as it were,
by any deviation from that likeness: far from
seeking to preserve their own distinguishing
singularities, they endeavor to shake them off, in
order to identify themselves with the general mass
of the people, which is the sole representative of
right and of might to their eyes. The
characteristics of individuals are nearly
obliterated. In the ages of aristocracy even those
who are naturally alike strive to create imaginary
differences between themselves: in the ages of
democracy even those who are not alike seek only
to become so, and to copy each other—so strongly
is the mind of every man always carried away by
the general impulse of mankind. Something of the
same kind may be observed between nations: two
nations having the same aristocratic social
condition, might remain thoroughly distinct and
extremely different, because the spirit of
aristocracy is to retain strong individual
characteristics; but if two neighboring nations
have the same democratic social condition, they
cannot fail to adopt similar opinions and manners,
DESCRIZIONE APPUNTO
Celebre volume di Alexis de Tocqueville "Democrazia in America", vol.2, nella versione inglese, parte del programma del corso di Storia del Pensiero Politico moderno e contemporaneo della Prof.ssa Bruna Consarelli. Al suo interno l'autore descrive ed esprime il suo giudizio sulla democrazia statunitense.
Fonte: [url=http://www.gutenberg.org/files/816/816-h/816-h.htm]http://www.gutenberg.org/files/816/816-h/816-h.htm[/url]
I contenuti di questa pagina costituiscono rielaborazioni personali del Publisher vipviper di informazioni apprese con la frequenza delle lezioni di Storia del Pensiero Politico moderno e contemporaneo e studio autonomo di eventuali libri di riferimento in preparazione dell'esame finale o della tesi. Non devono intendersi come materiale ufficiale dell'università Roma Tre - Uniroma3 o del prof Consarelli Bruna.
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