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<h1 class="regtext"><center><i>Democracy in America</i></center></h1>
<h3 class="regtext"><center>A Book Review</center></h3>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section1">Contents</h2>
 
<p class="regtext">
<ol class="regtext">
 <h4>Introductory</h4>
 <li><a href="#section1">Contents</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section2">Background</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section3">Tocqueville's Framing</a></li>
 <h4>Origins</h4>
  <li><a href="#section4">Origins: American Geography</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section5">Origins: The Puritan Stock</a></li>
 <h4>Government</h4>
  <li><a href="#section6">Government: Decentralized</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section7">Government: The Judiciary</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section8">Government: The Constitution</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section9">Government: Politics and Politicians</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section10">Government: A Lighter Aside</a></li>
 <h4>People</h4>
  <li><a href="#section11">People: The Good</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section12">People: The Bad</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section13">People: Old vs New World</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section14">People: Race & Slavery</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section15">People: The Indian</a></li>
 <h4>Culture</h4>
  <li><a href="#section16">Culture: American Religion</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section17">Culture: Free Press</a></li>
 <h4>Democracy</h4>
  <li><a href="#section18">Democracy: Tocqueville's Tendencies</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section19">Democracy: And Aristocracy</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section20">Democracy: The Good</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section21">Democracy: Despotism of the Majority</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section22">Democracy: Other Criticisms</a></li>
 <h4>Philosophy</h4>
  <li><a href="#section23">Philosophy: Religion</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section24">Philosophy: Miscellany</a></li>
 <h4>Predictions</h4>
  <li><a href="#section25">Predictions: War and Expansion</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section26">Predictions: Social Situation</a></li>
 <h4>Concluding</h4>
  <li><a href="#section27">Recap: American Development</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section28">Final Warnings</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section29">Further Reading</a></li>
  <li><a href="#section30">Footnotes</a></li>
</ol>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section2">Background</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Alexis de Tocqueville’s <i>Democracy in America</i> is the most often quoted book about the United States
and is "universally regarded as one of the most influential books ever written about America."
Its author has been called the most famous visitor to the US as well as the most unusual member
of the liberal pantheon.  All US presidents since Eisenhower have quoted him approvingly,
and Harvard scholars Mansfield and Winthrop, who have written the definitive modern translation,
declare the book to have the authority of a classic, and call it 
"at once the best book ever written on democracy, and the best book ever written on America." 
<a href="#footnote1">[footnotes]</a>
</p>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville and fellow French aristocrat Gustave de Beaumont traveled for nine months across American beginning in 1831,
when Tocqueville was 25 years old.  They traveled as far as New Orleans, the Ohio Valley, and the upper Great Lakes
(the then western fringe of civilization) in addition to visiting most of the Atlantic states.  After returning to France,
Tocqueville published this work in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840.  
The modern translation is 676 pages of dense text.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
The book is partly about Democracy, partly about America, and often about their unique combination.
The first volume is mostly firsthand observations and descriptions, while the second is more
general and philosophical.  Throughout both he makes notable predictions and discusses a wide range
of American people & pratices.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
The work is large and difficult to summarize; any attempt would drain it of vitality.  This review loosely explores
a few dozen notable themes and topics that don't map directly to chapters or sections.
Covering fewer would be inadequate, covering more would be tedious, and over-generalizing would be unfair to 
the nuanced and meandering nature of the text.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
As seen above in the Contents, the themes are grouped topically into Origins, Government, People, Culture,
Democracy, Philosophy, and Predictions.  There are also some introductory and concluding sections.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
A citation written as <span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.5, 210]</span> indicates Volume I, Part 2, Chapter 5, page 210
in the Mansfield translation, first edition.
</p>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section3">Tocqueville's Framing</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville’s 12-page introduction frames the work.  He describes:
<ul class="regtext">
<li>Equality of conditions as the “generative fact” and “central point” of all his observations</li>
<li>A 700-year trend of the spread of wealth and power that is providential and unstoppable</li>
<li>His own “sort of religious terror” at the sight of this revolution, as it destroys
 the lofty values of aristocracy, and which he describes with phrases such as 
“advancing today amid the ruins it has made,” “degrading souls” with
“coarseness and ignorance,” “confusion of ranks,” and “less brilliance”</li>
<li>His simultaneous admiration of the revolution, such as its 
“energetic passions, generous sentiments, profound beliefs, and savage virtues” and more diffuse prosperity</li>
<li>The need for a new political science for this new world</li>
<li>His decision to observe democracy, discern its consequences, understand its goods and ills, 
hopes and fears, and render it profitable to men</li>
</ul>

<blockquote>
If you examine what is happening in France every fifty years from the eleventh century on, at the end of each of these periods you cannot fail to perceive that a double revolution has operated on the state of society. The noble has fallen on the social ladder, and the commoner has risen; the one descends, the other climbs. Each half century brings them nearer, and soon they are going to touch.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The gradual development of equality of conditions is therefore a providential fact, and it has the principal characteristics of one; it is universal, it is enduring, each day it escapes human power; all events, like all men, serve its development.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
One would be strangely mistaken to think that I wanted to make a panegyric; whoever reads this book will be well convinced that such was not my design; nor was my goal to advocate such a form of government in general; for I number among those who believe that there is almost never any absolute good in the laws; I have not even claimed to judge whether the social revolution, whose advance seems to me irresistible, was advantageous or fatal to humanity; I have accepted this revolution as an accomplished fact or one about to be accomplished; and among the peoples who have seen it operating in their midst, I have sought the one in whom it has attained the most complete and peaceful development, in order to discern clearly its natural consequences, and to perceive, if possible, the means of rendering it profitable to men. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I Introduction, 12-13]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Throughout the book he re-emphasizes that men will not tolerate aristocracy anymore
and that aristocracy has foreseen it <span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.4, 54] [II 2.2, 482]</span>.   
He assumes the inevitability of democracy, and seeks to describe its consequences, in particular
its dangers.  In his Notice to Volume II he says:

<blockquote>
One will perhaps be astonished that, while I am firmly of the opinion that the democratic revolution to which we are witness is an irresistible fact against which it would be neither desirable nor wise to struggle, in this book I often come to address such severe words to the democratic societies this revolution has created.  [...] I thought that many would take it upon themselves to announce the new goods that equality promises to men, but that few would dare to point out from afar the perils with which it threatens them.  It is therefore principally at those perils that I have directed my regard. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II Notice, 400]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
His final summary recapitulates many themes, both on the dangers and benefits of democracy:

<blockquote>
Men who inhabit democratic countries, having neither superiors nor inferiors nor habitual and necessary
associates, willingly fall back on themselves and consider themselves in isolation.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Not only do they not naturally have the taste to occupy themselves with the public,
but often they lack the time to do it.  Private life is so active in democratic times, so agitated, 
so filled with desires and work, that hardly any energy or leisure remains to each man for political life.
<br/><br/>
That such penchants are not invincible I shall not deny, since my principal goal in writing this book 
has been to combat them.
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 4.3, 643]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
I wished to expose to broad daylight the perils that equality brings to human independence because I firmly believe that these perils are the most formidable as well as the least foreseen of all those that the future holds. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 4.7, 672]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
[W]hat seems to me decadence is therefore progress in his [God’s] eyes [...] Equality is perhaps less elevated, but it is more just, and its justice makes for its greatness and its beauty. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 4.8, 674]</div>
</blockquote>
</p>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section4">Origins: American Geography</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville begins with the favorable geography of America: a huge continent, rich in resources but devoid of civilization,
isolated from other world powers, with temperate climate, the world’s best ports, and a superlative river valley.
Even the poor soil (of New England) worked to inhibit aristocracy by making anything but owner-operator farms uneconomical
<span class="quoteattrib"> [I 1.2, 30]</span>.
</p>

<blockquote>
North America was still, properly speaking, an empty continent, a wilderness land, that awaited inhabitants [...] as if God had held it in reserve. [...] It presents, as in the first days of the creation, rivers whose source does not dry up, green and moist solitudes, boundless fields that the plowshare of the laborer has not yet turned. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 267-8]</div>
</blockquote>


<blockquote>
There is no people in the world that can offer to commerce deeper, vaster, and safer ports than the Americans 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 384]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Those coasts, so well prepared for commerce and industry, those rivers so deep, that inexhaustible Mississippi Valley, that continent as a whole, then appeared as the still-empty cradle of a great nation. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.1, 27]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Though Tocqueville begins with and sometimes revisits geography, he does not descend to the modern vice of material reductionism. Later excerpts will show that he ascribes more importance to the settlers themselves -- their habits, opinions, and mores -- than the land, while also recognizing the interconnectedness of all factors, and the impact of geography on particular issues <span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 265]</span>.  On reductionism he warns:
</p>

<blockquote>
I am not unaware that several of my contemporaries have thought that peoples are never masters of themselves here below, and that they necessarily obey I do not know which insurmountable and unintelligent force born of previous events, the race, the soil, or the climate.  Those are false and cowardly doctrines that can never produce any but weak men and pusillanimous nations. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 4.8, 676]</div>
</blockquote>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section5">Origins: The Puritan Stock</h2>

<p class="regtext">
America was influenced by its spectacular geography, but even more by its “point of departure,”
in Tocqueville’s words, from a core of high-quality Puritans, which Tocqueville calls 
“the seed of what is to follow and the key to almost the whole work” <span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.2, 29]</span>.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
He briefly mentions the north/south dichotomy, in particular the corroding influence of slavery and wealth-hunting,
before highlighting the particular influence of the Puritans of New England, who 
“wanted to make <i>an idea</i> triumph” <span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.2, 32]</span>.  These settlers were homogenous and equality reigned in fact:
they spoke the same language, had centuries of experience under law and order, were educated, religious,
virtuous, and motivated.  Their habits and opinions came to dominate the entire country.
</p>

<blockquote>
The bond of language is perhaps the strongest and most lasting that can unite men.
All the emigrants spoke the same tongue; they were all children of one and the same people.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
One saw more notions of rights, more principles of true freedom spread among them than in most of the peoples in Europe. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Education had been much increased in [the intellectual struggles of Christian religious quarrels];
the mind had received a more profound cultivation.  While they had been absorbed in speaking of religion,
mores had become purer. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.2, 29]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
New England’s principles spread at first to the neighboring states; later, they gradually won out in the most distant, and in the end, if I can express myself so, they <i>penetrated</i> the entire confederation. They now exert their influence beyond its limits, over the whole American world. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Proportionally, there was a greater mass of enlightenment spread among those men than within any European nation of our day. [...] It was not necessity that forced them to abandon their country; they left a social position they might regret and secure means of living; nor did they come to the New World in order to improve their situation or to increase their wealth; they tore themselves away from the sweetness of their native country to obey a purely intellectual need; in exposing themselves to the inevitable miseries of exile, they wanted to make <i>an idea</i> triumph. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.2, 32]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville sees early Puritan laws as particularly important in explaining “the great social enigma” of America,
which is its unusual combination of religion and freedom.  He examines a sample code of law, remarking on both its
nominal content and the real-life implementation.
</p>

<blockquote>
Nothing is both more singular and more instructive than the legislation of this period; there above all one finds
the password to the great social enigma that the United States presents to the world in our day.  
<br/><br/>
Among these memorials, we particularly distinguish, as one of the most characteristic, the code of laws
that the little state of Connecticut passed in 1650. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.2, 37]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
He spends several pages highlighting examples from that Connecticut code. “One never saw the death penalty laid
down more profusely in the law,” including for blasphemy, sorcery, adultery, rape, and worshipping any other God
 but the Lord God, “or applied to fewer of the guilty,” the nominal penalties being softened by the enlightened
spirit and mild mores of the inhabitants.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
The penal laws are “preoccupied with the care of maintaining moral order” and thus “there is almost no sin
that does not fall subject to the censure of the magistrate.”  Laws against, for instance, keeping company
among unmarried people, were often enforced.  Others, such as punishments for laziness and drunkenness,
or forced attendance at divine service, it is unspecified how vigorously they were enforced. <span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.2, 38-39]</span>
</p>

<p class="regtext">
Simultaneously the laws greatly respected the spirit of freedom.
</p>

<blockquote>
Beside this penal legislation, so strongly imprinted with the narrow spirit of sect and all the religious passions
that persecution had exalted and that still fermented in the depth of souls, was placed and in a way connected to them
a body of political laws which, drafted two hundred years ago, still seems to anticipate from very far the spirit of freedom in our age.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Intervention of the people in public affairs, free voting of taxes, responsibility of the agents of power, individual
freedom and judgement by jury were established there
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
In Connecticut the electoral body was composed, from the origin, of the universality of citizens [...] 
Citizens above sixteen years were obliged to bear arms
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.2, 39]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville observes that these two distinct elements, the <i>spirit of religion</i> and the <i>spirit of freedom</i>,
which “elsewhere have made war with each other,” America has marvelously combined in a symbiotic relationship. <span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.2, 37, 43]</span>
</p>

<blockquote>
In America, it is religion that leads to enlightenment; it is the observance of divine laws that guides man to freedom.
[...] Religion sees in civil freedom a noble exercise of the faculties of man [...] Freedom sees in religion the companion
of its struggles and triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, the divine source of its rights. It considers religion as the
safeguard of mores; and mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its own duration. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.2, 43-44]</div>
</blockquote>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section6">Government: Decentralized</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Another early pattern in America is its radical decentralization.  Federalism constrained the tiny national government,
which needed neither army nor agents nor high taxes; 
townships performed most administration and tax collection;
local sovereignty reigned, without the threats posed by a large city or a central source of news.
</p>

<p class="regtext">  
Tocqueville distinguishes between governmental centralization -- the idea of laws passed by a state legislature,
which he deems reasonable and necessary -- and administrative centralization -- the idea that laws are enforced
by centralized agents (rather than local officials), which he deems hazardous.  
He attributes the American way mostly to the mores and habits of the people, but also to the geography that was
too dispersed for central administration.
</p>

<blockquote>
They are, in a word, twenty-four little sovereign nations, the sum of which forms the great body of the Union. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.5, 56]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Thus it is true that the tax is voted by the legislature, but it is the township that apportions and collects it;
the existence of a school is imposed, but the township builds it, pays for it, and directs it. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.5, 63]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Generally, one can say that the salient characteristic of public administration in the United States is to be
enormously decentralized. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.5, 79]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
I saw the evils of the state imputed to an infinite variety of causes, but never to freedom of the township. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.5, 92]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Congress regulates the principal actions of social existence; every detail of it is abandoned to provincial legislation 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8, 153]</div>
</blockquote>


<p class="regtext">
Furthermore, by combining a series of footnotes, we may conclude that in the 1820s, the sum of spending at the national,
state, and county level probably amounted to about half a percent of the salary of a low level government clerk. 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.5, 207 footnote 11] [1, 2.5, 204 footnote 9]</span>
</p>

<ul class="regtext">
<li>Tocqueville used one year of figures from Pennsylvania</li>
<li>He obtained federal, state, and county figures, but was unable to find township expenditures</li>
<li>Per capita annual taxes were approximately 13 francs federal, 4 state, and 4 county (he converted dollars to francs)</li>
<li>The income of the lowest level Treasury Dept clerk was 5420 francs per year</li>
<li>Thus 21 / 5240 is approximately 0.4%</li>
</ul>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section7">Government: The Judiciary</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville explains the government proper of the United States, which in some ways is remarkably little changed
from the 1830s. His level of detail approaches tedious,
yet contains some notable observation and analysis.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
He describes our judicial system as unique in the world due to the ability for judges to 
“found their rulings on the <i>Constitution</i> rather than on the <i>laws</i>.” <span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.6, 93,95]</span>.  
</p>

<blockquote>
When one invokes a law before the courts of the United States that the judge deems contrary to the Constitution,
he can therefore refuse to apply it.  This power is the only one that is particular to the American magistrate,
 but a great political influence flows from it.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Americans have therefore entrusted an immense political power to their courts; but in obliging them to attack the laws
only by judicial means, they have much diminished the dangers of this power [...] [which] forms one of the most
powerful barriers that has ever been raised against the tyranny of political assemblies. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.6, 96-7]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
When Tocqueville says “judicial means,” he means that judges can only bind (a) the interested parties 
(b) in a specific dispute that (c) is brought before him.  He cannot spontaneously rule nor generally attack laws,
though later Tocqueville concedes that everything eventually is brought before the courts: 
“there is almost no political question in the United States that is not resolved sooner or later into a judicial question.” <span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.8, 257]</span>
</p>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville was particularly impressed, perhaps due to the excesses of French politics, that political trials
cannot result in jail time <span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.7, 101]</span>. The mildness of American consequence (removal of office, but no criminal penalty)
makes Americans more likely to curb excesses by exercising removal from office.  He predicts that
should such political trials increase, it would indicate the start of degeneration of the republic <span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.7, 104]</span>.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
The Supreme Court has immense power, which is a dangerous situation, but is necessary to our system of government.
</p>

<blockquote>
When, after having examined in detail the organization of the Supreme Court, one comes to consider in sum
the prerogatives that have been given it, one discovers without difficulty that a more immense judicial power
has never been constituted in any people.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The original cause of the danger is not in the constitution of the tribunal, but in the very nature of federal
governments. We have seen that nowhere is it more necessary to constitute the judicial power strongly than in
confederated peoples, because nowhere are the individual existences that can struggle against the social body
greater and in a better state to resist the use of the material force of government.   
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8, 142]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Lawyers, too, have immense political influence that works to counteract the
“lapses of democracy,” because lawyers are by nature aristocratic.
</p>

<blockquote>
Men who have made the laws their special study have drawn from their work the habits of order, a certain taste
for forms, a sort of instinctive love for the regular sequence of ideas, which naturally render them strongly
opposed to the revolutionary spirit and unreflective passions of democracy. [...] Hidden at the bottom of the
souls of lawyers one therefore finds a part of the tastes and habits of aristocracy. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.8, 252]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
If one asked me where I place the American aristocracy, I would respond without hesitation that it is not among
the rich, who have no common bond that brings them together.  The American aristocracy is at the attorneys’ bar
and on the judges’ bench. 
<br/><br/>
The more one reflects on what takes place in the United States, the more one feels convinced that the body of lawyers
forms the most powerful and so to speak the lone counterweight to democracy in this country. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.8, 256]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
And he makes some colorful comments on the nature of the precedent-based legal system, so different from his native France.
</p>

<blockquote>
The English and the Americans have preserved the legislation of precedents; that is to say, they continue to draw
from the opinions and legal decisions of their fathers the opinions that they will hold in matters of law
and the decisions that they will take.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The English or the American lawyer inquires into what has been done, the French lawyer into what one ought
to wish to do; the one wants rulings, the other reasons.  
<br/><br/>
When you listen to an English or an American lawyer, you are surprised to see him cite the opinion of others so often
and to hear him speak so little of his own, whereas the contrary happens among us.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Our written laws are often difficult to understand, but each man can read them; there is nothing, on the contrary,
more obscure for the vulgar and less within his reach than legislation founded on precedents. [...] The French
lawyer is only a learned man; but the English or American man of law resembles in a way the priests of Egypt;
like them, he is the lone interpreter of an occult science. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.8, 255]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
And he notes universal jury participation by citizens, and the use of juries in both criminal and civil affairs,
 which serves as a school of civics that raises the minds of men.
</p>

<blockquote>
In England, the jury is recruited from the aristocratic portion of the nation. [...] In the United States, the same
system is applied to the entire people.  Each American is elector, eligible [for office], and juror.  The system of
the jury, as it is understood in America, appears to me as direct and as extreme a consequence of the dogma of the 
sovereignty of the people as universal suffrage.  These are two equally powerful means of making the majority reign.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The jury, and above all the civil jury, serves to give to the minds of all citizens a part of the habits of mind 
of the judge; and these habits are precisely those that best prepare the people to be free. [...]
It teaches men the practice of equity. Each, in judging his neighbor, thinks that he could be judged in his turn.
That is above all true of the jury in a civil matter; there is almost no one who fears being the object of a
criminal prosecution one day; but everyone can have a lawsuit.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
It vests each citizen with a sort of magistracy; it makes all feel that they have duties toward society to fulfill
and that they enter into its government. In forcing men to occupy themselves with something other than their own affairs,
it combats individual selfishness, which is like the blight of societies.
<br/><br/>
The jury serves incredibly to form the judgement and to augment the natural enlightenment of the people.  There, in my
opinion, is its greatest advantage. One ought to consider it as a school, free of charge and always open, where each juror
comes to be instructed in his rights, where he enters into daily communication with the most instructed and most enlightened
members of the elevated classes, where the laws are taught to him in a practical manner and are put within reach of his
intelligence by the efforts of the attorneys, the advice of the judge, and the very passions of the parties.  I think that
the practical intelligence and good political sense of the Americans must principally be attributed to the long
use that they have made of the jury in civil matters. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.8, 261-262]</div>
</blockquote>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section8">Government: The Constitution</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville describes the constitution as the product of an assembly of “the finest minds and the noblest characters
that had ever appeared in the New World,” presided by George Washington <span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8, 107]</span>.  He discusses its enumerated
powers and specifically recommends the Federalist Papers as a “a fine book that, though special to America, ought
to be familiar to statesmen of every country.” <span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8 footnote, 108]</span> 
</p>

<blockquote>
The prerogatives of the federal government were therefore carefully defined, and it was declared that everything
that was not comprised in that definition returned to the prerogatives of the state governments.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8, 107-108]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
He recognizes the disproportionate power of the senate, without notable commentary thereon <span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8, 112]</span>. 
He is particularly impressed by the amendability of our Constitution, which he contrasts with France, 
which cannot be amended (presumably, though not mentioned, a cause of their frequent revolutions), and Britain,
which can be amended so easily that it is little more than an ordinary law.
</p>

<blockquote>
In France, the constitution is an immutable work, or supposed to be so. No power can change anything in it;
such is the received theory.
<br/><br/>
In England, they recognize in Parliament the right to modify the constitution. In England, the constitution can 
therefore change constantly, or rather it does not exist.  Parliament is at the same time the legislative body
and the constituting body. 
<br/><br/>
In America, political theories are simpler and more rational.
An American constitution is not supposed to be immutable as in France; it cannot be modified by the ordinary 
powers of society as in England. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.6, 95]</div>
</blockquote>
 
<p class="regtext">
Some notable changes since Tocqueville’s day is that the president then could fire all federal employees,
 and states could not alter private contracts. <span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8, 122 & 138]</span>
</p>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section9">Government: Politics and Politicians</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville criticizes the state of politicians and parties in America.  He declares that since the early Federalists
there have been no great parties nor great men.  He finds Representatives to be vulgar and Senators to be respectable,
mostly due to indirect election.  He generalizes that distinguished men are often repeled from democratic leadership.  
</p>

<blockquote>
America has had great parties; today they no longer exist: it has gained much in happiness, but not in morality. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The party that wanted to restrict popular power sought above all to make its doctrines apply to the Constitution of the Union,
by which it earned the name <i>federal</i>.
<br/><br/>
The other, which claimed to be the exclusive lover of freedom, took the title <i>republican</i> 
(editor’s footnote: Republican Democrats, today’s Democrat party).
<br/><br/>
America is the land of democracy. The Federalists were therefore always in a minority; but they counted in their ranks 
almost all the great men the War of Independence had given birth to, and their moral power was very extensive.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.2, 167-8]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
While the natural instincts of democracy bring the people to keep distinguished men away from power, an instinct no less
strong brings the latter to distance themselves from a political career, in which it is so difficult for them to remain
 completely themselves and to advance without debasing themselves. 
<br/><br/>
This thought is very naively expressed by Chancellor Kent.
The celebrated author I speak of, after having given great eulogies to the portion of the Constitution that accords
 the nomination of judges to the executive power, adds: “It is probable, in fact, that the most appropriate men to
 fill these places would have too much reserve in their manners and too much severity in their principles ever to be
 able to gather the majority of votes at an election that rested on universal suffrage.” (Kent’s Commentaries, Vol 1)
 That was printed in America in the year 1830 without contradiction.
<br/><br/>
It has demonstrated to me that those who regard universal suffrage as a guarantee of the goodness of choices make
a complete illusion for themselves. Universal suffrage has other advantages, but not that one. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.5, 189-190]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
When you enter the House of Representatives in Washington, you feel yourself struck by the vulgar aspect of this great assembly.
  Often the eye seeks in vain for a celebrated man within it. [...] In a country where instruction is almost universally
 widespread, it is said that the people’s representatives do not always know how to write correctly.
<br/><br/>
Two steps away is the chamber of the Senate, whose narrow precincts enclose a large portion of the celebrities of America.
[...] All the words that issue from this assembly would do honor to the greatest parliamentary debates of Europe.
<br/><br/>
Whence this peculiar contrast? [...] Why are so many vulgar elements gathered in the first assembly when the second seems
to have the monopoly on talents and enlightenment? [...] I see only a single fact that explains it: the election that produces
the House of Representatives is direct; that from which the Senate eminates is subject to two stages.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.5, 191-2]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Elaborating on his distaste for direct election, and the benefits of layers of indirection, he later predicts wider
use of the two stage electoral system to avoid “being miserably lost on the shoals of democracy.“
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.5, 192]</span>
</p>

<p class="regtext">
He further observes that since the founding, which was illuminated by Federalist principles, the Republican
Democrats (today’s Democrats) had “advanced from conquest to conquest, and has taken possession of the society as a whole.”
<span class="quoteattrib"> [I 2.2, 168]</span>
</p>

<p class="regtext">
He notes that voting is universal except for “slaves, domestics, and indigents nourished by the townships.”  
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.6, 230]</span>
</p>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section10">Government: A Lighter Aside</h2>

<p class="regtext">
In addition to serious analysis, Tocqueville records some mostly-forgotten bits of history: that the House of Representatives had already twice 
chosen the President by 1830, that Washington DC was once an immense empty city 
(“they have already uprooted trees for ten leagues around lest they should become inconvenient to the 
future citizens of this imaginary metropolis”), and that Massachusetts banned a newspaper edited 
by Ben Franklin’s brother. 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8, 126] [II 1.12, 443-4] [I 2.3 note XV, 696]</span>
</p>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section11">People: The Good</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville is full of penetrating observations of American people themselves.
Later excerpts will explore regional and racial differences; his more general statements depict the broad homogeneity
that makes such a large region governable. 
</p>

<blockquote>
One therefore encounters an immense multitude of individuals who have nearly the same number of notions in matters
of religion, of history, of science, of political economy, of legislation, of government. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.3, 51]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
There is one fact that admirably facilitates federal government in the United States.  The different states have not
only nearly the same interests, the same origin, the same language, but even the same degree of civilization, 
which almost always renders agreement between them an easy thing. I do not know if there is a small European nation 
that does not present an aspect less homogeneous in its different parts than the American people, whose territory
is as great as half of Europe.
<br/><br/>
From the state of Maine to the state of Georgia one counts around four hundred leagues. Nevertheless, less 
difference exists between the civilization of Maine and that of Georgia than between the civilization of Normandy 
and that of Brittany.  Maine and Georgia, placed at two ends of a vast empire, therefore naturally find more real 
opportunities to form a confederation than Normandy and Brittany, which are separated only by a stream.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8, 158-9]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville says many praiseworthy things about the American people.  They are peaceful, without class hatreds;
the rich classes mingle with all.
</p>

<blockquote>
In the United States there is no religious hatred because religion is universally respected and no sect is dominant;
there is no class hatred because the people are everything and no one yet dares to struggle with them; finally,
 there are no public miseries to exploit because the material state of the country offers such an immense scope 
for industry that it is enough to leave man to himself for him to do prodigies. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.2, 169]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
In the United States, the most opulent citizens take much care not to isolate themselves from the people;
 on the contrary, they constantly come close to them, they gladly listen to them and speak to them every day.
They know that the rich in democracies always need the poor, and that in democratic times one ties the poor 
to oneself more by manners than by benefits.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 2.4, 487]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
The Americans are full of commercial passion that promotes order and honesty, and are constantly uniting 
for commerce, religion, and other public goods.
</p>

<blockquote>
The passions that agitate the Americans most profoundly are commercial passions and not political passions, or rather,
they carry the habits of trade into politics. They love order, without which affairs cannot prosper, and they 
particularly prize regularity of mores, on which good houses [of business] are founded. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 273]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial
associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, 
very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, 
to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they 
create hospitals, prisons, schools.  Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a 
sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate.  Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, 
you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association 
in the United States.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 2.5, 489]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Americans will rule the oceans, he predicts, due to their boldness that borders on reckless.
</p>

<blockquote>
United States vessels fill the ports of Le Havre and Liverpool. One sees only a few English or French bottoms 
in the port of New York.
<br/><br/>
Thus not only does the American trader brave competition in his own soil, but he also does combat with foreigners 
advantageously on theirs.
<br/><br/>
This is readily explained: of all the vessels in the world, United States ships cross the seas most cheaply. [...]
American vessels are almost as dear to build as ours; they are not better constructed and generally do not last as long.
The wages of the American seaman are higher than those of the European seaman [...] How is it, therefore, that Americans
navigate more cheaply than we do? 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The European navigator ventures on the seas only with prudence; he departs only when the weather invites him to; 
if an unforeseen accident comes upon him, he enters into port at night, he furls a part of his sails, and when he sees 
the ocean whiten at the approach of land, he slows his course and examines the sun.
<br/><br/>
The American neglects these precautions and braves these dangers. He departs while the tempest still roars; at night 
as in day he opens all his sails to the wind; while on the go, he repairs his ship, worn down by the storm, and when 
he finally approaches the end of his course, he continues to fly toward the shore as if he already perceived the port.
<br/><br/>
The American is often shipwrecked; but there is no navigator who crosses the seas as rapidly as he does. Doing the 
same things as another in less time, he can do them at less expense.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 385-6]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
And Tocqueville earnestly paints the American mythos of “go west”:  the enlightened common man taming the wilderness 
with bible and hatchet; the pioneer cabins with books of Shakespeare; the women born in mansions yet resolutely enduring the leaky hut.
</p>

<blockquote>
It is therefore Americans who, abandoning the place of their birth daily, go to create vast domains in the distance. 
[...] They were told that fortune is to be found somewhere toward the west, and they go off in haste to meet it. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 268-9]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
If [the outside observer] pays attention only to the learned, he will be astonished at their small number; 
if he counts the ignorant, the American people will seem to him the most enlightened people on earth. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Scarcely arrived at a place that will serve as a refuge for him, the pioneer hastily fells some trees and raises 
a cabin under the leaves.  The traveler who approaches them toward evening perceives from afar the flame of the hearth 
glittering through the walls; and at night, if the wind comes up, he hears the roof of foliage rustling in the midst 
of the trees of the forest.  Who would not believe that this poor cottage serves as a refuge for coarseness and ignorance?  
Yet one must not establish any retaliation between the pioneer and the place that serves as his refuge.  All is primitive 
and savage around him, but he is so to speak the result of eighteen centuries of work and experience.  He wears 
the same clothing of the towns, he speaks their language; he knows the past, is curious about the future, argues 
about the present; he is a very civilized man who, for a time, submits to living in the middle of the woods, 
and who plunges into the wilderness of the New World with his Bible, a hatchet, and newspapers. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 289-290]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
There is scarcely a pioneer’s cabin where one does not encounter some odd volume of Shakespeare.  
I recall having read the feudal drama of <i>Henry V</i> for the first time in a log-house. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.12, 445]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
I often met young women at the utmost limits of the wilderness who, after having been raised in the midst of all 
the delicacies of the great cities of New England, had passed almost without transition from the rich 
dwellings of their parents to leaky huts in the middle of a forest. Fever, solitude, and tedium had not broken 
the springs of their courage. Their features seemed altered and faded, but their look was firm. 
They appeared at once sad and resolute.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 2.10, 567]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Around this withered debris wheat, offshoots of oaks, plants of all kinds, herbs of every nature grow pell-mell and get larger together on an unruly and half-wild soil. In the midst of this vigorous and varied vegetation rises the house of the pioneer or, as one calls it in that country, the log-house.  This rustic dwelling, like the field that surrounds it, tells of a new and hasty work; its length does not appear to us to exceed thirty feet, its height fifteen; its walls as well as the roof are formed of unhewn tree trunks between which moss and earth have been placed to prevent the cold and rain from penetrating inside. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
There is only a single window from which a muslin curtain hangs; in a hearth of trodden earth a great fire crackles that lights the whole inside of the building; above this hearth one perceives a fine scratched rifle, a deerskin, some eagle feathers; to the right of the chimney a map of the United States is spread out, which the wind lifts and agitates as it gets through the chinks in the wall; near to it on the shelf formed of a badly hewn board a few volumes have been placed; I notice on it the Bible, the first six cantos of Milton, and two plays of Shakespeare 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The master of this dwelling has the angular features and slender limbs that distinguish the inhabitant of New England; it is evident that this man was not born in the solitudes where we encounter him: his physical constitution is enough to tell that his first years were passed in the heart of an intellectual society and that he belongs to the restive, reasoning, and adventurous race that does coldly what only the ardor of the passions explains, and that submits for a time to a wild life in order better to vanquish and civilize the wilderness. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
At the other end of the hearth a woman is seated who cradles a young child on her knees; without interrupting herself she makes a signal to us with her head. Like the pioneer, this woman is in the flower of age, her appearance seems superior to her condition, her dress even announces a taste for finery still barely extinguished; but her delicate limbs appear diminished, her features are tired, her eye is mild and grave; one sees spread over her whole face a religious resignation, a profound peace of the passions, and a natural and tranquil firmness that confronts all the evils of life without fearing them or braving them.  
<br/><br/>
Her children press around her; they are full of health, turbulence, and energy; they are true sons of the wilderness; from time to time, their mother casts glances full of melancholy and joy at them; to see their strength and her weakness one would say that she has exhausted herself in giving them life and that she does not regret what they have cost her.
<br/><br/>
The house inhabited by the emigrants has neither interior partition nor attic. In the lone apartment that it contains the entire family comes to seek refuge at night. This dwelling forms, by itself, almost a little world; it is the ark of civilization lost in the middle of an ocean of foliage. A hundred steps further on, the eternal forest extends its shadow around it, and the solitude begins again. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 3.10 note XX, 700]</div>
</blockquote>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section12">People: The Bad</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville applied his penetrating observation to not only the good, but also the regrettable aspects of the American people.  Besides slavery,
 which fills an entire section below, he deems Americans to be obsessed with money and materialism.
</p>

<blockquote>
Indeed, I do not know a country where the love of money holds a larger place in the heart of man 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.3, 50]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
A thousand particular causes, of which I could make only the principal ones known, must have concentrated the American 
mind in a singular manner on caring for purely material things.  Their passions, needs, education, circumstances -- 
all in fact seem to cooperate in making the inhabitant of the United States incline toward the earth.  Religion alone, 
from time to time, makes him raise passing, distracted glances toward Heaven. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.9, 430]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
America lacks a proper literature, with “towns of the third order in Europe that publish more literary works” 
than the entire Union <span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 288] [II 1.13, 446] </span>.  American poetry is incoherent and bizarre. 
</p>

<blockquote>
I have often remarked that Americans, who generally treat affairs in a clear and dry language deprived of every ornament, whose extreme simplicity is often vulgar, willingly run to bombast when they want to enter into poetic style. Then they show themselves relentlessly pompous from one end of the speech to the other, and to see them thus squander images at every turn one would believe that they have never said anything simply. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
I fear that the works of democratic poets will often offer immense and incoherent images, overloaded depictions, and bizarre composites, and that the fantastic beings issuing from their minds will sometimes make one long for the real world.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.18, 465-6]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Regarding social graces, the American displays an irritable patriotism, being insatiable for praise and ill-adept at social conventions.
</p>

<blockquote>
The American, taking part in all that is done in this country, believes himself interested in defending all that is criticized there; for not only is his country then attacked, he himself is: thus one see his national pride have recourse to all the artifices and descend to all the puerilities of individual vanity.
<br/><br/>
There is nothing more annoying in the habits of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.6, 227]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Americans, in their relations with foreigners, appear impatient at the least censure and insatiable for praise. The slimmest eulogy is agreeable to them and the greatest is rarely enough to satisfy them; they pester you at every moment to get you to praise them; and if you resist their entreaties, they praise themselves. [...] One cannot imagine a more disagreeable and talkative patriotism. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 3.16, 585]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
I remarked many times in the United States that it is not an easy thing to make a man understand that his presence is unwelcome. To come to that, roundabout ways do not always suffice. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 3.3, 542]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
And despite the Americans’ practical and commercial temerity, in the realm of ideas the Americans have forfeited 
their independence of mind to the despotism of the majority.
</p>

<blockquote>
I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
In America the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Inside those limits, the writer is free; but unhappiness awaits him if he dares to leave them. It is not that he has to fear an auto-da-fe, but he is the butt of mortifications of all kinds and of persecutions every day.  A political career is closed to him: he has offended the only power that has the capacity to open it up.  Everything is refused him, even glory. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Chains and executioners are the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but in our day civilization has perfected even despotism itself, which seemed, indeed to have nothing more to learn. [...] in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed [against the body]; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul.  The master no longer says to it: You shall think as I do or you shall die; he says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything remains to you; but from this day on, you are a stranger among us. [...] You shall remain among men, but you shall lose your rights of humanity. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.7, 244-5]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
If America has not yet had great writers, we ought not to seek the reasons for this elsewhere: no literary genius exists without freedom of mind, and there is no freedom of mind in America.
<br/><br/>
The Inquisition could never prevent books contrary to the religion of the greatest number from circulating in Spain. The empire of the majority does better in the United States: it has taken away even the thought of publishing them.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.7, 245]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Among the immense crowd that flocks to a political career in the United States, I have seen few men indeed who show that virile candor, that manly independence of thought, that often distinguished Americans in previous times and that, everywhere it is found, forms the salient feature of great characters.  
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
If these lines ever come to America, I am sure of two things: first, that readers will all raise their voices to condemn me; second, that many among them will absolve me at the bottom of their consciences. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.7, 247]</div>
</blockquote>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section13">People: Old vs New World</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Sprinkled through the work are contrasts of Americans with both the old world and with other new world countries.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville considers what makes a people successful, and considering material causes, laws, formalities, and mores, he consistently
ascribes the most importance to mores. 
(He defines <i>mores</i> as “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people” <span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 275]</span>)
He first describes New England as making better choices than anywhere else:
</p>

<blockquote>
In New England, where education and freedom are the children of morality and religion; where society, already old and long established, has been able to form maxims and habits, the people, at the same time that they escape all the superiorities that wealth and birth have ever created among men, have been habituated to respect intellectual and moral superiorities and to submit to them without displeasure: thus one sees that democracy in New England makes better choices than everywhere else. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.5, 191]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
He then compares the United States to other new world nations. Mexico, with a nearly identical constitution, does poorly.
</p>

<blockquote>
The inhabitants of Mexico, wishing to establish a federal system, took as a model and copied almost entirely the federal constitution of the Anglo-Americans, their neighbors [Tocqeville footnote: see the Mexican constitution of 1824].  But in transporting the letter of the law to themselves, they could not at the same time transport the spirit that enlivened it. One therefore sees them constantly embarrassed amid the wheels of their double government. [...]Mexico is still now incessantly carried along from anarchy to military despotism, and from military despotism to anarchy. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8, 156]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
South America offers great natural wealth and no enemies, but has also proven a disaster.
</p>

<blockquote>
But nature had isolated the Spanish of South America in the same manner [as the Anglos in North America], and that isolation did not prevent them from keeping armies. They made war among themselves when foreigners were lacking.  It is only Anglo-American democracy that, up to the present, has been able to maintain itself in peace. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
In what portion of the world does one encounter wilderness more fertile, greater rivers, wealth more intact and more inexhaustible than in South America? Nevertheless, South America cannot support democracy.  If, for peoples to be happy, it were enough to have been placed in a corner of the universe and to be able to spread at will over uninhabited lands, the Spanish of southern America would not have to complain of their lot.  And if they did not enjoy the same happiness as inhabitants of the United States, they ought at least to have made themselves envied by the peoples of Europe.  There are nevertheless no nations of earth more miserable than those of South America.
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 293]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Does he ascribe the new world differences to laws or resources? No, to the mores of the inhabitants.  
</p>

<blockquote>
Physical causes therefore do not influence the destiny of nations as much as one supposes.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Mexico, which is as happily situated as the Anglo-American Union, has appropriated these same laws, and it has not been able to become habituated to the government of democracy.  There is therefore a reason independent of physical causes and laws that enables democracy to govern the United States.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
I am convinced that the happiest situation and the best laws cannot maintain a constitution despite mores, whereas the latter turn even the most unfavorable positions and the worst laws to good account.  The importance of mores is a common truth to which study and experience constantly lead back.  It seems to me that I have it placed in my mind as a central point; I perceive it at the end of all my ideas.
<br/><br/>
I have only one more word to say on this subject. If, in the course of this work, I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance that I attribute to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, to their opinions -- in a word, to their mores -- in the maintenance of their laws, I have missed the principal goal that I proposed for myself in writing it. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 294-5]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
In comparing the United States to the old world, Tocqueville offers amusing contrasts, from the superficial -- 
such as the lack of ceremonial uniforms among government officials -- to deep differences of outlook and personality
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.5, 194]</span>.  The Americans, compared to Europeans, are restive, greedy, independent,
 and impelled to commerce.
</p>

<blockquote>
In Europe we habitually regard restiveness of mind, immoderate desire for wealth, extreme love of independence as great social dangers.  It is precisely all these things that guarantee a long and peaceful future to the American republics. Without these restive passions, the population would be concentrated around certain places and would, as among us, soon feel needs difficult to satisfy.  What a happy country is the New World, where man’s vices are almost as useful to society as his virtues! 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 272]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
I have shown how Americans are unceasingly impelled toward commerce and industry. Their origin, their social state, the political institutions, the very place that they inhabit, carry them irresistibly in this direction.  They therefore presently form an almost exclusively industrial and commercial association, placed in the bosom of a new and immense country whose exploitation is its principal object.  Such is the characteristic feature that in our day most particularly distinguishes the American people from all others. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 3.18, 593]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
While the European values centralization, government regulation, and a public sinecure, the American prizes voluntary 
associations and, other than basic law and order, to be left alone.
</p>

<blockquote>
The first time I heard it said in the United States that a hundred thousand men publicly engaged not to make use of strong liquors, the thing appeared to me more amusing than serious, and at first I did not see well why such temperate citizens were not content to drink water within their families. [...] It is to be believed that if those hundred thousand men had lived in France, each of them would have addressed himself individually to the government, begging it to oversee the cabarets all over the realm. [II 2.5, 492]
<br/><div class="quoteattrib"></div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
In the United States, as soon as a citizen has some enlightenment and some resources, he seeks to enrich himself in commerce and industry, or better, he buys a field covered with forests and makes himself a pioneer.  All that he demands of the state is that it not come to trouble him in his labors, and that it assure him the fruits of them.
<br/><br/>
Among the European peoples, when a man begins to feel his strength and to extend his desires, the first idea that presents itself to him is to obtain a public post. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 3.20, 604-5]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
He compares the treatment of women. American women are freer when young, more constrained when married, intellectually respected, and of the very highest quality.  He does not tie these features into a linear chain of causality; he simply provides a loosely coupled set of observations.
</p>

<blockquote>
There have never been free societies without mores, and as I said in the first part of this work, it is women who make mores. Therefore, all that influences the condition of women, their habits, and their opinions has great political interest in my eyes.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
In the United States, the doctrines of Protestantism come to combine with a very free constitution and a very democratic social state; and nowhere is the girl more promptly or more completely left to herself.
<br/><br/>
Long before the young American woman has attained the age of puberty, one begins to free her little by little from maternal tutelage; before she has entirely left childhood she already thinks for herself, speaks freely, and acts alone; the great picture of the world is constantly exposed before her; far from seeking to conceal the view of it from her, they uncover more and more of it to her regard every day and teach her to consider it with a firm and tranquil eye. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
In America the independence of woman is irretrievably lost with the bounds of marriage.  If the girl is less constrained [in America] than everywhere else, the wife submits to stricter obligations.  The one makes of the paternal home a place of freedom and pleasure, the other lives in her husband’s dwelling as in a cloister. 
<br/><br/>
These two so different states are perhaps not so contrary as is supposed, and it is natural that Americans pass through the one to arrive at the other.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The Americans form at once a Puritan nation and a commercial people; their religious beliefs as well as their industrial habits therefore bring them to exact from woman a self-abnegation and a continual sacrifice of her pleasures to her business that is rare to demand of her in Europe.  Thus an inexorable public opinion reigns in the United States that carefully confines woman within the small circle of interests and domestic duties, and forbids her to leave it. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 3.10, 565-6]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
There are people in Europe who, confusing the diverse attributes of the sexes, intend to make man and woman into beings not only equal, but alike. They give both the same functions, impose the same duties on them, and accord them the same rights; they mix them in all things  -- labors, pleasure, affairs.  One can easily conceive that in thus striving to equalize one sex with the other, one degrades them both; and that from this coarse mixture of nature’s works, only weak men and disreputable women can ever emerge.
<br/><br/>
This is not the way the Americans have understood the kind of democratic equality that can be established between woman and man. They have thought that since nature had established such great variation between the physical and moral constitution of man and that of woman, its clearly indicated goal was to give a diverse employment to their different faculties; and they have judged that progress did not consist in making two unlike beings do nearly the same things, but in setting each of them to acquit its task as well as possible. Americans have applied to the two sexes the great principle of political economy that dominates industry in our day.  They have carefully divided the functions of man and woman in order that the great social work be better done. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Americans do not believe that man and woman have the duty or the right to do the same things, but they show the same esteem for the role of each of them, and they consider them as beings whose value is equal although their destiny differs. They do not give the same form or the same employment to the courage of woman as to that of man, but they never doubt her courage;  and if they deem that man and his mate should not always employ the intelligence and reason in the same manner, they at least judge that the reason of one is as sure as that of the other, and her intelligence as clear.
<br/><br/>
Americans, who have allowed the inferiority of woman to subsist in society, have therefore elevated her with all their power to the level of man in the intellectual and moral world; and in this they appear to me to have admirably understood the true notion of democratic progress.
<br/><br/>
As for me, I shall not hesitate to say it: although in the United States the woman scarcely leaves the domestic circle and is in certain respects very dependent within it, nowhere does her position seem higher to me; and now that I approach the end of this book where I have shown so many considerable things done by Americans, if one asked me to what do I think one must principally attribute the singular prosperity and growing force of this people, I would answer that it is to the superiority of its women.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 3.12, 573-6]</div>
</blockquote>


<p class="regtext">
Finally, he relates the behavior of travelers abroad: the American has a brotherhood with all his countrymen, the European only with countrymen of the same social class.
</p>

<blockquote>
In a foreign country, two Americans are friends right away for the sole reason that they are Americans.  There is no prejudice that repels them, and the community of their native country attracts them.  For two Englishmen, the same blood is not enough: the same rank must bring them together. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 3.2, 541]</div>
</blockquote>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section14">People: Race & Slavery</h2>

<p class="regtext">
The longest chapter in the book, by a factor of two, is entitled “Some considerations on the present state and the probable future of the three races that inhabit the territory of the United States.” Only the first half of the chapter discusses race directly, and is worth reading in full. The second half digresses into regional analysis of economics and culture, north vs south vs west.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
He begins by describing the races’ wildly different situations, with the educated & powerful Europeans treating the others like animals.  
</p>

<blockquote>
From the first one finds in them three naturally distinct and, I could almost say, inimical races.  Education, law, origin, and even the external form of their features have raised an almost insurmountable barrier between them; fortune has gathered them on the same soil, but it has mixed them without being able to intermingle them, and each pursues its destiny separately.
<br/><br/>
Among these men, so diverse, the first who attracts the eye, the first in enlightenment, in power, in happiness, is the white man, the European, man par excellence; below him appear the Negro and the Indian. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Both [Negro & Indian] occupy an equally inferior position in the country that they inhabit; both experience the effects of tyranny; and if their miseries are different, they can accuse the same authors for them.
<br/><br/>
Would one not say, on seeing what takes place in the world, that the European is to men of other races what man himself is to the animals? He makes them serve his use, and when he cannot bend them, he destroys them. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 303]</div>
</blockquote>


<p class="regtext">
The Negro’s deplorable state is described in detail.
</p>

<blockquote>
Oppression has with one blow taken from the descendants of the African almost all the privileges of humanity!  The Negro of the United States has lost even the memory of his country; he no longer understands the language that his fathers spoke; he has abjured their religion and forgotten their mores. In thus ceasing to belong to Africa, he has however acquired no right to the goods of Europe. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 304]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Even outside the slave-owning states, he observes the Negro’s position to be low.
</p>

<blockquote>
Racial prejudice appears to me stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where slavery still exists, and nowhere is it shown to be as intolerant as in states where servitude has always been unknown.
<br/><br/>
It is true that in the North of the union the law permits Negroes and whites to contract legitimate alliances; but opinion declares the white man who would unite with a Negro woman to be infamous, and it would be very difficult to cite an example of such a deed. 
<br/><br/>
In almost all the states where slavery was abolished, the Negro has been given electoral rights; but if he presents himself to vote, he runs a risk to his life. Oppressed, he can complain, but he finds only white among his judges. [...] The black is permitted to beseech the same God as whites, but not to pray to him at the same altar.  He has his own priests and churches. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
In the South, where slavery still exists, Negroes are kept to one side less carefully; they sometimes share the labors of whites and their pleasures; one consents  up to a certain point to mix with them; legislation is harder in regard to them; habits are more tolerant and milder. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 329]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
In 1740 the legislature of the state of New York declared that the greatest possible direct importation of slaves must be encouraged and that contraband must be severely punished as tending to discourage the honest trader. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10 footnote 34, 330]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Not only does Ohio not accept slavery, but it prohibits the entry of free Negroes into its territory, and forbids them to acquire anything in it. See the statutes of Ohio. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10 footnote 35, 331]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville examines the economics of slavery, concluding that it works economically only in the south 
due to the labor-intensive crops -- tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane -- which, in contrast with grains, require continuous care
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 339]</span> .  He believes that slavery is actually quite expensive; he notes that
black mortality is higher in the north than the south,
and asserts that where slavery is abolished, it is abolished for the white man’s benefit
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10 footnote 41, 337]</span>.
</p>

<blockquote>
It is not in the interest of Negroes, but of whites, that slavery is being destroyed in the United States. [...] The provinces that so to speak possessed no slaves grew in population, in wealth, and in well-being more rapidly than those that had them. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The free worker is paid, but he acts more quickly than the slave, and rapidity of execution is one of the great elements of economy. The white sells his assistance, but one buys it only when it is useful; the black has nothing to claim as the price of his services, but one is obliged to nourish him at all times; one must sustain him in his old age as in his mature age, in his sterile childhood as during the fruitful years of his youth, through sickness as in health. Thus, only by paying does one obtain the work of these two men: the free worker receives a wage; the slave an education, food, care, clothing; the money that the master spends to keep the slave is drained little by little and in detail; one hardly perceives it: the wage that one gives to the worker is delivered in one stroke, and it seems to enrich only the one who receives it; but in reality the slave has cost more than the free man and his work has been less productive. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 330-333]</div>
</blockquote>


<p class="regtext">
He also believes that slavery degrades the slave owner by making him idle and lazy, 
a concept he explains while floating down the Ohio river and surveying the free and slave states on their respective banks.
</p>

<blockquote>
On both banks of the Ohio stretches undulating ground, where every day the soil offers inexhaustible treasures to the laborer; on both banks the air is equally healthful and the climate temperate; each of them forms the frontier of a vast state:  the one that follows on the left the thousand windings that the Ohio describes in its course is named Kentucky; the other has borrowed its name from the river itself. The two states differ only on a single point: Kentucky has accepted slaves, the state of Ohio has rejected them all from its midst.
<br/><br/>
The traveler who, placed in the middle of the Ohio, allows himself to be carried along by the current to the mouth of the river in the Mississippi, therefore, navigates so to speak between freedom and servitude; and he has only to cast glances around himself to huge in an instant which is more favorable to humanity.
<br/><br/>
On the left bank of the river, the population is sparse; from time to time one perceives a troop of slaves running through half-wild fields with an insouciant air; the primitive forest constantly reappears; one would say that society is asleep; man seems idle, nature offers the image of activity and of life.
<br/><br/>
From the right bank, on the contrary, rises a confused noise that proclaims from afar the presence of industry; rich harvests cover the fields; elegant dwellings announce the taste and the care of the laborer; on all sides comfort reveals itself; man appears rich and content: he works. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
On the left bank of the Ohio work is blended with the idea of slavery; on the right bank, with that of well-being and progress; there it is degraded, here they honor it; on the left bank of the river, one cannot find workers belonging to the white race, for they would fear resembling slaves; one must rely on the care of the Negroes; on the right bank one would seek in vain for an idle man: the white extends his activity and his intelligence to all his works. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The American on the left bank scorns not only work, but all the undertakings that work makes successful. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 330-333]</div>
</blockquote>


<p class="regtext">
He believes the black/white tension will be a permanent conflict, which he despairs of solving.
</p>

<blockquote>
As for me, when I consider the trouble that aristocratic corps, of whatever nature they may be, have in mingling with the mass of people and the extreme care they take to preserve for centuries the imaginary barriers that separate them from it, I despair of seeing an aristocracy founded on visible and imperishable signs disappear.
<br/><br/>
Those who hope that the Europeans will one day intermingle with Negroes therefore appear to me to cherish a chimera. My reason does not lead me to believe it, and I see nothing in the facts that indicates it to me.
<br/><br/>
Until now, everywhere that whites have been most powerful, they have held Negroes in degradation or slavery. Everywhere that Negroes have been strongest, they have destroyed whites; this is the only account that has ever been opened between the two races. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 328]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
And he establishes that the incompatibility of the races is not his idiosyncratic view, but is widely shared by society, by citing examples
such as writings by Thomas Jefferson, and the movement to export freed Negroes to Liberia.
</p>

<blockquote>
This opinion [of the difficulty of intermingling races], furthermore, is supported by authorities far more serious than mine. 
One reads in the <i>Memoirs of Jefferson</i> among others: “Nothing is more clearly written in the book of destinies than the freeing of the Blacks, and it is altogether as certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live under the same government. Nature, habit, and opinion have established insurmountable barriers between them.” 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10 footnote 46, 341]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Dreading the dangers [of racial conflict] I have just described, a certain number of American citizens have united in a society with the goal of exporting at their expense to the coasts of Guinea the free Negroes who would like to escape the tyranny that weighs on them. [...] [even all the Union’s vessels would] could not equal the natural progress alone of the population among blacks.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 345]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Given the risk of racial war, Tocqueville concludes with an intellectual sympathy to the Southern position: that southern whites were born into an evil situation in which abolishing the evil would lead (it was broadly believed) to self-genocide, and thus are trapped between two great evils.
</p>

<blockquote>
It is not that all inhabitants of the South regard slavery as necessary to the wealth of the master; on this point many of them are in accord with the northerners and willingly admit with them that servitude is an evil; but they think that one must preserve this evil in order to live.
<br/><br/>
Enlightenment is increasing in the South, and it has made the inhabitants of that part of the territory perceive that slavery is harmful to the master, and this same enlightenment shows them, more clearly than they had seen before, the near impossibility of destroying it.  
<br/><br/>
If it is impossible to foresee a period when Americans of the South will mix their blood with that of the Negroes, can they, without exposing themselves to perishing, permit the latter to come to freedom?  And if they are obliged to want to keep them in irons to save their own race, ought one not to excuse them for taking the most efficacious means to succeed in that?
<br/><br/>
What is taking place in the South of the Union seems to me at once the most horrible and the most natural consequence of slavery. When I see the order of nature reversed, when I hear humanity crying and struggling in vain under the laws, I avow that I cannot find the indignation to stigmatize the men of our day, authors of these outrages; but I gather all my hatred against those who, after more than a thousand years of equality, introduced servitude into the world once again.
<br/><br/>
Furthermore, whatever the efforts of the Americans of the South to preserve slavery, they will not succeed at it forever. Slavery contracted to a single point on the globe, attacked by Christianity as unjust, by political economy as fatal; slavery, in the midst of the democratic freedom and enlightenment of our age, is not an institution that can endure.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 348]</div>
</blockquote>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section15">People: The Indian</h2>

<p class="regtext">
The Indian, in contrast with the Negro, is placed “at the extreme limits of freedom.”  He wanders the wilderness 
without ruler or law and he repels civilization.  Yet, he too perishes due to the European, both deliberately and circumstantially
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 305-306]</span>.
</p>

<blockquote>
The savage is delivered to himself as soon as he can act. He has hardly known the authority of the family; he has never bent his will before that of those like him; no one has taught him to distinguish voluntary obedience from shameful subjection, and he is ignorant even of the name of law.  For him, to be free is to escape from almost all the bonds of society. He takes pleasure in this barbarous independence, and he would rather perish than sacrifice the least part of it. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 305]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
The native of North America preserves his opinions and his habits to the least detail with an inflexibility that has no example in history. For the more than two hundred years that the wandering tribes of North America have had daily relations with the white race, they have borrowed from it so to speak not one idea nor one usage. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10 footnote 1, 306]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
The European has indirectly injured the native in many ways: by introducing tastes they were unable to satisfy themselves; by the noise of industry; and simply by settling land, which displaces game and creates famine.
</p>

<blockquote>
The Europeans introduced firearms, iron, and brandy among the natives of North America; they taught them to replace with our fabrics the barbarous clothes with which the Indian simplicity had been contented until then. While contracting new tastes, the Indians did not learn the art of satisfying them, and they had to resort to the industry of the whites.  
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
From the day when a European settlement forms in the neighborhood of the territory occupied by Indians, the wild game takes alarm.  Thousands of savages, wandering in the forests without fixed dwellings, did not frighten it; but from the moment when the continuous noise of European industry made itself heard someplace, it began to flee and to retreat toward the west, where its instinct taught it that it would encounter still boundless wilderness.  
<br/><br/>
“The buffalo is constantly receding,” say Mr. Cass and Mr. Clark in their report to Congress, February 4, 1829. “A few years since, they approached the base of the Allegheny, and a few years hence they may even be rare upon the immense plains which extend to the base of the Rocky Mountains.”  I was assured that this effect of the approach of the whites was often felt at two hundred leagues from their frontier.  Thus their influence is exerted on tribes whose names they hardly know, and who suffer the evils of usurpation long before recognizing its authors. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
By making their game flee, it is as if one made the fields of our farmers sterile.  Soon the means of existence are almost entirely lacking to them.  One then encounters these unfortunates prowling like famished wolves in the midst of their wooded wilderness.   [...] It is therefore not, properly speaking, the Europeans who chase the natives from America, it is famine. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 310]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
From the shores of Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico, as the crow flies, it is around four hundred French leagues. [...] It has been calculated that each year, whites have advanced, on average, seven leagues over all this vast front. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 363]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
The Indians face famine partly because they refuse to adopt agriculture.
</p>

<blockquote>
Men who have once indulged in the idle and adventurous life of hunters feel an almost insurmountable disgust for the constant and regular labor that cultivation requires. [...] The natives of North America not only consider work as an evil, but as a dishonor, and their haughtiness struggles against civilization almost as obstinate as their laziness. [...] [the Indian] compares the farmer to the cow who plows a furrow, and in each of our arts he perceives nothing but the work of slaves. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 313-4]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
After having led an agitated life, full of ills and dangers, but at the same time filled with emotion and greatness, he must submit to a monotonous, obscure, and degraded existence. To gain the bread that will nourish him by hard work and in the midst of ignominy: such is in his eyes the only result of the civilization that is extolled to him. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 318]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Not all the Indian’s woes are indirect.  In many cases, the government uses force or deception.
</p>

<blockquote>
The tyranny of the government is ordinarily added to the greed of the colonists. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The United States engages itself to maintain [the southern Indians in Arkansas]; but the territory that they now occupy had formerly been guaranteed to them by the most solemn oaths. Today, it is true, the American government does not take their lands away from them, but it allows them to be invaded. In a few years, doubtless, the same white population that now presses on them will be on their heels in the solitudes of Arkansas; then they will again meet the same ills without the same remedies; and as sooner or later they will run out of land, they will ever have to resign themselves to dying. 
<br/><br/>
There is less cupidity and violence in the Union’s manner of acting toward the Indians than in the policy followed by the states; but the two governments are equally lacking in good faith. 
<br/><br/>
The states, in extending what they call the benefit of their laws to the Indians, reckon that the latter will rather move away than submit to them; and the central government, in promising to these unfortunates a permanent refuge in the West, is not ignorant that it cannot guarantee it to them. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 322-3]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqeuville concludes with a pessimistic outlook for the Indians. 
He reprints the Cherokee petition to Congress of 1829, in which the Cherokees foresee the inevitable. And Tocqueville himself agrees that they are condemned to perish and will “die in isolation, as they have lived” 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 324] [I 2.10, 312 & 326]</span> .
</p>
 

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section16">Culture: American Religion</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville notes that while Christianity is dying in Europe, it maintains an unconventional vigor in the United States.
</p>

<blockquote>
The philosophers of the eighteenth century explained the gradual weakening of beliefs in an altogether simple fashion. Religious zeal, they said, will be extinguished as freedom and enlightenment increase.  It is unfortunate that the facts do not accord with this theory. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
On my arrival in the United States it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eye. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 282]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
He goes on to speculate that the death of the faith in Europe arose from its “intimate union of politics and religion” that
polluted religion  <span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 286-8]</span>.

<p class="regtext">
He observes that in America, all noise ceases on the sabbath; that “each citizen, surrounded by his children, goes to a church;”
that back home, he opens the book of the Holy Scriptures <span class="quoteattrib">[II 2.15, 517]</span>.
He notes the religious unity, that “all sects in the United States are within the great Christian unity, and the morality 
of Christianity is everywhere the same”  
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 278]</span>.  This uniformity is so great that atheists can be stricken from legal testimony:

<blockquote>
While I was in America, a witness presented himself to the assizes of the county of Chester (state of New York) and declared that he did not believe in the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.  The presiding officer refused to accept his oath, given, he said, that the witness had destroyed in advance all the faith that could have been put in his words. The newspapers reported the fact without commentary. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 280]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Despite these accolades, the American faith does not have all facets of traditional piety.  He notes that in no country does “the love of money hold a larger place in the heart of man” and contrary to greed being a vice, that Americans “make a sort of virtue of commercial recklessness.” 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.3, 50] [II 3.18, 594]</span>
</p>

<p class="regtext">
Americans have perfected what he calls “the doctrine of self-interest well understood.”  Aristocratic times were “pleased to profess that it is glorious to forget oneself and that it is fitting to do good without self-interest,” while in the United States, “it is almost never said that virtue is beautiful. They maintain that it is useful” 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 2.8, 501]</span>.  Virtue is promoted as a means to worldly success, rather than as a way to please God.

<blockquote>
[...] one ordinarily sees even in the midst of [Americans’] zeal something so tranquil, so methodical, so calculated, that it seems to be reason much more than heart that leads them to the foot of the altar.
<br/><br/>
Not only do Americans follow their religion out of interest, but they often place in this world the interest that one can have in following it. In the Middle Ages priests spoke only of the other life; they scarcely worried about proving that a sincere Christian can be a happy man here below.
<br/><br/>
But American preachers constantly come back to earth and only with great trouble can they take their eyes off it. To touch their listeners better, they make them see daily how religious beliefs favor freedom and public order, and it is often difficult to know when listening to them if the principal object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the other world or well-being in this one. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 2.10, 505-6]</div>
</blockquote>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section17">Culture: Free Press</h2>

<p class="regtext">
The Americans have a free press; Tocqueville specifically notices that no license or registration is required of newspapers,
 causing the number of periodicals to “pass beyond all belief.” 
Numerous truly independent newspapers is essential to scattering the strength of the medium, as a central newspaper
can become a powerful weapon to despots
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.3, 176-7]</span>.  
</p>

<blockquote>
The most enlightened Americans attribute the lack of power of the press to this incredible scattering of its strength. [...] In the United States there is almost no small town that does not have its newspaper. One conceives without difficulty that among so many combatants neither discipline nor unity of action can be established [...] Newspapers in the United States, therefore, cannot establish great currents of opinion that sweep away or overflow the most powerful dikes. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.3, 176-7]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville does not particularly admire the press: it is coarse, destructive, and violent, and mostly advertisements.  
Yet for all its failings, he sees it as essential to democracy, by coordinating the individuals that democracy tends to atomize.
</p>

<blockquote>
I avow that I do not hold that complete and instantaneous love for the freedom of the press that one accords to things whose nature is unqualifiedly good. I love it out of consideration for the evils it prevents much more than for the good it does.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
In America the press has the same destructive tastes as in France and the same violence without the same causes for anger.  
In America as in France, this is an extraordinary power, so strangely mixed of goods and evils, without
which freedom cannot live and with which order can hardly be maintained.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
In America three-quarters of the immense newspaper that is placed before your eyes is filled with advertisements; the rest is most often occupied by political news or simple anecdotes.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The spirit of the journalist in America is to attack coarsely, without preparation and without art, the passions of those whom it addresses, to set aside principles in order to grab men; to follow them into their private lives, and to lay bare their weaknesses and their vice. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.3, 174-7]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
When men are no longer bound among themselves in a solid and permanent manner, one cannot get many to act in common except by persuading each of them whose cooperation is necessary that his particular interest obliges him voluntarily to unite his efforts with the efforts of all others. 
That can be done habitually and conveniently only with the aid of a newspaper; only a newspaper can come to deposit the same thought in a thousand minds at the same moment. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
I shall not deny that in democratic countries newspapers often bring citizens to make very inconsiderate undertakings in common; but if there were no newspapers, there would almost never be common action. The ill they produce is therefore much less than the one they cure. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 2.6, 493]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
In times of aristocracy, each man is always bound in a very tight manner to several of his fellow citizens in such a way that one cannot attack him without having the others rush to his aid. In centuries of equality, each individual is naturally isolated; he has no hereditary friends from whom he can require cooperation, no class whose sympathies are assured him [...] Thus freedom of the press is infinitely more precious in democratic nations than in all others; it alone cures most of the ills that equality can produce. Equality isolates and weakens men [...] Printing hastened the progress of equality, and it is one of its best correctives. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 4.7, 668]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
As quoted at length above, America's press is not as free as it seems, because social conventions
prevent truly diverse thoughts from being published:
</p>

<blockquote>
I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
If America has not yet had great writers, we ought not to seek the reasons for this elsewhere: no literary genius exists without freedom of mind, and there is no freedom of mind in America.
<br/><br/>
The Inquisition could never prevent books contrary to the religion of the greatest number from circulating in Spain. The empire of the majority does better in the United States: it has taken away even the thought of publishing them.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.7, 244-5]</div>
</blockquote>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section18">Democracy: Tocqueville's Tendencies</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville does not disguise his aristocratic tendencies, and he uses them to contrast and illuminate democracy.  He believes that an authority is always present, even when hidden, because man has an instinct for hierarchy. Aristocracy of some sort (even if intellectual or market-based meritocracy, instead of heredity) will exist because intellects are naturally unequal.  Historic aristocracy was honorable in binding the rich to the poor in ways that democracy fails to do.
</p>

<blockquote>
Individual independence can be more or less great; it cannot be boundless. Thus, the question is not that of knowing whether an intellectual authority exists in democratic centuries, but only where it is deposited and what its extent will be. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.2, 408]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Natural inequality being very great, fortunes become unequal from the moment that each makes use of all his faculties to enrich himself. [...]
When there are no longer inherited wealth, class privileges, and prerogatives of birth, and each draws his force only from himself, it becomes visible that what makes the principal difference among the fortunes of men is intelligence. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.9, 431-2]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
To tell the truth, although there are rich, the class of the rich does not exist; for the rich have neither common spirit nor objects, neither common traditions nor hopes. There are then members, but no corps.  
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The aristocracy founded by trade almost never settles in the midst of the industrial population that it directs; its goal is not to govern the latter, but to make use of it.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The territorial aristocracy of past centuries was obliged by law or believed itself to be obliged by mores to come to the aid of its servants and to relieve their miseries. But the manufacturing aristocracy of our day, after having impoverished and brutalized the men whom it uses, leaves them to be nourished by public charity in times of crisis.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 2.20, 532]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Aristocracy produces the most stability, the best art, the grandest desires, and the greatest orators and men.
</p>

<blockquote>
When royal power, leaning on the aristocracy, peacefully governed the peoples of Europe, society, amid its miseries, enjoyed several kinds of happiness one can conceive and appreciate only with difficulty in our day.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The nobles, placed at an immense distance from the people, nevertheless took the sort of benevolent and tranquil interest in the lot of the people that the shepherd accords to his flock; and without seeing in the poor man their equal, they watched over his destiny as a trust placed by Providence in their hands.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Thus organized, the social body could have stability, power, and above all, glory. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[Intro, 8]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
In aristocratic societies the class that directs opinion and leads affairs, placed in a permanent and hereditary manner above the crowd, naturally conceives a high-minded idea of itself and of man.  It willingly imagines glorious enjoyments for him and fixes magnificent goals for his desires. Aristocracies often do very tyrannical and very inhuman deeds, but they rarely conceive base thoughts, and they show a certain haughty disdain for little pleasures, even when they indulge in them; this lifts all souls to a very high tone. In aristocratic times one generally makes for oneself very vast ideas of the dignity, power, and greatness of man.  These opinions influence those who cultivate the sciences as well as all others; they facilitate the natural spark of the mind toward the highest regions of thought and naturally dispose it to conceive a sublime and almost divine love of truth.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
It cannot be the same in democratic nations.
<br/><br/>
Most men who compose these nations are very eager for present material enjoyments; as they are always discontented with the position they occupy and always free to leave it, they dream only of the means of changing their fortune or of increasing it. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.10, 436]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
the interest of [aristocrats] is that each artisan produce masterpieces. In aristocratic centuries, the aim of the arts is therefore to make the best possible, not the quickest or the cheapest.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.11, 439]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
These sort of aristocratic tendencies permeate the book, particularly in the more philosophical second volume.
</p>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section19">Democracy: And Aristocracy</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville frequently contrasts democracy to aristocracy.  
He compares the activity, agitation, betterment, progress, and wealth of democracy with the calm, 
immobility, and satisfaction of aristocracy <span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.6, 231]</span>.
He describes democracy as confusing classes and obscuring individuals, while aristocracy preserves individual worth
(among aristocrats, at least) <span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 300]</span>.  
He associates democracy with “restive activity” and “superabundant force” of social energy focused on material goods,
while aristocracies promote ideals of lofty spirit, elevated manners, arts, poetry, and glory.  
</p>

<p class="regtext">
He observes that democracies “habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful,” while aristocracies do the opposite 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 1.10, 439]</span>. One particular example is watches:

<blockquote>
When it was only the rich who had watches, they were almost all excellent.  Scarcely any but mediocre ones are made any longer, but everyone has one.  Thus democracy not only tends to direct the human mind toward the useful arts, it brings artisans to make many imperfect things rapidly, and the consumer to content himself with these things.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
When I arrive in a country and [...] perceive that the products of the arts there are generally imperfect, in very great number and at a low price, I am assured that among the people where this happens, privileges are weakened, and the classes are beginning to mix and are soon going to be confused with one another. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.11, 441]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
In democracies, “men are all very small and very much alike” and are present-oriented, vulgar, and coarse, 
while aristocrats are refined individuals who focus on generational time frames <span class="quoteattrib">[II 1.17, 460] [II 2.2, 483] [II 3.19, 603]</span>. 
</p>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section20">Democracy: The Good</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Among the admirable aspects of democracy, Tocqueville extensively explores the idea of
milder mores. 
</p>

<blockquote>
In democratic centuries, men rarely devote themselves to one another, but they show a general compassion
for all members of the human species. One does not see them inflict useless evils, and when they can relieve
the sorrows of another without denying themselves much, they take plesure in doing it; they are not disinterested,
but they are mild.
<br/><br/>
Although the Americans have so to speak reduced selfishness to a social and philosophical theory,
they do not show themselves any less accessible to pity.
<br/><br/>
There is no country where criminal justice is administered with more kindness than in the United States.
Whereas the English seem to want to preserve carefully the bloody traces of the Middle Ages in their penal
legislation, the Americans have almost made the death penalty disappear from their codes.
<br/><br/>
North America is, I think, the sole region on earth where for fifty year the life of not a single
citizen has been taken for political offenses.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
At the time of their greatest enlightenment, the Romans cut the throats of enemy generals after having
dragged them in triumph behind a chariot and delivered prisoners over to beasts for the amusement of the
people.  Cicero, who utters such great groans at the idea of a citizen crucified, finds nothing to reproach
in these atrocious abuses of victory.  It is evident that in his eyes a foreigner is not of the same human species
as a Roman.
<br/><br/>
On the contrary, as peoples become more like one another, they show themselves reciprocally more compassionate
regarding their miseries, and the law of nations becomes milder.
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 3.1, 538-9]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
These milder mores apply also to family life, in which democracies engender warmer familial relations.
</p>

<blockquote>
I think that as mores and laws become more democratic, the relations of father and son
become more intimate and sweeter; rule and authority are met with less; confidence and affection 
are often greater; and it seems that the natural bond tightens while the social bond is loosened.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The sweetness of these democratic mores is so great that even partisans of aristocracy allows themselves
to be taken by it, and after tasting it for some time, they are not tempted to return to the respectful
and cold forms of the aristocratic family.
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II, 3.8, 561-2</div>
</blockquote>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section21">Democracy: Despotism of the Majority</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville frequently criticizes democracy for the bullying nature of its majorities, which
are tyrannical, faddish, and inimical to independence of thought.  Introducing
one chapter, he admits that “here I am walking on ground that is afire. Each word of this chapter must offend” 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.5, 187]</span>.
</p>

<blockquote>
It is of the very essence of democratic governments that the empire of the majority is absolute [...] The majority in the United States therefore has an immense power in fact, and a power in opinion almost as great; and once it has formed on a question, there are so to speak no obstacles that can, I shall not say stop, but even delay its advance, and allow it the time to hear the complaints of those it crushes as it passes. 
The consequences of this state of things are dire and dangerous for the future. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.7, 235-7]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
When a man or a party suffers from an injustice in the United States, whom do you want him to address? Public opinion? That is what forms the majority; the legislative body? It represents the majority and obeys it blindly; [...] in certain states, the judges themselves are elected by the majority.  Therefore, however iniquitous or unreasonable is the measure that strikes you, you must submit to it.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.7, 241]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
[I]n democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed [via physical violence]; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul.  The master no longer says to it: You shall think as I do or you shall die; he says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything remains to you; but from this day on, you are a stranger among us. [...] You shall remain among men, but you shall lose your rights of humanity.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.7, 244-5]</div>
</blockquote>


<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville approvingly quotes a lengthy section from President Madison’s Federalist 51, that “in a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in the state of nature” 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.7, 249]</span>.
Democracies have a faith in majority opinion that is so powerful that even the clergy rarely choose to contradict the majority
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 1.5, 423]</span>.
</p>

<blockquote>
The public therefore has a singular power among democratic peoples, the very idea of which aristocratic nations could not conceive. It does not persuade [one] of its beliefs, it imposes them and makes them penetrate souls by a sort of immense pressure of the minds of all on the intellect of each.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.2, 409]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
[M]en in democratic times [have] a very high opinion of the privileges of society and a very humble idea of the rights of the individual.  They readily accept that the interest of the former is everything and that of the latter, nothing.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 4.2, 641]</div>
</blockquote>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section22">Democracy: Other Criticisms</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville's other criticisms of democracy often relate to money. Democracy creates a bias toward materialism
and toward transactional relationships.  It excites envy, and allows people to tax others while evading the taxes themselves.
</p>

<blockquote>
One must not conceal from oneself that democratic institutions develop the sentiment of envy in the human heart to a very high degree. [...] Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely. [...] The chance of succeeding stirs them, and uncertainty of success irritates them; they are agitated, they are wearied, they are embittered. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.5, 189]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Men who live in democratic times have many passions; but most of their passions end in love of wealth or issue from it. That comes from the fact not that their souls are smaller, but that the importance of money really is greater to them.
<br/><br/>
When fellow citizens are all independent and indifferent, it is only by paying them that one can obtain the cooperation of each; this infinitely multiplies the use of wealth and increases the value of it. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 3.17, 587]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Countries where the poor were charged exclusively with making the law therefore could not hope for
great economy in public expenditures; those expenditures will always be considerable, either because
taxes cannot reach those who vote them or because they are assessed in a manner so as not to reach them.
In other words, the government of democracy is the only one in which he who votes the tax can escape the
obligation to pay it.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Who has ever imagined entrusting the poor alone with making the law? Who? Those who established universal suffrage. Is it the majority or the minority that makes the law? Without doubt, the majority; and if I prove that the poor always compose the majority, shall I not be right to add that in countries where they are called on to vote, the poor alone make the law? [...] Therefore universal suffrage really gives the government of society to the poor.
<br/><br/>
The distressing influence that popular power can sometimes exert on the finances of the state was well displayed in certain democratic republics of antiquity, where the public treasury was exhausted in assisting indigent citizens, or in giving games and spectacles to the people. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.5, 201]</div>
</blockquote>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section23">Philosophy: Religion</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville often shares philosophical thoughts on the nature of religion.
Americans believe that religion is “necessary to the maintenance of republican institutions,” and Tocqueville largely agrees:
</p>

<blockquote>
Despotism can do without faith, but freedom cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic [freedom lovers] extol than in the monarchy they attack, and in democratic republics more than all others. How could society fail to perish if, while the political bond is relaxed, the moral bond were not tightened? And what makes a people master of itself if it has not submitted to God?” 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 282]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
As for me, I doubt that man can ever support a complete religious independence and an entire political freedom
at once; and I am brought to think that if he has no faith, he must serve, and if he is free, he must believe.
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.5, 419]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
He observes that all men hold dogmas, and that “almost no human action [...] does not arise from a very general idea that men have conceived of God, of his relations with the human race, of the nature of their souls, and of their duties toward those like them.”  The dogmas relative to God and human nature are the most important to not undermine  
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 1.2, 407] [II 1.5, 418]</span>.  
When they are undermined, “the most visible boundary that divided good and evil is overturned; all seems doubtful and uncertain in the moral world; [...] and no one can say where the natural limits of despotism and the bounds of license are” 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 299] </span>.

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville acknowledges that man is more than a utilitarian, and thus atheism is a practical problem: “it will always be hard to make a man who does not wish to die live well” 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 2.9, 504]</span>.
Man has a “taste for the infinite and the love of what is immortal. These sublime instincts are not born of a caprice
of his will: they have their immovable foundation in his nature” 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 2.12, 510]</span>.  And he calls for government to buttress, not undermine them: 

<blockquote>
Legislators of democracies and all honest and enlightened men who live in them must therefore apply themselves relentlessly to raising up souls and keeping them turned toward Heaven.  It is necessary for all those who are interested in the future of democratic societies to unite, and for all in concert to make continuous efforts to spread within these societies a taste for the infinite, a sentiment of greatness, and a love of immaterial pleasures.  
<br/><br/> 
If one encounters among the opinions of a democratic people some of those harmful theories that tend to make it believed that everything perishes with the body, consider the men who profess them as the natural enemies of the people.
<br/><br/> 
There are many things that offend me in the materialists.  Their doctrines appear to me pernicious and their haughtiness revolts me.  If their system could be of some utility to man, it seems that it would be in giving him a modest idea of himself. But they do not make anyone see that this should be so; and when they believe they have sufficiently established that they are only brutes, they show themselves as proud as if they had demonstrated they were gods.
<br/><br/> 
Materialism is a dangerous malady of the human mind in all nations; but one must dread it particularly in a democratic people because it combines marvelously with the most familiar vice of the heart in these peoples. 
<br/><br/> 
Democracy favors the taste for material enjoyments. This taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes men to believe that all is nothing but matter; and materialism in its turn serves to carry them toward these enjoyments with an insane ardor. Such is the fatal circle into which democratcic nations are propelled.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 2.15, 519]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
Despite all the benefits of public faith, Tocqueville acknowledges that the government’s role is hazardous:
</p>

<blockquote>
If it is easy to see that it is particularly important in times of democracy to make spiritualist opinions reign, it is not easy to say what those who govern democratic peoples ought to do to make them reign. 
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
as for state religions, I have always thought that if sometimes they could temporarily serve the interests of political power, they would always sooner or later become fatal to the Church. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 2.15, 520]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
And he recognizes that the very notion of equality, which began with Jesus, tends in time to promote atheism,
by removing faith in any true authority.
</p>

<blockquote>
it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.3, 413]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
equality of conditions makes men conceive a sort of instinctive incredulity about the supernatural and a very high and often much exaggerated idea of human reason.
<br/><br/>
Men who live in times of equality are therefore only with difficulty led to place the intellectual authority to which they submit outside of and above humanity.  It is in themselves or in those like themselves that they ordinarily seek the sources of truth.  [...] one can foresee that faith in common opinion will become a sort of religion whose prophet will be the majority. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.2, 408-410]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
His extended thoughts on “the principal causes that make religion powerful in America” are found in 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 282-288]</span>;
on the mingling of democracy and religion, in 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II, 1.5-1.8, 417-428]</span>;
and on self-interest, materialism, and spiritualism in 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 2.8-2.17, 500-524]</span>.
</p>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section24">Philosophy: Miscellany</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Among the philosophical asides throughout the book, some notable ones are:
</p>

<ul class="regtext">
<li>Small countries are tranquil and free; large, wealthy cities are depraved and selfish; US is the best of both 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8, 150-154]</span></li>
<li>Common interest and homogeneity is necessary for stability 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8, 158]</span></li>
<li>Human reason is imbecile because it follows and justifies, rather than leads and controls, our impulses 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 273]</span></li>
<li>Estate law is the source of all law 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.3, 47] [I 2.10, 334]</span></li>
<li>The theater has immense influence on social direction 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 1.19, 465-7]</span></li>
<li>There is a tight bound between freedom and industry 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 2.14, 515]</span></li>
<li>Patriotism -- loyalty to an abstract entity, rather than a person -- is a recent invention from the era of central government 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 3.18, 592]</span></li>
<li>Land owners were and still are the most free 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 4.5, 656]</span></li>
</ul>

<p class="regtext">
Elsewhere, in a single paragraph, Tocqueville enumerates a compact summary of American philosophy, which includes 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 359]</span>:
<ul class="regtext">
<li>The moral authority of universal reason</li>
<li>The political authority of all citizens</li>
<li>That “self-interest well understood” leads to justice</li>
<li>That man is born with the ability to govern himself</li>
<li>A faith in human perfectability</li>
<li>Valuing education</li>
<li>Valuing change</li>
</ul>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section25">Predictions: War and Expansion</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville makes numerous predictions on expansion and war, some of which are impressively accurate.  
His 100-year prediction of 100 Million people and 40 states was in error by only 20%, on the low side
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 362]</span>.  He predicts that the US “will cover almost all of North America”
 and will become the preeminent maritime power on the globe
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 368-390]</span>.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
Culturally, he predicts that the North (by which he means New England) will dominate the nation, with the midwest
exercising large political power 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 365-370]</span>.
In Texas, the Americans will acquire lands and found “an empire of their language and mores there” 
that will displace Mexico <span class="quoteattrib"> [I 2.10, 392] </span>. 
“The Indians will die in isolation as they have lived” <span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 326] </span>.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
Militarily, he predicts war with Mexico, and predicts that if revolutions occur, “they will be brought about by the presence
of blacks on the soil of the United States: that is to say, it will not be the equality of conditions, 
but on the contrary, their inequality, that will give rise to them” 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.8, 160] [II 3.21, 611]</span>.  
He predicts both for and against a draft: “I doubt that one would ever dare to introduce [conscription]” in America, 
and yet in general, in democracies in the long term, “one can easily predict that all will adopt it” 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.5, 213; II, 3.23, 623]</span>.

<p class="regtext">
The book’s only mention of Russia is eerily accurate, stating that the two great peoples on earth today (in the year 1835)
are the Russians and the Anglo-Americans, and that “each of them seems called by a secret design of Providence to hold
the destinies of half the world in its hands one day” <span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.10, 395-6]</span>.
</p>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section26">Predictions: Social Situation</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Regarding equality, Tocqueville predicts an ever-expanding equality, one that will make woman the equal of man
and will abolish slavery, but will never achieve full white and black equality 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.4, 52] [I 2.10, 341 & 348] [II 3.12, 573]</span>.  
</p>

<p class="regtext">
Yet several forces will work counter to equality.  Intelligence will be the new source of wealth and inequality 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 1.9, 432]</span>.
The manufacturing aristocracy “that we see rising before our eyes” may generate massively unequal conditions 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 2.20, 532]</span>.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
Socially he predicts that religious observation will fracture “into only two parts, those leaving Christianty
entirely and others entering into the bosom of the Roman Church” 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 1.6, 425]</span>. 
He predicts increasing narcissism -- that democracy fixes man’s imagination on only himself -- 
and an expanding belief in the perfectibility of human nature 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 1.17, 460]</span>. 
And he predicts that “prescriptions of honor” will diminish 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 3.18, 596]</span>.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
Politically he predicts that the concentrated power in cities, along with the loss of personal relationships, 
is “genuine danger that threatens the future of the democratic republics” due to “the nature of their inhabitants,” 
especially their penchant toward vice, rioting, and their failure to assimilate  
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, including footnote, 266]</span>.  
</p>

<p class="regtext">
He pessimistically predicts increasing centralization, the destruction of local sovereignty, and even governmental 
capture of pension funds and banking 
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 4.5, 651-654]</span>.
He predicts that soft despotism, “degrading men without tormenting them,” will be more likely, as it will be easier 
for the state “to gather all public powers in their hands alone and to penetrate the sphere of private interests more
habitually and more deeply than any of those in antiquity was ever able to do”  
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 4.6, 662]</span>.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
Equality will “in the end penetrate the political world as elsewhere.” It will be man’s primary love; equality will be 
more important that freedom; and there will be “no stopping until they have arrived at universal suffrage” 
<span class="quoteattrib">[I 1.4, 53-55]</span>.
</p>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section27">Recap: American Development</h2>

<p class="regtext">
To recap some of Tocqueville’s statements on the development of democracy in America:
</p>

<blockquote>
The social condition, religion, and mores of the first emigrants doubtless exerted an immense influence 
on the destiny of their new country 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 1.2, 44]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
The laws and mores of the Anglo-Americans therefore form the special reason for their greatness and the predominant 
cause that I seek 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 293]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
It is religion that gave birth to the Anglo-American societies; one must never forget this; in the United States religion 
is therefore intermingled with all national habits and all the sentiments to which a native country gives birth; that gives it a particular strength. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.1, 406]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
The Americans have a democratic social state and constitution, but they did not have a democratic revolution. They arrived on the soil they occupy nearly as we see them. That is very important. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.1, 406]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
The Americans are a very old and very enlightened people who encountered a new and immense country in which they can spread out at will and which they make fruitful without trouble. That is without example in the world. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 1.9, 429]</div>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Three things seem to concur more than all others to maintain a democratic republic in the New World:
<br/><br/>
The first is the federal form that the Americans have adopted, which permits the Union to enjoy the power of a 
great republic and the security of a small one.  
<br/><br/>
I find the second in the township institutions that, moderating the despotism of the majority, at the same time 
give the people the taste for freedom and the art of being free. 
<br/><br/>
The third is encountered in the constitution of the judicial power. I have shown how the courts serve to correct
the aberrations of democracy, and how, without ever being able to stop the movements of the majority, they
succeed in slowing and directing them. 
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[I 2.9, 274]</div>
</blockquote>


<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section28">Final Warnings</h2>

<p class="regtext">
Tocqueville’s final 30 pages reflects on his themes and offers the book’s most stern and compact set of warnings. 
It is worth reading in its entirety.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
He points out that all government grows without bound due to the fear of disorder. The trend to centralization is everywhere,
in all spheres of life. Men are overturning thrones to obey clerks. These clerks micromanage every aspect of life, 
with more power than the emperors of old. They enforce uniformity in education, they control money, banking, and the welfare state, and they even create a sort of state-industrial complex.  The result is that individual man is made weak, dependent, and uniform
<span class="quoteattrib">[II 4.5-4.7, 651-673] </span>.

<blockquote>
Now, it is in the nature of all government to wish to enlarge its sphere continuously.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The first, and in a way the only, necessary condition for arriving at centralizing public power in a democracy is to love
equality or to make it believed [that one does].
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Education as well as charity has become a national affair among most peoples of our day. The state receives and often takes
the child from the arms of his mother to entrust him to its agents; it takes charge of inspiring sentiments 
in each generation and furnishing it with ideas.  Uniformity reigns in studies as in all the rest; diversity like
freedom disappears from them each day.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
The sovereign is not limited to directing the public fortune; it is introduced into private fortunes; it is the chief
of each citizen and often his master, and in addition, it makes itself his paymaster and his banker.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
At each instant citizens fall under the control of the public administration; they are brought insensibly and almost
without their knowing it to sacrifice new parts of their individual independence to it every day, and the same
men who from time to time overturn a throne and ride roughshod over kings bend more and more without resistance to
the slightest will of a clerk.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
One sees that in the time of the greatest power of the Caesars, the different peoples who inhabited the Roman world still preserved diverse customs and mores: although subject to the same monarch, most of the provinces were administered separately; they were filled with powerful and active municipalities; and although all the government of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the emperor alone and he always remained the arbitrator of all things in case of need, the details of social life and individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
I do not doubt that in centuries of enlightenment and equality like ours, sovereigns will come more easily to gather all public powers in their hands alone and to penetrate the sphere of private interests more habitually and more deeply than any of those in antiquity was ever able to do.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 4.3-4.6, 644-662]</div>
</blockquote>

<p class="regtext">
He goes so far as to anticipate a spooky Brave New World style of soft despotism:
</p>

<blockquote>
I think therefore that the kind of oppression with which democratic peoples are threatened will resemble
nothing that has preceded it in the world.
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the 
small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.  
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments
and watching over their fate.  It is absolute, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal
power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to
keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only
of enjoying themselves.  It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and
sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their
pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their
inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?
<br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>
Equality has prepared men for all these things; it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to
regard them as a benefit.
<br/><br/>
Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the
sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated,
painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear
a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them;
it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it
prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes,
dazes, adn finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals
of which the government is a the shepherd.
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 4.6, 662-3]</div>
</blockquote>


<p class="regtext">
Finally, after the gloom, he expresses a final hope that man can recognize, face, and overcome the 
challenges of equality and democracy. His final paragraphs read:
</p>

<blockquote>
I feel full of fears and full of hopes.  I see great perils that it is possible to ward off; great evils that
one can avoid or restrain, and I become more and more firm in the belief that to be honest and prosperous,
it is still enough for democratic nations to wish it.
<br/><br/>
I am not unaware that several of my contemporaries have thought that peoples are never masters of themselves here below, and that they necessarily obey I do not know which insurmountable and unintelligent force born of previous events, the race, the soil, or the climate.  
<br/><br/>
Those are false and cowardly doctrines that can never produce any but weak men and pusillanimous nations:
Providence has not created the human race either entirely independent or perfectly slave. It traces, it is true, 
a fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave; but within its vast limits man is powerful and free;
so too with peoples.
<br/><br/>
Nations of our day cannot have it that conditions within them are not equal; but it depends on them whether equality leads them to servitude or freedom, to enlightenment or barbarism, to prosperity or misery.  
<br/><div class="quoteattrib">[II 4.8, 675-6]</div>
</blockquote>

<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section29">Further Reading</h2>

<p class="regtext">
To read additional primary material without committing to the full two-inch-thick volume
(which contains some tedious sections), 
here is one selection of excerpts. The book does
not trace a single narrative or conceptual arc, so disjoint sections can be safely read
with minimal context.
</p>

<p class="regtext">
<ol class="regtext">
  <li> <i>Introduction</i>: Tocqueville's own framing of the entire work <br/>  (pages 3-15)
  </li>
  <li> <i>On the Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of the Anglo-Americans</i>
        : a look into the early settlers and their all-important mores (I 1.2, 27-44)
  </li>
  <li><i>On the Principal Causes Tending To Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States</i>
        : a long summary of American uniqueness, covering providential causes,
        laws, mores, religion, and their relative importance (I 2.9, 264-302)
  </li>
  <li> <i>Some Considerations on the Present State and the Probable Future of the
       Three Races that Inhabit the Territory of the United States</i>
       : a deep look at race relations. The latter half the chapter
       digresses from race into analysis of regional differences. (I 2.10, 302-348)
  </li>
  <li> <i>Notice to Volume II</i> : Tocqueville's framing of Volume II <br/>(pages 399-400)
  </li>
  <li><i>How, In the United States, Religion Knows How to Make Use of Democratic Instincts</i>
        (and several following chapters) : a detailed look at how religion and
        democracy interact (II 1.5-1.8, 417-428)
  </li>
  <li><i>How the Americans Combat Individualism By the Doctrine of Self-Interest Well Understood</i>
      : a detailed look at the relationship of materialism, self-interest,
      and spiritualism in America (II 2.8-2.17, 500-524)
  </li>
  <li> <i>On the Influence That Democratic Ideas and Sentiments Exert on Political Society</i>
       : his final summary, dense with predictions and warnings (II Part 4, 639-676)
  </li>
</ol>
</p>


<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>
<hr/><h2 class="regtext" id="section30">Footnotes</h2>

<p class="regtext" id="footnote1">
<a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo3612682.html">University of Chicago Press</a>: 
"It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest
and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone."
<br/><br/>
<a href="https://edsitement.neh.gov/curricula/alexis-de-tocqueville-tyranny-majority">National Endowment for the Humanities</a>: 
"Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville is universally regarded as one of the most influential books ever written about America. "
<br/><br/>
<a href="https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/report/the-way-we-were-alexis-de-tocqueville-women-and-the-family">
The Heritage Foundation</a>: "The most famous visitor to the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville, praised the well-ordered 
home life of its citizens."
<br/><br/>
<a href="https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2018/08/09/de-tocqueville-and-the-french-exception">The Economist</a>:
"He is the most unusual member of the liberal pantheon. Liberalism has usually been at its most vigorous among the
Anglo-American middle classes. By contrast, Alexis de Tocqueville was a proud member of the French aristocracy.
Liberalism tends to be marinated in optimism to such an extent that it sometimes shades into naivety. Tocqueville
believed that liberal optimism needs to be served with a side-order of pessimism."
<br/><br/>
Mansfield & Winthrop translation
<a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo3612682.html">(link to publisher)</a>
, Editor's Introduction, pages xvii-xviii
</p>


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