SELF-GOVERNMENT

There is one thing that America demonstrates invincibly of which I was hitherto doubtful. This is that the middle classes are capable of governing a state. I don’t know if they would come off honorably from really difficult political situations, but they are adequate for the ordinary conduct of society, despite their petty passions, their incomplete education, their vulgar manners. Clearly they can supply practical intelligence, and that is sufficient.

THE RULERS AND THE RULED

When I arrived in the United States I discovered with astonishment that good qualities were common among the governed but rare among the rulers. In our day it is a constant fact that the most outstanding Americans are seldom summoned to public office, and it must be recognized that this tendency has increased as democracy has gone beyond its previous limits. It is clear that during the last fifty years the race of American statesmen has strangely shrunk.

THOSE PROTESTANTS

Sunday is rigorously observed. And yet, either I am much mistaken or there is a great depth of doubt and indifference hidden under these external forms. … One follows a religion as our fathers took medicine in the month of May. If it doesn’t do any good, one seems to say, at least it can do no harm.

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

I admit that I do not feel toward freedom of the press that complete and instantaneous love which one accords to things by their nature supremely good. I love it more from considering the evils it prevents than on account of the good it does.

THE NATURE OF DEMOCRACY

Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure. … Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him.

Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

SPECIAL AMERICAN TRAITS

The man you left behind in the streets of New York, you will find him again in the midst of almost impenetrable solitudes: same dress, same spirit, same language, same habits and the same pleasures. An American takes up ten occupations in a lifetime, leaving them and returning to them again: he continually changes his place of abode, and perpetually undertakes new enterprises. Less than any man does he fear to jeopardize the fortune he has acquired, for he knows with what ease he can found a new one.

CINCINNATI OBSERVED

A singular spectacle, a city which seems to want to rise too quickly for people to have any system or plan about it.