 III. CHAPTER V. HOW DEMOCRACY AFFECTS THE RELATION OF MASTERS AND SERVANTS. An American who had travelled for a long time in Europe once said to me, the English treat their servants with a stiffness and imperiousness of manner which surprises us, but on the other hand the French sometimes treat their servants with a degree of familiarity or of politeness which we cannot conceive. It looks as if they were afraid to give orders. The posture of the superior and the inferior is ill-maintained. The remark was a just one, and I have often made it myself. I have always considered England as the country in the world where, in our time, the bond of domestic service is drawn most tightly, and France as the country where it is most relaxed. Nowhere have I seen masters say and so high or so low as in these two countries. Between these two extremes the Americans are to be placed. Such is the fact as it appears upon the surface of things. To discover the causes of that fact it is necessary to search the matter thoroughly. No communities have ever yet existed in which social conditions have been so equal, that there were neither rich nor poor, and consequently neither masters nor servants. Democracy does not prevent the existence of these two classes, but it changes their dispositions and modifies their mutual relations. Amongst aristocratic nations, servants form a distinct class, not more variously composed than that of masters. A settled order is soon established. In the former as well as in the latter class, a scale is formed, with numerous distinctions or marked gradations of rank, and generations succeed each other thus without any change of position. These two communities are superposed one above the other, always distinct, but regulated by analogous principles. This aristocratic constitution does not exert a less powerful influence on the notions and manners of servants than on those of masters, and although the effects are different, the same cause may be easily traced. Both classes constitute small communities in the heart of the nation, and certain permanent notions of right and wrong are ultimately engendered amongst them. The different acts of human life are viewed by one particular and unchanging light. In the society of servants, as in that of masters, men exercise a great influence over each other. They acknowledge settled rules, and in the absence of law they are guided by a sort of public opinion. Their habits are settled, and their conduct is placed under a certain control. These men whose destiny is to obey certainly do not understand fame, virtue, honesty, and honor in the same manner as their masters, but they have a pride, a virtue, and an honesty pertaining to their condition, and they have a notion if I may use the expression of a sort of servile honor. Because a class is mean, it must not be supposed that all who belong to it are mean-hearted. To think so would be a great mistake. However lowly it may be, he who is foremost there, and who has no notion of quitting it, occupies an aristocratic position which inspires him with lofty feelings, pride, and self-respect, that fit him for the higher virtues and actions above the common. Among aristocratic nations it was by no means rare to find men of noble and vigorous minds in the service of the great, who felt not the servitude they bore, and who submitted to the will of their masters without any fear of their displeasure. But this was hardly ever the case amongst the inferior ranks of domestic servants. It may be imagined that he who occupies the lowest stage of the order of menials stands very low indeed. The French created a word on purpose to designate the servants of the aristocracy. They called them lackeys. This word, lackey, served as the strongest expression when all others were exhausted to designate human meanness. Under the old French monarchy, to denote by a single expression a low-spirited, contemptible fellow, it was usual to say that he had the soul of a lackey. The term was enough to convey all that was intended. The permanent inequality of conditions not only gives servants certain peculiar vices and virtues, but it places them in peculiar relation with respect to their masters. Amongst aristocratic nations the poor man is familiarized from his childhood with the notion of being commanded. To whichever side he turns his eyes, the graduated structure of society in the aspect of obedience meet his view. Hence in those countries the master readily obtains prompt, complete, respectful, and easy obedience from his servants, because they revere in him not only their master, but the class of masters. He weighs down their will by the whole weight of the aristocracy. He orders their actions. To a certain extent he even directs their thoughts. In aristocracies the master often exercises, even without being aware of it, an amazing sway over the opinions, the habits, and the manners of those who obey him, and his influence extends even further than his authority. In aristocratic communities there are not only hereditary families of servants as well as of masters, but the same families of servants adhere for several generations to the same families of masters, like two parallel lines which neither meet nor separate, and this considerably modifies the mutual relations of these two classes of persons. Thus although in aristocratic society the master and servant have no natural resemblance, although on the contrary they are placed at an immense distance on the scale of human beings by their fortune, education, and opinions, yet time ultimately binds them together. They are connected by a long series of common reminiscences, and however different they may be they grow alike, whilst in democracies, where they are naturally almost alike, they always remain strangers to each other. Amongst an aristocratic people the master gets to look upon his servants as an inferior and secondary part of himself, and he often takes an interest in their lot by a last stretch of egotism. Servants on their part are not adverse to regard themselves in the same light, and they sometimes identify themselves with the person of the master, so that they become an appendage to him in their own eyes as well as in his. In aristocracy as a servant fills a subordinate position which he cannot get out of. Above him is another man, holding a superior rank, which he cannot lose. On the one side are obscurity, poverty, obedience for life, on the other, and also for life, fame, wealth, and command. The two conditions are always distinct and always in propinquity. The tie that connects them is as lasting as they are themselves. In this predicament the servant ultimately detaches his notion of interest from his own person. He deserts himself, as it were, or rather he transports himself into the character of the master and thus assumes an imaginary personality. He complacently invests himself with the wealth of those who command him, he shares their fame, exalts himself by their rank, and feeds his mind with borrowed greatness, to which he attaches more importance than those who fully and really possess it. There is something touching, and at the same time ridiculous, in this strange confusion of two different states of being. The passions of masters, when they pass into souls of menials, assume the natural dimensions of the place they occupy. They are contracted and lowered. What was pride in the former becomes purile vanity and paltry ostentation in the latter. The servants of a great man are commonly most punctilious as to the marks of respect due to him, and they attach more importance to his slightest privileges than he does himself. In France a few of these old servants of the aristocracy are still to be met with here and there. They have survived their race, which will soon disappear with them altogether. In the United States I never saw anyone at all like them. The Americans are not only unacquainted with the kind of man, but it is hardly possible to make them understand that such ever existed. It is scarcely less difficult for them to conceive it than for us to form a correct notion of what a slave was amongst the Romans, or a serf in the Middle Ages. All these men were in fact, though in different degrees, results of the same cause. They are all retiring from our sight, and disappearing in the obscurity of the past, together with the social condition to which they owed their origin. Equality of conditions turns servants and masters into new beings, and places them in new relative positions. When social conditions are nearly equal, men are constantly changing their situations in life. There is still a class of menials and a class of masters, but these classes are not always composed of the same individuals, still less of the same families, and those who command are not more secure of perpetuity than those who obey. As servants do not form a separate people, they have no habits, prejudices, or manners peculiar to themselves. They are not remarkable for any particular turn of mind or moods of feeling. They know no vices or virtues of their condition, but they partake of the education, the opinions, the feelings, the virtues, and the vices of their contemporaries, and they are honest men or scoundrels in the same way as their masters are. The condition of servants are not less equal than those of masters. As no marked ranks or fixed subordination are to be found amongst them, they will not display either the meanness or the greatness which characterizes the aristocracy of menials as well as all other aristocracies. I never saw a man in the United States who reminded me of that class of confidential servants of which we still retain a reminiscence in Europe. Neither did I ever meet with such a thing as a lackey. All traces of the one and of the other have disappeared. In democracies, servants are not only equal amongst themselves, but it may be said that they are in some sort the equals of their masters. This requires an explanation in order to be rightly understood. At any moment a servant may become a master, and he aspires to rise to that condition. The servant is therefore not a different man from the master. Why, then, has the former a right to command, and what compels the latter to obey? The free and temporary consent of both their wills. Neither of them is, by nature, inferior to the other. They only become so for a time by covenant. Within the terms of this covenant the one is a servant, the other a master. Beyond it they are two citizens of the commonwealth, two men. I beg the reader particularly to observe that this is not only the notion which servants themselves entertain of their own condition. Domestic service is looked upon by masters in the same light, and the precise limits of authority and obedience are as clearly settled in the mind of the one as in that of the other. When the greater part of the community have long attained a condition nearly alike, and when equality is an old and acknowledged fact, the public mind, which is never affected by exceptions, assigns certain general limits to the value of man, above or below which no man can long remain placed. It is in vain that wealth and poverty, authority and obedience accidentally interpose great distances between two men. Public opinion, founded upon the usual order of things, draws them to a common level, and creates a species of imaginary equality between them in spite of the real inequality of their conditions. This all-powerful opinion penetrates at length even into the hearts of those whose interests might arm them to resist it. It affects their judgment whilst it subdues their will. In their inmost convictions the master and the servant no longer perceive any deep-seated difference between them. They neither hope nor fear to meet with any such at any time. They are therefore neither subject to disdain nor anger, and they discern in each other neither humility nor pride. The master holds the contract of service to be the only source of his power, and the servant regards it as the only cause of his obedience. They do not quarrel about their reciprocal situation, but each knows his own and keeps it. In the French army the common soldier is taken from nearly the same classes as the officer, and may hold the same commissions. Out of the ranks he considers himself entirely equal to his military superiors, and in point of fact he is so. But when under arms he does not hesitate to obey, and his obedience is not the less prompt, precise and ready for being voluntary and defined. This example may give a notion of what takes place between masters and servants in democratic communities. It would be preposterous to suppose that those warm and deep-seated affections, which are sometimes kindled in the domestic service of the aristocracy, will ever spring up between these two men, or that they will exhibit strong instances of self-sacrifice. In aristocracies masters and servants live apart, and frequently their only intercourse is through a third person, yet they commonly stand firmly by one In democratic countries the master and the servant are close together. They are in daily personal contact, but their minds do not intermingle. They have common occupations, but hardly ever common interests. Among such a people the servant always considers himself as a sojourner in the dwelling of his masters. He knew nothing of their forefathers, he will see nothing of their descendants, he has nothing lasting to expect from their hand. Why, then, should he confound his life with theirs, and whence should so strange a surrender himself proceed? The reciprocal question of the two men is changed. Their mutual relations must be so too. I would feign illustrate all these reflections by the example of the Americans, but for this purpose the distinction of persons and places must be accurately traced. In the south of the union slavery exists. All that I have just said is consequently inapplicable there. In the north the majority of servants are either freedmen or the children of freedmen. These persons occupy a contested position in the public estimation. By the laws they are brought up to the level of their masters, by the manners of the country they are obstinately detruded from it. They do not themselves clearly know their proper place, and they are almost always either insolent or craven. But in the northern states, especially in New England, there are a certain number of whites who agree for wages to yield a temporary obedience to the will of their fellow citizens. I have heard that these servants commonly perform the duties of their situation with punctuality and intelligence, and that without thinking themselves naturally inferior to the person who orders them, they submit without reluctance to obey him. They appear to me to carry into service some of these manly habits which independence and equality engender. Having once selected a hard way of life, they do not seek to escape from it by indirect means, and they have sufficient respect for themselves, not to refuse to their master that obedience which they have freely promised. On their part, masters require nothing of their servants but the faithful and rigorous performance of the Covenant. They do not ask for marks of respect. They do not claim their love or devoted attachment. It is enough that, as servants, they are exact and honest. It would not then be true to assert that, in democratic society, the relation of servants and masters is disorganized. It is organized on another footing. The rule is different, but there is a rule. It is not my purpose to inquire whether the new state of things which I have just described is inferior to that which preceded it, or simply different. Enough for me that it is fixed and determined, for what is most important to meet with among men is not any given ordering but order. But what I shall say of these sad and troubled times at which equality is established in the midst of the tumult of revolution, and democracy, after having been introduced into the state of society, still struggles with difficulty against the prejudices and manners of the country. The laws, and particularly public opinion, already declare that no natural or permanent inferiority exists between the servant and the master. But this new belief has not yet reached the innermost convictions of the latter, or rather his heart rejects it. In the secret persuasion of his mind the master thinks that he belongs to a peculiar and superior race. He dares not say so, but he shudders whilst he allows himself to be dragged to the same level. His authority over his servants becomes timid and at the same time harsh. He has already ceased to entertain for them the feelings of patronizing kindness which long uncontested power always engenders, and he is surprised that, being changed himself, his servant changes also. He wants his attendance to form regular and permanent habits, in condition of domestic service which is only temporary. He requires that they should appear contented with and proud of a servile condition which they will one day shake off, that they should sacrifice themselves to a man who can either protect nor ruin them, and, in short, that they should contract an indissoluble engagement to a being like themselves and one who will last no longer than they will. Among aristocratic nations it often happens that the condition of domestic service does not degrade the character of those who enter upon it, because they neither know nor imagine any other, and the amazing inequality which is manifest between them and their masters appears to be the necessary and unavoidable consequence of some hidden law providence. In democracies the condition of domestic service does not degrade the character of those who enter upon it because it is freely chosen and adopted for a time only, because it is not stigmatized by public opinion and creates no permanent inequality between the servant and the master. But whilst the transition from one social condition to another is going on, there is almost always a time when men's minds fluctuate between the aristocratic notions of subjection and the democratic notion of obedience. Obedience then loses its moral importance in the eyes of him who obeys, he no longer considers it as a species of divine obligation, and he does not yet view it under its purely human aspect. It has to him no character of sanctity or justice, and he submits to it as to a degrading but profitable condition. At that moment a confused and imperfect phantom of equality haunts the minds of servants. They do not at once perceive whether the equality to which they are entitled is to be found within or without the pale of domestic service, and they rebel in their hearts against a subordination to which they have subjected themselves and from which they derive actual profit. They consent to serve and they blush to obey. They like the advantages of service but not the master, or rather they are not sure that they ought not themselves to be masters, and they are inclined to consider him who orders them as an unjust usurper of their own rights. Then it is that the dwelling of every citizen offers a spectacle somewhat analogous to the gloomy aspect of political society. A secret and intestine warfare is going on there between powers, ever rivals and suspicious of one another. The master is ill-natured and weak, the servant ill-natured and intractable, the one constantly attempts to evade by unfair restrictions his obligation to protect and remunerate, the other his obligation to obey. The reins of domestic government dangle between them to be snatched at by one or the other. The lines which divide authority from oppression, liberty from license, and right from might, are to their eyes so jumbled together and confused that no one knows exactly what he is, or what he may be, or what he ought to be. Such a condition is not democracy but revolution. CHAPTER VI. That democratic institutions and manners tend to raise rents and shorten the terms of leases. What has been said of servants and masters is applicable to a certain extent to landowners and farming tenants, but this subject deserves to be considered by itself. In America there are, properly speaking, no tenant farmers. Every man owns the ground he tills. It must be admitted that democratic laws tend greatly to increase the number of landowners and to diminish that of farming tenants. Yet what takes place in the United States is much less attributable to the institutions of the country than to the country itself. In America land is cheap and anyone may easily become a landowner. Its returns are small and its produce cannot well be divided between a landowner and a farmer. America, therefore, stands alone in this as well as in many other respects, and it would be a mistake to take it as an example. I believe that in democratic as well as in aristocratic countries there will be landowners and tenants, but the connection existing between them will be of a different kind. In aristocracies the hire of a farm is paid to the landlord not only in rent but in respect, regard, and duty. In democracies the whole is paid in cash. When estates are divided and passed from hand to hand and the permanent connection which existed between families and the soil is dissolved the landowner and the tenant are only casually brought into contract. They meet for a moment to settle the conditions of the agreement and then lose sight of each other. They are two strangers brought together by a common interest and who keenly talk over a manner of business, the sole object of which is to make money. In proportion as property is subdivided and wealth distributed over the country the community is filled with people whose former opulence is declining and with others whose fortunes are of recent growth and whose wants increase more rapidly than their resources. For all such persons the smallest pecuniary profit is a matter of importance and none of them feel disposed to waive any of their claims or to lose any portion of their income. As ranks are intermingled and as very large as well as very scanty fortunes become more rare every day brings the social condition of the landowner nearer to that of the farmer. The one has not naturally any uncontested superiority over the other between two men who are equal and not at ease in their circumstances the contract of hire is exclusively an affair of money. A man whose estate extends over a whole district and who owns a hundred farms is well aware of the importance of gaining at the same time the affections of them thousands of men. This object appears to call for his exertions and to attain it he will readily make considerable sacrifices. But he who owns a hundred acres is insensible to similar considerations and he cares but little to win the private regard of his tenant. An aristocracy does not expire like a man in a single day. The aristocratic principle is slowly undermined in men's opinions before it is attacked in their laws. Long before open wars declared against it the tie which had hitherto united the higher classes to the lower may be seen to be gradually relaxed. Indifference and contempt are betrayed by one class, jealousy and hatred by the others. The intercourse between rich and poor becomes less frequent and less kind and rents are raised. This is not the consequence of a democratic revolution but its certain harbinger for an aristocracy which has lost the affections of the people once and forever is like a tree dead at the root which is the more easily torn up by winds the higher its branches have spread. In the course of the last 50 years the rents of farms have amazingly increased not only in France but throughout the greater part of Europe. The remarkable improvements which have taken place in agriculture and manufacturers within the same period do not suffice in my opinion to explain this fact. Recourse must be had to another cause more powerful and more concealed. I believe that causes to be found in the democratic institutions which several European nations have adopted and in the democratic passions which more or less agitate all the rest. I have frequently heard great English landowners congratulate themselves that at the present day they derive a much larger income from their estates than their fathers did. They had perhaps good reasons to be glad but most assured they know not what they are glad of. They think they are making a clear gain when it is in reality only an exchange. Their influence is what they are parting with for cash and what they gain in money will air long be lost in power. There is yet another sign by which it is easy to know that a great democratic revolution is going on or approaching. In the middle ages almost all lands were leased for lives or for very long terms. The domestic economy of that period shows that leases for ninety-nine years were more frequent than leases for twelve years are now. Men then believed that families were immortal. Men's conditions seemed settled forever and the whole of society appeared to be so fixed that it was not supposed that anything would ever be stirred or shaken in its structure. In ages of equality the human mind takes a different bent. The prevailing notion is that nothing abides and man is haunted by the thought of mutability. Under this impression the landowner and the tenant himself are instinctively averse to protracted terms of obligation. They are afraid of being tied up tomorrow by the contract with benefits them today. They have vague anticipations of some sudden and unforeseen change in their conditions. They mistrust themselves. They fear lest their taste should change and lest they should lament that they cannot rid themselves of what they coveted. Nor are such fears unfounded for in democratic ages that which is most fluctuating amidst the fluctuation of all around is the heart of man. CHAPTER VII The Influence of Democracy on Wages Most of the remarks which I have already made in speaking of servants and masters may be applied to masters and workmen. As the gradations of the social scale come to be less observed, whilst the great sink, the humble rise, and as poverty as well as opulence ceases to be hereditary, the distance both in reality and in opinion, which here to force separated the workmen from the master, is lessened every day. The workmen conceives the more lofty opinion of his rights, of his future, of himself. He is filled with new ambition and with new desires. He is harassed by new wants. Every instant he views with longing eyes the profits of his employer, and in order to share them he strives to dispose of his labour at a higher rate, and he generally succeeds at length in the attempt. In democratic countries, as well as elsewhere, most of the branches of productive industry are carried on at a small cost, by men little removed from their wealth or education above the level of those whom they employ. These manufacturing speculators are extremely numerous. Their interests differ. They cannot therefore easily concert or combine their exertions. On the other hand, the workmen have almost always some sure resources, which enable them to refuse to work when they cannot get what they can seem to be the fair price of their labour. In the constant struggle for wages which is going on between these two classes, their strength is divided, and success alternates from one to the other. It is even probable that in the end the interest of the working class must prevail, for the high wages which they have already obtained make them every day less dependent on their masters, and as they grow more independent they have greater facilities for obtaining a further increase of wages. I shall take, for example, that branch of productive industry which is still at the present day the most generally followed in France, and in almost all the countries of the world. I mean the cultivation of the soil. In France most of those who labour for hire in agriculture are themselves owners with certain plots of ground, which just enable them to subsist without working for anyone else. When these labourers come to offer their services to a neighbouring land owner or farmer, if he refuses them at a certain rate of wages, they retire to their own small property and await another opportunity. I think that upon the whole it may be asserted that a slow and gradual rise of wages is one of the general laws of democratic communities. In proportion as social conditions become more equal wages rise, and as wages are higher social conditions become more equal. But a great and gloomy exception occurs in our own time. I have shown in a preceding chapter that aristocracy expelled from political society has taken refuge in certain departments of productive industry, and has established its sway there under another form. This powerfully affects the rate of wages. As a large capital is required to embark on the great manufacturing speculations to which I allude, the number of persons who enter upon them is exceedingly limited. As their number is small they can easily concert together and fix the rate of wages as they please. Their workmen on the contrary are exceedingly numerous, and the number of them is always increasing, for from time to time an extraordinary run of business takes place, during which wages are inordinately high, and they attract the surrounding population to the factories. But when once men have embraced that line of life we have already seen that they cannot quit it again, because they soon contract habits of body and mind which unfit them for any other sort of toil. These men have generally but little education and industry, with but few resources. They stand therefore almost at the mercy of the master. When competition or other fortuitous circumstance lessens his profits he can reduce the wages of his workmen almost at pleasure and make from them what he loses by the chances of business. Should the workmen strike the master who is a rich man can very well wait without being ruined, until necessity brings them back to him. But they must work day by day or they die, for their only property is in their hands. They have been long impoverished by oppression, and the poorer they become the more easily may they be oppressed. They can never escape from this fatal cycle of cause and consequence. It is not then surprising that wages after having sometimes suddenly risen are permanently lowered in this branch of industry, whereas in other callings the price of labor which generally increases but little is nevertheless constantly augmented. This state of dependence and wretchedness in which a part of the manufacturing population of our time lives forms an exception to the general rule, contrary to the state of all the rest of the community. But for this very reason no circumstance is more important or more deserving of the special consideration of the Legislature, for when the whole of society is in motion it is difficult to keep any one-class stationary, and when the greater number of men are opening new paths to fortune it is no less difficult to make the few support in peace their wants and their desires. Chapter 8. Influence of Democracy on Kindred I have just examined the changes which the equality of conditions produces in the mutual relations of the several members of the community amongst democratic nations and amongst the Americans in particular. I would now go deeper and inquire into the closer ties of kindred. My object here is not to seek for new truths, but to show in what manner facts already known are connected with my subject. It has been universally remarked that in our time the several members of a family stand upon an entirely new footing towards each other, that the distance which formerly separated a father from his sons has been lessened, and that paternal authority, if not destroyed, is at least impaired. Something analogous to this, but even more striking, may be observed in the United States. In America the family, in the Roman and aristocratic signification of the word, does not exist. All that remains of it are a few vestiges in the first years of childhood, when the father exercises, without opposition, that absolute domestic authority, which the feebleness of his children renders necessary, and which their interest, as well as his own incontestable superiority, warrants. But as soon as the young American approaches manhood, the ties of filial obedience are relaxed day by day. Master of his thoughts he is soon master of his conduct. In America there is, strictly speaking, no adolescence. At the close of boyhood the man appears and begins to trace out his own path. It would be an error to suppose that this is preceded by a domestic struggle, in which the son has obtained by a sort of moral violence the liberty that his father refused him. The same habits, the same principles which impel the one to assert his independence, predispose the other to consider the use of that independence as an incontestable right. The former does not exhibit any of those rankerous or irregular passions which disturb men long after they have shaken off an established authority. The latter feels none of that bitter and angry regret which is apt to survive a bygone power. The father perceives the limits of his authority long beforehand, and when the time arrives he surrenders it without a struggle. The son looks forward to the exact period at which he will be his own master, and he enters upon his freedom without precipitation and without effort, as a possession which is his own and which no one seeks to rest from him. It may perhaps not be without utility to show how these changes which take place in family relations are closely connected with the social and political revolution which is approaching its consummation under our own observation. There are everywhere great social principles which a people either introduces everywhere or tolerates nowhere. In countries which are aristocratically constituted with all the gradations of rank, the government never makes a direct appeal to the mass of the governed. As men are united together it is enough to lead the foremost, the rest will follow. This is equally applicable to the family, as to all aristocracies which have ahead. Amongst aristocratic nations social institutions recognize in truth no one in the family but the father. Children are received by society at his hands. Society governs him, he governs them. Thus the parent has not only a natural right, but he acquires a political right to command them. He is the author and the support of his family, but he is also its constituted ruler. In democracies where the government picks out every individual singly from the mass to make him subservient to the general laws of the community, no such intermediate person is required. A father is there, in the eye of the law, only a member of the community, older and richer than his sons. When most of the conditions of life are extremely unequal and the inequality of these conditions is permanent, the notion of a superior grows upon the imagination of men. If the law invested him with no privileges, custom and public opinion would concede them. Men differ but little from each other and do not always remain in dissimilar conditions of life, the general notion of a superior becomes weaker and less distinct. It is vain for legislation to strive to place him who obeys very much beneath him who commands. The manners of the time bring the two men nearer to one another and draw them daily towards the same level. Although legislation of an aristocratic people should grant no peculiar privileges to the heads of families, I shall not be the less convinced that their power is more respected and more extensive than in a democracy. For I know that, whatsoever the laws may be, superiors always appear higher and inferiors lower in aristocracies than amongst democratic nations. When men live more for the remembrance of what has been than for the care of what it is, and when they are more given to attend what their ancestors thought than to think themselves, the father is the natural and necessary tie between the past and the present, the link by which the ends of these two chains are connected. In aristocracies then the father is not only the civil head of the family, but the oracle of its traditions, the expounder of its customs, the arbiter of its manners. He is listened to with deference, he is addressed with respect, and the love which is felt for him is always tempered with fear. When the condition of society becomes democratic, and men adopt as their general principle that it is good and lawful to judge of all things for oneself, using former points of belief not as a rule of faith, but simply as a means of information, the power which the opinions of a father exercise over those of his sons diminishes as well as his legal power. Perhaps the subdivision of estates, which democracy brings with it, contributes more than anything else to change the relations existing between a father and his children. When the property of the father, of the family, is scanty, his son and himself constantly live in the same place, and share the same occupations, habit and necessity bring them together and force them to hold constant communication. The inevitable consequence is a sort of familiar intimacy, which renders authority less absolute, and which can ill be reconciled with the external forms of respect. Now in democratic countries the class of those who are possessed of small fortunes is precisely that which gives strength to the notions, and a particular direction to the manners of the community. This class makes its opinions preponderate as universally as its will, and even those who are most inclined to resist its commands are carried away in the end by its example. I have known eager opponents of democracy who allowed their children to address them with perfect colloquial equality. Thus, at the same time that the power of aristocracy is declining, the austere, the conventional and the legal part of parental authority vanishes, and a species of equality prevails around the domestic hearth. I know not upon the whole whether society loses by the changed, but I am inclined to believe that man individually is a gainer by it. I think that in proportion as manners and laws become more democratic, the relation of father and son becomes more intimate and more affectionate. Rules and authority are less talked of, confidence and tenderness are often times increased, and it would seem that the natural bond is drawn closer in proportion as the social bond is loosened. In a democratic family the father exercises no other power than that which men love to invest the affection and experience of age. His orders would perhaps be disobeyed, but his advice is for the most part authoritative. Though he be not hedged in with ceremonial respect, his sons at least accost him with confidence. No settled form of speech is appropriated to the mode of addressing him, but they speak to him constantly and are ready to consult him day by day. The master and the constituted ruler have vanished, the father remains. Nothing more is needed in order to judge of the difference between the two states of society in this respect than to peruse the family correspondence of aristocratic ages. The style is always correct, ceremonious, stiff, and so cold that the natural warmth of the heart can hardly be felt in the language. The language on the contrary, addressed by a son to his father in democratic countries, is always marked by mingled freedom, familiarity, and affection, which at once show that new relations have sprung up in the bosom of the family. A similar revolution takes place in the mutual relations of children. In aristocratic families, as well as in aristocratic society, every place is marked out beforehand. Not only does the father occupy a separate rank in which he enjoys extensive privileges, but even the children are not equal amongst themselves. The age and sex of each irrevocably determine his rank and secure to him certain privileges. Most of these distinctions are abolished or diminished by democracy. In aristocratic families, the eldest son, inheriting the greater part of the property and almost all the rights of the family, becomes the chief, and to a certain extent the master of his brothers. Greatness and power are for him, for them, mediocrity and dependence. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to suppose that, amongst aristocratic nations, the privileges of the eldest son are advantageous to himself alone, or that they excite nothing but envy and hatred in those around them. The eldest son commonly endeavors to procure wealth and power for his brothers, because the general splendor of the house is reflected back on him who represents it. The younger son seeks to back the elder brother in all his undertakings, because the greatness and power of the head of the family better enable him to provide for all its branches. The different members of an aristocratic family are therefore very closely bound together. Their interests are connected, their minds agree, but their hearts are seldom in harmony. Democracy also binds brothers to each other, but by very different means. Under democratic laws all the children are perfectly equal, and consequently independent. Nothing brings them forcibly together, but nothing keeps them apart, and as they have the same origin, as they are trained under the same roof, as they are treated with the same care, and as no peculiar privilege distinguishes or divides them, the affection and youthful intimacy of early years easily springs up between them. Scarcely any opportunities occur to break the tie thus formed at the outset of life, for their brotherhood brings them daily together without embarrassing them. It is not then by interest, but by common associations, and by the free sympathy of opinion and of taste, that democracy unites brothers to each other. It divides their inheritance, but it allows their hearts and minds to mingle together. Such is the charm of these democratic manners, that even the partisans of aristocracy are caught by it, and after having experienced it for some time, they are by no means tempted to revert to the respectful and frigid observance of aristocratic families. They would be glad to retain the domestic habits of democracy, even if they might throw off its social conditions and its laws. But these elements are indissolubly united, and it is impossible to enjoy the former without enduring the latter. The remarks I have made on filial love and fraternal affection are applicable to all the passions which emanate spontaneously from human nature itself. If a certain mode of thought or feeling is the result of some peculiar condition of life, when that condition is altered, nothing whatever remains of the thought or feeling. Thus a law may bind two members of a community very closely to one another, but that law being abolished they stand asunder. Nothing was more strict than the tie which united the vassal to the Lord under the feudal system. At the present day the two men know not each other, the fear, the gratitude, and the affection which formerly connected them have vanished, and not a vestige of the tie remains. Such, however, is not the case with those feelings which are natural to mankind. Whenever a law attempts to tutor these feelings in any particular manner, its seldom fails to weaken them. By attempting to add to their intensity it robs them of some of their elements, for they are never stronger than when left to themselves. Democracy, which destroys or obscures almost all the old conventional rules of society, and which prevents men from readily assenting to new ones, entirely effaces most of the feelings to which these conventional rules have given rise, but it only modifies some others, and frequently imparts to them a degree of energy and sweetness unknown before. Perhaps it is not impossible to condense into a single proposition the whole meaning of this chapter and of several others that preceded it. Democracy loosens social ties, but it draws the ties of nature more tight. It brings kindred more closely together whilst it places the various members of the community more widely apart. For more information or to volunteer please visit TheBrivox.org. No free communities ever existed without morals, and, as I observed in the former part of this work, morals are the work of women. Consequently, whatever affects the condition of women, their habits and their opinions, has great political importance in my eyes. Amongst almost all Protestant nations, young women are far more the mistresses of their own actions than they are in Catholic countries. This independence is still greater in Protestant countries like England, which have retained or acquired the right of self-government. The spirit of freedom is then infused into the domestic circle by political habits and by religious opinions. In the United States the doctrines of Protestantism are combined with great political freedom and a most democratic state of society, and nowhere are young women surrendered so early or so completely to their own guidance. Long before an American girl arrives at the age of marriage, her emancipation from maternal control begins. She has scarcely ceased to be a child when she already thinks for herself, speaks with freedom, and acts on her own impulse. The great scene of the world is constantly open to her view. Far from seeking concealment it is every day disclosed to her more completely, and she is taught to survey it with a firm and calm gaze. Thus the vices and dangers of society are early revealed to her, and she sees them clearly. She views them without illusions, and braves them without fear, for she is full of reliance on her own strength, and her reliance seems to be shared by all who are about her. An American girl scarcely ever displays that virginal bloom in the midst of young desires, or that innocent and ingenuous grace which usually attends the European women in a transition from girlhood to youth. It is rarely that an American woman at any age displays childish timidity or ignorance. Like the young women of Europe she seeks to please, but she knows precisely the cost of pleasing. If she does not abandon herself to evil, at least she knows that it exists, and she is remarkable rather for purity of manners than for chastity of mind. I have frequently been surprised and almost frightened at the singular address and happy boldness with which young women in America contrive to manage their thoughts and their language amidst all the difficulties of stimulating conversation. A philosopher would have stumbled at every step along the narrow path which they trod without accidents and without effort. It is easy indeed to perceive that, even amidst the independence of early youth, an American woman is always mistress of herself. She indulges in all permitted pleasures, yet without yielding herself up to any of them, and her reason never allows the reins of self-guidance to drop, though it often seems to hold them loosely. In France, where remnants of every age are still so strangely mingled in the opinions and tastes of the people, women commonly receive a reserve, retired, and almost cloisteral education, as they did in aristocratic times, and then they are suddenly abandoned without a guide and without assistance in the midst of all the irregularities inseparable from democratic society. The Americans are more consistent. They have found out that in a democracy the independence of individuals cannot fail to be very great. Youth premature, tastes ill-restrained, customs fleeting, public opinion opt in unsettled and powerless, paternal authority weak, and marital authority contested. Under these circumstances, believing that they had little chance of repressing in women the most vehement passions of the human heart, they held that the sure way was to teacher the art of combating these passions for herself. As they could not prevent her virtue from being exposed to frequent danger, they determined that she should know how best to defend it. And more reliance was placed on the free vigor of her will than on safeguards which have been shaken or overthrown. Instead, then, of inculcating mistrust of herself, they constantly seek to enhance their confidence in her own strength of character. As it is neither possible nor desirable to keep a young woman in perpetual or complete ignorance, they hasten to give her a precocious knowledge on all subjects. Far from hiding the corruptions of her world from her, they prefer that she should see them at once and train herself to shun them. And they hold it of more importance to protect her conduct than to be overscrupulous of her innocence. Although the Americans are a very religious people, they do not rely on religion alone to defend the virtue of women. They seek to arm her with reason also. In this, they have followed the same method as in several other respects. They first make the most vigorous efforts to bring individual independence, to exercise a proper control over itself. And they do not call in the aid of religion until they have reached the utmost limits of human strength. I am aware that an education of this kind is not without danger. I am sensible that it tends to invigorate the judgment at the expense of the imagination and to make cold and virtuous women instead of affectionate wives and agreeable companions to man. Society may be more tranquil and better regulated, but domestic life often has fewer charms. These, however, are secondary evils which may be braved for the sake of higher interests. At the stage at which we are now arrived, the time for choosing is no longer within our control. A democratic education is indispensable to protect women from the dangers with which democratic institutions and manners surround them. CHAPTER X THE YOUNG WOMEN IN THE CHARACTER OF A WIFE In America, the independence of women is irrevocably lost in the bonds of matrimony. If an unmarried woman is less constrained than elsewhere, a wife is subjected to stricter obligations. The former makes her father's house in a boat of freedom and of pleasure. The latter lives in the home of her husband as if it were a cloister. Yet these two different conditions of life are perhaps not so contrary as may be supposed, and it is natural that the American woman should pass through one to arrive at the other. Religious peoples and trading nations entertain peculiarly serious notions of marriage. The former consider the regularity of women's life as the best pledge and most certain sign of the purity of her morals. The latter regard it as the highest security for the order and prosperity of the household. The Americans are at the same time a puritanical people and a commercial nation. Their religious opinions, as well as their trading habits, consequently lead them to require much abnegation on the part of women and a constant sacrifice of her pleasures to her duties which is seldom demanded of her in Europe. Thus in the United States the inexorable opinion of the public carefully circumscribes women within the narrow circle of domestic interest and duties and forbids her to step beyond it. Upon her entrance into the world a young American woman finds these notions firmly established. She sees the rules which are derived from them. She is not slow to perceive that she cannot depart for an instant from the established usages of her contemporaries without putting in jeopardy her peace of mind, her honor, nay even her social existence. And she finds the energy required for such an act of submission in the firmness of her understanding and in the virile habits which her education has given her. It may be said that she has learned by the use of her independence to surrender it without a struggle and without a murmur when the time comes for making the sacrifice. But no American woman falls into the toils of matrimony as into a snare held out to her simplicity and ignorance. She has been taught beforehand what is expected of her and voluntarily and freely does she enter upon this engagement. She supports her new condition with courage because she chose it. As an America paternal discipline is very relaxed and the conjugal tie very strict, a young woman does not contract the latter without considerable circumspection and apprehension. Precocious marriages are rare. Thus American women do not marry until their understandings are exercised and ripened, whereas in other countries most women generally only begin to exercise and ripen their understandings after marriage. I by no means suppose, however, that the great change which takes place in all the habits of women in the United States as soon as they are married ought solely to be attributed to the constraint of public opinion. It is frequently imposed upon themselves by the sole effort of their own will. When the time for choosing a husband is arrived, that cold and stern reasoning power which has been educated and invigorated by free observation of the world teaches an American woman that a spirit of levity and independence in the bonds of marriage is a constant subject of annoyance, not of pleasure. It tells her that the amusements of the girl cannot become the recreations of the wife and that the sources of a married woman's happiness are in the home of her husband. As she clearly discerns beforehand the only road which can lead to domestic happiness she enters upon it at once and follows it to the end without seeking to turn back. The same strength of purpose which the young wives of America display in bending themselves at once and without repining to the austere duties of their new condition is no less manifest in all the great trials of their lives. In no country in the world are private fortunes more precarious than in the United States. It is not uncommon for the same man in the course of his life to rise and sink again through all the grades which lead from opulence to poverty. American women support these vicissitudes with calm and unquenchable energy. It would seem that their desires contract as easily as they expand with their fortunes. Footnote A. See appendix S. The greater part of the adventurers who migrate every year to people of the western wilds belong, as observed in the former part of this work, to the old Anglo-American race of the northern states. Many of these men who rush so boldly onwards in pursuit of wealth were already in enjoyment of a competency in their own part of the country. They take their wives along with them and make them share the countless perils and privations which always attend the commencement of these expeditions. I have often met, even on the verge of the wilderness, with young women who after having been brought up amidst all the comforts of the large towns of New England had passed almost without any intermediate stage from the wealthy abode of their parents to a comfortless hovel in a forest. Fever, solitude, and a tedious life had not broken the springs of their courage. Their features were impaired and faded, but their looks were firm. They appeared to be at once sad and resolute. I do not doubt that these young American women had amassed in the education of their early years that inward strength which they displayed under these circumstances. The early culture of a girl may still therefore be traced in the United States under the aspect of marriage. Her part has changed, her habits are different, but her character is the same. End Part 3, Chapter 10. Part 3, chapters 11 and 12 of Democracy in America, Volume 2. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Ana Simón. Democracy in America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by Henry Reeve. Part 3, Chapter 11. That the equality of conditions contributes to the maintenance of good morals in America. Some philosophers and historians have said or have hinted that the strictness of female morality was increased or diminished simply by the distance of a country from the equator. This solution of the difficulty was an easy one, and nothing was required but a globe and a pair of compasses to settle in an instant one of the most difficult problems in the condition of mankind. But I am not aware that this principle of the materialists is supported by facts. The same nations have been chased or disillured at different periods of their history. The strictness or the laxity of their morals depended therefore on some variable cause, not only on the natural qualities of their country, which were invariable. I do not deny that in certain climates the passions which are occasioned by the mutual attraction of the sexes are peculiarly intense, but I am of opinion that this natural intensity may always be excited or restrained by the condition of society and by political institutions. Although the travelers who have visited North America differ on a great number of points, they all agree in remarking that morals are far more strict there than elsewhere. It is evident that on this point the Americans are very superior to their progenitors of the English. A superficial glance at the two nations will establish the fact. In England, as in all other countries of Europe, public malice is constantly attacking the frailties of women. Philosophers and statesmen are heard to deplore that morals are not sufficiently strict and the literary productions of the country constantly lead one to suppose so. In America, all books, novels not accepted, suppose women to be chased and no one thinks of relating affairs of gallantry. No doubt this great regularity of American morals originates partly in the country, in the race of the people and in their religion, but all these causes which operate elsewhere do not suffice to account for it. Recourse must be had to some special reason. This reason appears to me to be the principle of equality and the institutions derived from it. Equality of conditions does not of itself engender regularity of morals, but it unquestionably facilitates and increases it. Amongst aristocratic nations, birth and fortune frequently make two such different beings of man and woman that they can never be united to each other. Their passions draw them together, but the condition of society and the notions suggested by it prevent them from contracting a permanent and ostensible tie. The necessary consequence is a great number of transient and clandestine connections. Nature secretly avenges herself for the constraint imposed upon her by the laws of man. This is not so much the case when the equality of conditions has swept away all the imaginary or the real barriers which separated man from woman. No girl then believes that she cannot become the wife of the man who loves her, and this renders all breaches of morality before marriage very uncommon. For whatever be the credulity of the passions, a woman will hardly be able to persuade herself that she is beloved when her lover is perfectly free to marry her and does not. The same cause operates, though more indirectly, unmarried life. Nothing better serves to justify an illicit passion, either to the minds of those who have conceived it or to the world which looks on, than compulsory or accidental marriages. In a country in which a woman is always free to exercise her power of choosing and in which education has prepared her to choose rightly, public opinion is inexorable to her faults. The rigor of the Americans arises in part from this cause. They consider marriages as a covenant which is often onerous, but every condition of which the parties are strictly bound to fulfill, because they knew all those conditions beforehand and were perfectly free not to have contracted them. The very circumstances which render matrimonial fidelity more obligatory also render it more easy. In aristocratic countries the object of marriage is rather to unite property and persons. Hence the husband is sometimes at school and the wife at nurse when they are betrothed. It cannot be wondered that if the conjugal tie which holds the fortunes of the pair united allows their hearts to rove, this is the natural result of the nature of the contract. When, on the contrary, a man always chooses a wife for himself without any external coercion or even guidance, it is generally a conformity of tastes and opinions which brings a man and a woman together, and this same conformity keeps and fixes them in close habits of intimacy. Our forefathers had conceived a very strange notion on the subject of marriage, as they had remarked that the small number of love matches which occurred in their time almost always turned out ill, they resolutely inferred that it was exceedingly dangerous to listen to the dictates of the heart on the subject. Accident appeared to them to be a better guide than choice, yet it was not very difficult to perceive that the examples which they witnessed did in fact prove nothing at all. For in the first place, if democratic nations leave a woman at liberty to choose her husband, they take care to give her mind sufficient knowledge and her will sufficient strength to make so important a choice. Whereas the young women who, amongst aristocratic nations, furtively elope from the authority of their parents to throw themselves of their own accord into the arms of men whom they have had neither time to know nor ability to judge of, are totally without those securities. It is not surprising that they make a bad use of their freedom of action the first time they avail themselves of it, nor that they fall into such cruel mistakes when not having received a democratic education they choose to marry in conformity to democratic customs. But this is not all. When a man and woman are bent upon marriage in spite of the differences of an aristocratic state of society, the difficulties to be overcome are enormous. Having broken or relaxed the bonds of filial obedience, they have then to emancipate themselves by a final effort from the sway of custom and the tyranny of opinion, and when at length they have succeeded in this arduous task they stand estranged from their natural friends and kinsmen. The prejudice they have crossed separates them from all and places them in a situation which soon breaks their courage and sours their hearts. If, then, a couple married in this manner are first unhappy and afterwards criminal, it ought not to be attributed to the freedom of their choice, but rather to their living in a community in which this freedom of choice is not admitted. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that the same effort which makes a man violently shake off a prevailing error commonly impels him beyond the bounds of reason, that to dare to declare war in however just cause against the opinion of one's age and country, a violent and adventurous spirit is required, and that men of this character seldom arrive at happiness of virtue, whatever be the part they follow. And this, it may be observed by the way, is the reason why in the most necessary and righteous revolutions it is so rare to meet with virtues or moderate revolutionary characters. There is then no just ground for surprise if a man who in an age of aristocracy chooses to consult nothing but his own opinion and his own taste in the choice of a wife soon finds that infractions of morality and domestic wretchedness invade his household. But when this same line of action is in the natural and ordinary course of things, when it is sanctioned by parental authority and backed by public opinion, it cannot be doubted that the internal piece of families will be increased by it and conjugal fidelity more rigidly observed. Almost all men in democracies are engaged in public or professional life, and on the other hand a limited extent of common incomes obliges a wife to confine herself to the house in order to watch in person and very closely over the details of domestic economy. All these distinct and compulsory occupations are so many natural barriers which by keeping the two sexes asunder render the solicitations of the one less frequent and less ardent. The resistance of the other more easy. Not indeed that the equality of conditions can ever succeed in making men chaste, but it may impart a less dangerous character to their breaches of morality, as no one has then either sufficient time or opportunity to assail virtue armed in self-defense. There will be at the same time a great number of courtesans and a great number of virtuous women. This state of things causes lamentable cases of individual hardship, but it does not prevent the body of society from being strong and alert. It does not destroy, family ties or enervate the morals of the nation. Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the lexity of morals amongst all. In the eyes of a legislator prostitution is less to be dreaded than intrigue. The tumultuous and constantly harassed life which equality makes men lead not only distracts them from the passion of love by denying them time to indulge in it, but it diverts them from it by another more secret but more certain road. All men who live in democratic ages more or less contract the ways of thinking of the manufacturing and trading classes. Their minds take a serious deliberate and positive turn. They are apt to relinquish the ideal in order to pursue some visible and proximate object which appears to be the natural and necessary aim of their desires. Thus the principle of equality does not destroy the imagination but lowers its flight to the level of the earth. No men are less addicted to everry than the citizens of a democracy, and few of them are ever known to give way to those idle and solitary meditations which commonly proceed and produce the great emotions of the heart. It is true they attach great importance to procuring for themselves that sort of deep, regular and quiet affection which constitutes the charm and safeguard of life, but they are not apt to run after those violent and capricious sources of excitement which disturb and abridge it. I am aware that all this is only applicable in its full extent to America and cannot at present be extended to Europe. In the course of the last half century whilst laws and customs have impelled several European nations with unexampled force to its democracy, we have not had occasion to observe that the relations of men and women have become more orderly or more chaste. In some places the very reverse may be detected, some classes are more strict, the general morality of the people appears to be more lax. I do not hesitate to make the remark for I am as little disposed to flatter my contemporaries as to malign them. This fact must distress, but it ought not to surprises. The propitious influence which a democratic state of society may exercise upon orderly habits is one of those tendencies which can only be discovered after a time. If the equality of conditions is favorable to purity of morals, the social commotion by which conditions are rendered equal is adverse to it. In the last 50 years during which France has been undergoing this transformation, that country has rarely had freedom, always disturbance. Amidst this universal confusion of notions and this general stir of opinions, amidst this incoherent mixture of the just and unjust of truth and falsehood, of right and might, public virtue has become doubtful and private morality wavering. But all revolutions, whatever may have been their object or their agents, have at first produced similar consequences. Even those which have in the end drawn the bonds of morality more tightly began by loosening them. The violations of morality, which the French frequently witness, do not appear to me to have a permanent character, and this is already betokent by some curious signs of the times. Nothing is more wretchedly corrupt than an aristocracy which retains its wealth when it has lost its power, and which still enjoys a vast deal of leisure after it is reduced to mere vulgar pastimes. The energetic passions and great conceptions which animated it here to fore leave it then, and nothing remains to it but a host of petty consuming vices, which cling about it like worms upon a carcass. No one denies that the French aristocracy of the last century was extremely disillusioned, whereas established habits and ancient belief still preserved some respect for morality amongst the other classes of society. Nor will it be contested that the present day the remnants of that same aristocracy exhibit a certain severity of morals, whilst lexity of morals appears to have spread amongst the middle and lower ranks, so that the same families which were most profligate 50 years ago are nowadays the most exemplary, and democracy seems only to have strengthened the morality of the aristocratic classes. The French Revolution, by dividing the fortunes of the nobility, by forcing them to attend assiduously to their affairs and to their families, by making them live under the same roof with their children, and entwilled by giving a more rational and serious turn to their minds, has imparted to them almost without their being aware of it a reverence for a religious belief, a love of order, of tranquil pleasures, of domestic endearments, and of comfort, whereas the rest of the nation, which had naturally these same tastes, was carried away into excesses by the effort which was required to overthrow the laws and political habits of the country. The old French aristocracy has undergone the consequences of the revolution, but it neither felt the revolutionary passions nor shared in the anarchical excitement which produced that crisis. It may easily be conceived that this aristocracy feels the solitary influence of the revolution in its manners before those who achieve it. It may therefore be said, though at first it seems paradoxical, that at the present day the most anti-democratic classes of the nation principally exhibit the kind of morality which may reasonably be anticipated from democracy. I cannot but think that when we shall have obtained all the effects of this democratic revolution after having got rid of the tumult that has caused, the observations which are now only applicable to the few will gradually become true of the whole community. Chapter 12 How the Americans understand the equality of the sexes I have shown how democracy destroys or modifies the different inequalities which originate in society, but is this all, or does it not ultimately affect that great inequality of man and woman which has seemed up to the present day to be eternally based in human nature? I believe that the social changes which bring nearer to the same level the father and son, the master and servant, and superiors and inferiors, generally speaking, will raise woman and make her more and more the equal of man. But here, more than ever, I feel the necessity of making myself clearly understood, for there is no subject on which the course and lawless fancies of our age have taken a freer range. There are people in Europe who confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes would make of man and woman, beings not only equal, but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights. They would mix them in all things, their occupations, their pleasures, their business. It may readily be conceived that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded. And from so preposterous and medley of the works of nature, nothing could ever result, but weak men and disorderly women. It is not thus that the Americans understand that species of democratic equality, which may be established between the sexes. They admit that as nature has appointed such wide differences between the physical and moral constitution of man and woman, her manifest design was to give a distinct employment to their various faculties, and they hold that improvement does not consist in making beings so dissimilar to pretty nearly the same things, but in getting each of them to fulfill their respective tasks in the best possible manner. The Americans have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy, which governs the manufacturers of our age, by carefully dividing the duties of men from those of women, in order that the great work of society may be the better carried on. In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes, and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways which are always different. American women never manage the outward concerns of the family or conduct a business or take a part in political life, nor are they, on the other hand, ever compelled to perform the rough labor of the fields or to make any of those laborious exertions which demand the exertion of physical strength. No families are so poor as to form an exception to this rule. If, on the one hand, an American woman cannot escape from the quiet circle of domestic employments, on the other hand, she is never forced to go beyond it. Hence it is that the women of America who often exhibit a masculine strength of understanding and a manly energy, generally preserve great delicacy of personal appearance and always retain the manners of women, although they sometimes show that they have the hearts and minds of men. Nor have the Americans ever supposed that one consequence of democratic principles is a subversion of marital power or the confusion of the natural authorities and families. They hold that every association must have a head in order to accomplish its object and that the natural head of the conjugal association is man. They do not therefore deny him the right of directing his partner and they maintain that in the smaller association of husband and wife, as well as in the great social community, the object of democracy is to regulate and legalize the powers which are necessary, not to subvert all power. This opinion is not peculiar to one sex and contested by the other. I never observed that the women of America consider conjugal authority as a fortunate usurpation of their rights, nor that they thought themselves degraded by submitting to it. It appeared to me on the contrary that they attach a sort of pride to the voluntary surrender of their own will and make it their boast to bend themselves to the yoke, not to shake it off. Such at least is a feeling expressed by the most virtues of their sex. The others are silent and in the United States it is not the practice for a guilty wife to clamor for the rights of women whilst she is trampling on her holiest duties. It has often been remarked that in Europe a certain degree of contempt lurks even in the flattery which men lavish upon women. Although a European frequently affects to be the slave of women, it may be seen that he never sincerely thinks her is equal. In the United States men seldom compliment women but they daily show how much they esteem them. They constantly display an entire confidence in the understanding of a wife and a profound respect for her freedom. They have decided that her mind is just as fitted as that of a man to discover the plain truth and her heart is firm to embrace it and they have never sought to place her virtue any more than his under the shelter of prejudice, ignorance and fear. It would seem that in Europe where men so easily submit to the despotic sway of women they are nevertheless curtailed of some of the greatest qualities of the human species and considered as seductive but imperfect beings and what may well provoke astonishment. Women ultimately look upon themselves in the same light and almost consider it as a privilege that they are entitled to show themselves futile, feeble and timid. The women of America claim no such privileges. Again it may be said that in our morals we have reserved strange immunities to men so that there is as it were one virtue for his use and another for the guidance of his partner and that according to the opinion of the public the very same act may be punished alternately as a crime or only as a fault. The Americans know not this iniquitous division of duties and rights. Amongst them the seducer is as much dishonoured as his victim. It is true that the Americans rarely lavish upon women those eager attentions which are commonly paid them in Europe but their conduct to women always implies that they suppose them to be virtuous and refined and such is the respect entertained for the moral freedom of the sex that in the presence of a woman the most guarded language is used lest her ear should be offended by an expression. In America a young unmarried woman may alone and without fear undertake a long journey. The legislators of the United States who have mitigated almost all the penalties of criminal law still make rape a capital offence and no crime is visited with more inexorable severity by public opinion. This may be accountantful as the Americans can conceive nothing more precious than a woman's honour and nothing which ought so much to be respected as her independence they hold that no punishment is too severe for the man who deprives her of them against her will. In France where the same offence is visited with far milder penalties it is frequently difficult to get a verdict for majority against prisoner. This is a consequence of contempt of decency or contempt of women. I cannot but believe that it is a contempt of one and of the other. Thus the Americans do not think that man and woman have either the duty or the right to perform the same offices but they show an equal regard for both their respective parts and though their lot is different they consider both of them as beings of equal value. They do not give to the courage of woman the same form or the same direction as to that of man but they never doubt her courage and if they hold that man and his partner ought not always to exercise their intellect and understanding in the same manner they at least believe the understanding of the one to be as sound as that of the other and her intellect to be as clear. Thus then, whilst they have allowed the social inferiority of woman to subsist they have done all they could to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man and in this respect they appear to me to have excellently understood the true principle of democratic improvement. As for myself I do not hesitate to avow that although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life and that situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence I have nowhere seen woman occupy a loftier position and if I were asked now that I am drawing to the close of this work in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed I should reply to the superiority of their women. End of part 3 chapters 11 and 12 Part 3 chapters 13 and 14 of Democracy in America Volume 2 This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Anna Simon Democracy in America Volume 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville Translated by Henry Reeve Part 3 Chapter 13 That the principle of equality naturally divides the Americans into a number of small private circles It may probably be supposed that the final consequence and necessary effect of democratic institutions is to confound together all the members of the community in private as well as in public life and to compel them all to live in common But this would be to ascribe very coarse and oppressive form to the equality which originates in democracy No state of society or laws can render men so much alike but that education, fortune and tastes will interpose some difference between them And though different men may sometimes find it their interest to combine for the same purposes they will never make it their pleasure They will therefore always tend to evade the provisions of legislation whatever they may be and departing in some one respect from the circle within which they were to be bounded they will set up close by the great political community small private circles united together by the similitude of their conditions, habits and manners In the United States the citizens have no sort of preeminence over each other They owe each other no mutual obedience or respect They all meet for the administration of justice for the government of the state and in general to treat of the affairs which concern their common welfare But I never heard that attempts have been made to bring them all to follow the same diversions or to amuse themselves promiscuously in the same places of recreation The Americans who mingle so readily in their political assemblies and courts of justice are want on the contrary carefully to separate into small distinct circles in order to indulge by themselves in the enjoyment of private life Each of them is willing to acknowledge all his fellow citizens as his equals but he will only receive a very limited number of them amongst his friends or his guests This appears to me to be very natural In proportion as the circle of public societies extended it may be anticipated that the sphere of private intercourse will be contracted far from supposing that the members of modern society will ultimately live in common I am afraid that they may end by forming nothing but small coteries Amongst aristocratic nations the different classes are like vast chambers out of which it is impossible to get into which it is impossible to enter These classes have no communication with each other but within their pale men necessarily live in daily contact even though they would not naturally suit the general conformity of a similar condition brings them nearer together But when neither law nor custom professes to establish frequent and habitual relations between certain men their intercourse originates in the accidental analogy of opinions and tastes Hence private society is infinitely varied In democracies where the members of the community never differ much from each other and naturally stand in such propinquity that they may all at any time be confounded in one general mass numerous artificial and arbitrary distinctions spring up by means of which every man hopes to keep himself aloof lest he should be carried away in the crowd against his will This can never fail to be the case for human institutions may be changed but not man Whatever may be the general endeavor of a community to render its members equal and alike the personal pride of individuals will always seek to rise above the line and to form somewhere an inequality to their own advantage In aristocracies men are separated from each other by lofty stationary barriers In democracies they are divided by a number of small and almost invisible threats which are constantly broken or moved from place to place Thus whatever may be the progress of equality In democratic nations a great number of small private communities will always be formed within the general pale of political society but none of them will bear any resemblance in its menace to the highest class in aristocracies Chapter 14 Some Reflections on American Menace Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions yet there is nothing upon which man set more store They grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own menace The influence of the social and political state of a country upon menace is therefore deserving of serious examination Menace are generally the product of the very basis of the character of a people but they are also sometimes the result of an arbitrary convention between certain men Thus they are at once natural and acquired When certain men perceive that they are the foremost persons in society without contestation and without effort when they are constantly engaged on large objects leaving the more minute details to others and when they live in the enjoyment of wealth which they did not amass and which they do not fear to lose it may be supposed that they feel a kind of hearty disdain of the petty interests and practical cares of life and that their thoughts assume a natural greatness which a language and their manners denote In democratic countries menace are generally devoid of dignity because private life is there extremely petty in its character and they are frequently low because the mind has few opportunities of rising above the engrossing cares of domestic interests True dignity and menace consists in always taking one's proper station neither too high nor too low and this is as much within the reach of a peasant as of a prince In democracies all stations appear doubtful hence it is that the menace of democracies though often full of arrogance are commonly wanting in dignity and moreover they are never either well disciplined or accomplished The men who live in democracies are too fluctuating for a certain number of them ever to succeed in laying down a code of good breeding and enforcing people to follow it Every man therefore behaves after his own fashion and there is always a certain incoherence in the manners of such times because they are molded upon the feelings and notions of each individual rather than upon an ideal model proposed for general imitation This however is much more perceptible at the time when an aristocracy has just been overthrown than after it has long been destroyed New political institutions and new social elements then bring to the same places of resort and frequently compelled to live in common Men whose education and habits are still amazingly dissimilar and this renders the motley composition of society peculiarly visible The existence of a former strict code of good breeding is still remembered but what it contained or where it is to be found is already forgotten Men have lost the common law of manners and they have not yet made up their minds to do without it but everyone endeavours to make to himself some sort of arbitrary and variable rule from the remnant of former usages so that manners have neither the regularity and the dignity which they often display amongst aristocratic nations nor the simplicity and freedom which they sometimes assume in democracies they are at once constrained and without constrained This however is not the normal state of things when the equality of conditions is long established and complete as all men entertain nearly the same notions and do nearly the same things they do not require to agree or to copy from one another in order to speak or act in the same manner Their manners are constantly characterized by a number of lesser diversities but not by any great differences They are never perfectly alike because they do not copy from the same pattern They are never very unlike because our social condition is the same At first sight a traveler would observe that the manners of all the Americans are exactly similar It is only upon close examination that the peculiarities in which they differ may be detected The English may game of the manners of the Americans but it is singular that most of the writers who have drawn these ludicrous delineations belong themselves to the middle classes in England to whom the same delineations are exceedingly applicable so that these pitiless censors for the most part furnish an example of the very thing they blame in the United States They do not perceive that they are deriding themselves to the great amusement of the aristocracy of their own country Nothing is more prejudicial to democracy than its outward forms of behavior Many men would willingly endure its vices who cannot support its menace I cannot, however, admit that there is nothing commendable in the manners of a democratic people Amongst aristocratic nations all who live within reach of the first class in society commonly strained to be like it which gives rise to ridiculous and insipid imitations As a democratic people does not possess any models of high breeding at least it escapes the daily necessity of seeing wretched copies of them In democracies, manners are never so refined as amongst aristocratic nations but on the other hand they are never so coarse Neither the coarse oaths of the populace nor the elegant and choice expressions of the nobility are to be heard there The manners of such a people are often vulgar but they are neither brutal nor mean I've already observed that in democracies no such thing as a regular code of good breeding can be laid down This has some inconveniences and some advantages In aristocracies the rules of propriety impose the same demeanour on everyone They make all the members of the same class appear alike in spite of their private inclinations They are dawn and they conceal the natural man Amongst the democratic people manners are neither so tutored nor so uniform but they are frequently more sincere They form as it were a light and loosely woven veil through which the real feelings and private opinions of each individual are easily discernible The form and the substance of human actions often therefore stand in closer relation and if the great picture of human life be less embellished it is more true Thus it may be said in one sense that the effect of democracy is not exactly to give men any particular manners but to prevent them from having manners at all The feelings, the passions, the virtues and the vices of an aristocracy may sometimes reappear in a democracy but not its manners They are lost and vanish forever as soon as the democratic revolution is completed It would seem that nothing is more lasting than the manners of an aristocratic class for they are preserved by that class for some time after it has lost its wealth and its power nor so fleeting for no sooner have they disappeared than not a trace of them is to be found and it is scarcely possible to say what they have been as soon as they have ceased to be A change in the state of society works this miracle and a few generations suffice to consummate it The principal characteristics of aristocracy are handed down by history after an aristocracy is destroyed but the light and exquisite touches of manners are effaced from men's memories almost immediately after its fall Men can no longer conceive what these manners were when they have ceased to witness them They are gone and their departure was unseen, unfelt for in order to feel that refined enjoyment which is derived from choice and distinguished manners habit and education must have prepared the heart and the taste for them is lost almost as easily as the practice of them Thus not only a democratic people cannot have aristocratic manners but they neither comprehend nor desire them and as they never have thought of them it is to their minds as such things had never been Too much importance should not be attached to this loss but it may well be regretted I am aware that it has not unfrequently happened that the same men have had very high-bred manners and very low-born feelings The interior of courts has sufficiently shown what imposing externals may conceal the meanest hearts But though the manners of aristocracy did not constitute virtue they sometimes embellished virtue itself It was no ordinary sight to see a numerous and powerful class of men whose every outward action seemed constantly to be dictated by a natural elevation of thought and feeling by delicacy and regularity of taste and by urbanity of manners Those menace threw a pleasing illusory charm over human nature and though the picture was often a false one it could not be viewed without a noble satisfaction End of chapters 13 and 14 Part 3, chapters 15 and 16 of Democracy in America Volume 2 This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Anna Simon Democracy in America Volume 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville translated by Henry Reeve Part 3, Chapter 15 Of the gravity of the Americans and why it does not prevent them from often committing inconsiderate actions Men who live in democratic countries do not value the simple turbulent or coarse diversions in which the people indulge in aristocratic communities Such diversions are thought by them to be pure ill or insipid Nor have they a greater inclination for the intellectual and refined amusements of the aristocratic classes They want something productive and substantial in their pleasures They want to mix actual fruition with their joy In aristocratic communities the people readily give themselves up to bursts of tumultuous and boisterous gaiety which shake off at once the recollection of their privations The natives of democracies are not fond of being thus violently broken in upon and they never lose sight of their own selves without regret They prefer to these frivolous delights those more serious and silent amusements which are like business and which do not drive business wholly from their minds An American, instead of going in a leisure hour to dance merrily at some place of public resort as the fellows of his calling continue to do throughout the greater part of Europe shuts himself up at home to drink He does enjoy his two pleasures He can go on thinking of his business and he can get drunk decently by his own fireside I thought that the English constituted the most serious nation on the face of the earth but I have since seen the Americans and have changed my opinion I do not mean to say that temperament has not a great deal to do with the character of the inhabitants of the United States but I think that their political institutions are a still more influential cause I believe the seriousness of the Americans arises partly from their pride In democratic countries even poor men entertain a lofty notion of their personal importance They look upon themselves with complacency and are apt to suppose that others are looking at them too With this disposition they watch their language and their actions with care and do not lay themselves open so as to portray their deficiencies To preserve their dignity they think it necessary to retain their gravity But I detect another more deep-seated and powerful cause which instinctively produces amongst the Americans this astonishing gravity Under a despotism communities give way at times to bursts of vehement joy but they are generally gloomy and moody because they are afraid Under absolute monarchies tempered by the customs and manners of the country their spirits are often cheerful and even because as they have some freedom and a good deal of security they are exempted from the most important cares of life But all free peoples are serious because their minds are habitually absorbed by the contemplation of some dangerous or difficult purpose This is more especially the case amongst those free nations which form democratic communities Then there are in all classes a very large number of men constantly occupied with the serious affairs of the government and those whose thoughts are not engaged in the direction of the Commonwealth are wholly engrossed by the acquisition of a private fortune Amongst such a people a serious demeanour ceases to be peculiar to certain men and becomes a habit of the nation We are told of small democracies in the days of antiquity in which the citizens met upon the public places with garlands of roses and spent almost all their time in dancing and theatrical amusements I do not believe in such republics any more than in that of Plato or if the things we read of really happened I do not hesitate to affirm that these supposed democracies were composed of very different elements from ours and that they had nothing in common with the letter except their name But it must not be supposed that in the midst of all their toils the people who live in democracies think themselves to be pitied The contrary is remarked to be the case No man are funder of their own condition Life would have no relish for them if they were delivered from the anxieties which harass them and they show more attachment to their cares than aristocratic nations to their pleasures I am next led to inquire how it is that these same democratic nations which are so serious sometimes act in so inconsiderate a menna The Americans who almost always preserve a state demeanour and a frigid air nevertheless frequently allow themselves to be born away far beyond the bound of reason by a sudden passion or a hasty opinion and they sometimes gravely commit strange absurdities This contrast ought not to surprises There is one sort of ignorance which originates in extreme publicity In despotic states men know not how to act because they are told nothing In democratic nations they often act at random because nothing is to be left untold The former do not know the latter forget and the chief features of each picture are lost to them in a bewilderment of details It is astonishing what imprudent language a public man may sometimes use in free countries and especially in democratic states without being compromised or as in absolute monarchies a few words dropped by accident are enough to unmask him forever and ruin him without hope of redemption This is explained by what goes before When a man speaks in the midst of a great crowd many of his words are not heard or are forthwith obliterated from the memories of those who hear them But amidst the silence of a mute then motionless throng the slightest whisper strikes the ear In democracies men are never stationary A thousand chances waft them to and fro and their life is always the sport of unforeseen or so to speak extemporaneous circumstances Thus they are often obliged to do things which they have imperfectly learned to say things they imperfectly understand and to devote themselves to work for which they are unprepared by long apprenticeship In aristocracies every man has one sole object which he unceasingly pursues But amongst democratic nations the existence of man is more complex The same mind will almost always embrace several objects at the same time and these objects are frequently wholly foreign to each other As it cannot know them all well the mind is readily satisfied with imperfect notions of each When the inhabitant of democracies is not urged by his wants he is so at least by his desires for of all the possessions which he sees around him none are wholly beyond his reach He therefore does everything in a hurry He is always satisfied with pretty well and never pauses more than an instant to consider what he has been doing His curiosity is at once insatiable and cheaply satisfied for he cares more to know a great deal quickly and to know anything well He has no time and but little taste to search things to the bottom Thus then democratic peoples are grave because our social and political condition constantly leads them to engage in serious occupations and they act inconsiderately because they give but little time and attention to each of these occupations The habit of inattention must be considered as the greatest bane of the democratic character Chapter 16 Why the national vanity of the Americans is more restless and captures than that of the English All free nations are vain glories but national pride is not displayed by all in the same manner The Americans in their intercourse with strangers appear impatient to the smallest censure and insatiable of praise The most slender eulogym is acceptable to them The most exalted seldom contents them They unceasingly harass you to extort praise and if you resist their entreaties they falter praising themselves It would seem as if dousing their own merit they wish to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes Their vanity is not only greedy but restless and jealous It will grant nothing whilst it demands everything but is ready to beg and to crawl at the same time If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a fine one I, he replies, there is not its fellow in the world If I applaud the freedom which its inhabitants enjoy, he answers Freedom is a fine thing but few nations are worthy to enjoy it If I remark the purity of morals which distinguishes the United States I can imagine to see that a stranger who has been struck by the corruption of all other nations is astonished at the difference At length I leave him to the contemplation of himself but he returns to the charge and does not desist till he has got me to repeat all I had just been saying It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garless patriotism It worries even those who are disposed to respect it Such is not the case with the English An Englishman calmly enjoys the real or imaginary advantages which in his opinion his country possesses If he grants nothing to other nations neither does he solicit anything for his own The censure of foreigners does not affect him and their praise hardly flatters him His position with regard to the rest of the world is one of disdainful and ignorant reserve His pride requires no sustenance It nourishes itself It is remarkable that two nations so recently sprung from the same stock should be so opposite to one another in their manner of feeling and conversing In aristocratic countries the great possess immense privileges upon which their pride rests without seeking to rely upon the lesser advantages which accrue to them As these privileges came to them by inheritance they regard them in some sort as a portion of themselves or at least as a natural right inherent in their own persons They therefore entertain a calm sense of their superiority They do not dream of founting privileges which everyone perceives that no one contests And these things are not sufficiently new to them to be made topics of conversation They stand unmoved in their solitary greatness well assured that they are seen of all the world without any effort to show themselves off and that no one will attempt to drive them from that position When an aristocracy carries on the public affairs its national pride naturally assumes this reserved indifferent and haughty form which is imitated by all the other classes of the nation When, on the contrary, social conditions differ but little the slightest privileges are of some importance as every man sees around himself a million of people enjoying precisely similar or analogous advantages his pride becomes craving and jealous He clings to mere trifles and doggedly defends them In democracies As the conditions of life are very fluctuating men have almost always recently acquired the advantages which they possess The consequence is that they feel extreme pleasure in exhibiting them to show others and convince themselves that they really enjoy them As at any instant these same advantages may be lost their possessors are constantly on the alert and make a point of showing that they still retain them Men living in democracies love their country just as they love themselves and they transfer the habits of their private vanity to their vanity as a nation The restless and insatiable vanity of a democratic people originates so entirely in the equality and precariousness of social conditions that the members of the heartiest nobility display the very same passion in those lesser portions of their existence in which there is anything fluctuating or contested An aristocratic class always differs greatly from the other classes of the nation by the extent and perpetuity of its privileges But it often happens that the only differences between the members who belong to it consist in small transient advantages which may any day be lost or acquired The members of a powerful aristocracy collected in a capital or a court have been known to contest with virulence those frivolous privileges which depend on the caprice of fashion or the will of their master These persons then, displayed towards each other precisely the same purile jealousies which animate the men of democracies the same eagerness to snatch the smallest advantages which are equals contested and the same desire to parade ostentatiously those of which they were in possession If national pride ever entered into the minds of courtes I do not question that they would display it in the same manner as the members of a democratic community End of chapters 15 and 16