Public Spirit In The United States
Patriotism of instinct -Patriotism of reflection -Their
different characteristics -Nations ought to strive to acquire the
second when the first has disappeared -Efforts of the Americans to it -Interest of the individual intimately connected with that of the
country.
There is one sort of patriotic attachment which principally
arises from that instinctive, disinterested, and undefinable
feeling which connects the affections of man with his birthplace.
This natural fondness is united to a taste for ancient customs,
and to a reverence for ancestral traditions of the past; those
who cherish it love their country as they love the mansions of
their fathers. They enjoy the tranquillity which it affords
them; they cling to the peaceful habits which they have
contracted within its bosom; they are attached to the
reminiscences which it awakens, and they are even pleased by the
state of obedience in which they are placed. This patriotism is
sometimes stimulated by religious enthusiasm, and then it is
capable of making the most prodigious efforts. It is in itself a
kind of religion; it does not reason, but it acts from the
impulse of faith and of sentiment. By some nations the monarch
has been regarded as a personification of the country; and the
fervor of patriotism being converted into the fervor of loyalty,
they took a sympathetic pride in his conquests, and gloried in
his power. At one time, under the ancient monarchy, the French
felt a sort of satisfaction in the sense of their dependence upon
the arbitrary pleasure of their king, and they were wont to say
with pride, "We are the subjects of the most powerful king in the
world."
But, like all instinctive passions, this kind of patriotism
is more apt to prompt transient exertion than to supply the
motives of continuous endeavor. It may save the State in
critical circumstances, but it will not unfrequently allow the
nation to decline in the midst of peace. Whilst the manners of a
people are simple and its faith unshaken, whilst society is
steadily based upon traditional institutions whose legitimacy has
never been contested, this instinctive patriotism is wont to
endure.
But there is another species of attachment to a country
which is more rational than the one we have been describing. It
is perhaps less generous and less ardent, but it is more fruitful
and more lasting; it is coeval with the spread of knowledge, it
is nurtured by the laws, it grows by the exercise of civil
rights, and, in the end, it is confounded with the personal
interest of the citizen. A man comprehends the influence which
the prosperity of his country has upon his own welfare; he is
aware that the laws authorize him to contribute his assistance to
that prosperity, and he labors to promote it as a portion of his
interest in the first place, and as a portion of his right in the
second.
But epochs sometimes occur, in the course of the existence
of a nation, at which the ancient customs of a people are
changed, public morality destroyed, religious belief disturbed,
and the spell of tradition broken, whilst the diffusion of
knowledge is yet imperfect, and the civil rights of the community
are ill secured, or confined within very narrow limits. The
country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the eyes of the
citizens; they no longer behold it in the soil which they
inhabit, for that soil is to them a dull inanimate clod; nor in
the usages of their forefathers, which they have been taught to
look upon as a debasing yoke; nor in religion, for of that they
doubt; nor in the laws, which do not originate in their own
authority; nor in the legislator, whom they fear and despise.
The country is lost to their senses, they can neither discover it
under its own nor under borrowed features, and they entrench
themselves within the dull precincts of a narrow egotism. They
are emancipated from prejudice without having acknowledged the
empire of reason; they are neither animated by the instinctive
patriotism of monarchical subjects nor by the thinking patriotism
of republican citizens; but they have stopped halfway between the
two, in the midst of confusion and of distress.
In this predicament, to retreat is impossible; for a people
cannot restore the vivacity of its earlier times, any more than a
man can return to the innocence and the bloom of childhood; such
things may be regretted, but they cannot be renewed. The only
thing, then, which remains to be done is to proceed, and to
accelerate the union of private with public interests, since the
period of disinterested patriotism is gone by forever.
I am certainly very far from averring that, in order to
obtain this result, the exercise of political rights should be
immediately granted to all the members of the community. But I
maintain that the most powerful, and perhaps the only, means of
interesting men in the welfare of their country which we still
possess is to make them partakers in the Government. At the
present time civic zeal seems to me to be inseparable from the
exercise of political rights; and I hold that the number of
citizens will be found to augment or to decrease in Europe in
proportion as those rights are extended.
In the United States the inhabitants were thrown but as
yesterday upon the soil which they now occupy, and they brought
neither customs nor traditions with them there; they meet each
other for the first time with no previous acquaintance; in short,
the instinctive love of their country can scarcely exist in their
minds; but everyone takes as zealous an interest in the affairs
of his township, his county, and of the whole State, as if they
were his own, because everyone, in his sphere, takes an active
part in the government of society.
The lower orders in the United States are alive to the
perception of the influence exercised by the general prosperity
upon their own welfare; and simple as this observation is, it is
one which is but too rarely made by the people. But in America
the people regards this prosperity as the result of its own
exertions; the citizen looks upon the fortune of the public as
his private interest, and he co-operates in its success, not so
much from a sense of pride or of duty, as from what I shall
venture to term cupidity.
It is unnecessary to study the institutions and the history
of the Americans in order to discover the truth of this remark,
for their manners render it sufficiently evident. As the
American participates in all that is done in his country, he
thinks himself obliged to defend whatever may be censured; for it
is not only his country which is attacked upon these occasions,
but it is himself. The consequence is, that his national pride
resorts to a thousand artifices, and to all the petty tricks of
individual vanity.
Nothing is more embarrassing in the ordinary intercourse of
life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. A stranger
may be very well inclined to praise many of the institutions of
their country, but he begs permission to blame some of the
peculiarities which he observes -a permission which is, however,
inexorably refused. America is therefore a free country, in
which, lest anybody should be hurt by your remarks, you are not
allowed to speak freely of private individuals, or of the State,
of the citizens or of the authorities, of public or of private
undertakings, or, in short, of anything at all, except it be of
the climate and the soil; and even then Americans will be found
ready to defend either the one or the other, as if they had been
contrived by the inhabitants of the country.
In our times option must be made between the patriotism of
all and the government of a few; for the force and activity which
the first confers are irreconcilable with the guarantees of
tranquillity which the second furnishes.
