 Individualism, a Reader, edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore, narrated by James Foster. 5. From What Is An American? J. Hector St. John de Crevacour Letters from an American farmer, New York, Duffield, and company, 1908. J. Hector St. John de Crevacour, 1735 to 1813, served as a surveyor with the French Army during the French and Indian War, 1754 to 1763. After the war was over, Crevacour purchased a farm in New York and prospered. The following excerpt is from the third of Crevacour's Letters from an American farmer, first published in 1782. It is a classic statement of American individualism. I wish I could be acquainted with the feelings and thoughts which must agitate the heart and present themselves to the mind of an enlightened Englishman when he first lands on this continent. He has arrived on a new continent, a modern society offers itself to his contemplation different from what he had hitherto seen. He is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one. No great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe. Some few towns accepted we are all tillers of the earth, from Nova Scotia to West Florida. We are a people of cultivators, scattered over an immense territory, communicating with each other by means of good roads and navigable rivers, united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws without dreading their power because they are equitable. We are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained because each person works for himself. If he travels through our rural districts he views not the hostile castle and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-built hut and miserable cabin where cattle and men help to keep each other warm and dwell in meanness, smoke and indigence. A pleasing uniformity of decent competence appears throughout our habitations. The meanness of our log houses is a dry and comfortable habitation. Lawyer or merchant are the fairest titles our towns afford, that of a farmer is the only appellation of the rural inhabitants of our country. It must take some time ere he can reconcile himself to our dictionary, which is but short in words of dignity and names of honour. There on a Sunday he sees a congregation of respectable farmers and their wives all clad in neat homespun well-mounted or riding in their own humble wagons. There is not among them an esquire saving the unlettered magistrate. There he sees a parson as simple as his flock, a farmer who does not riot on the labour of others. We have no princes for whom we will toil, starve and bleed. We are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free, as he ought to be. This has been Individualism a Reader, edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore, narrated by James Foster. Copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute. Production Copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute.