10. Chapter X: Of The Taste For Physical Well-Being In America
In America the passion for physical well-being is not always
exclusive, but it is general; and if all do not feel it in the
same manner, yet it is felt by all. Carefully to satisfy all,
even the least wants of the body, and to provide the little
conveniences of life, is uppermost in every mind. Something of an
analogous character is more and more apparent in Europe. Amongst
the causes which produce these similar consequences in both
hemispheres, several are so connected with my subject as to
deserve notice.
When riches are hereditarily fixed in families, there are a
great number of men who enjoy the comforts of life without
feeling an exclusive taste for those comforts. The heart of man
is not so much caught by the undisturbed possession of anything
valuable as by the desire, as yet imperfectly satisfied, of
possessing it, and by the incessant dread of losing it. In
aristocratic communities, the wealthy, never having experienced a
condition different from their own, entertain no fear of changing
it; the existence of such conditions hardly occurs to them. The
comforts of life are not to them the end of life, but simply a
way of living; they regard them as existence itself -enjoyed,
but scarcely thought of. As the natural and instinctive taste
which all men feel for being well off is thus satisfied without
trouble and without apprehension, their faculties are turned
elsewhere, and cling to more arduous and more lofty undertakings,
which excite and engross their minds. Hence it is that, in the
midst of physical gratifications, the members of an aristocracy
often display a haughty contempt of these very enjoyments, and
exhibit singular powers of endurance under the privation of them.
All the revolutions which have ever shaken or destroyed
aristocracies, have shown how easily men accustomed to
superfluous luxuries can do without the necessaries of life;
whereas men who have toiled to acquire a competency can hardly
live after they have lost it.
If I turn my observation from the upper to the lower
classes, I find analogous effects produced by opposite causes.
Amongst a nation where aristocracy predominates in society, and
keeps it stationary, the people in the end get as much accustomed
to poverty as the rich to their opulence. The latter bestow no
anxiety on their physical comforts, because they enjoy them
without an effort; the former do not think of things which they
despair of obtaining, and which they hardly know enough of to
desire them. In communities of this kind, the imagination of the
poor is driven to seek another world; the miseries of real life
inclose it around, but it escapes from their control, and flies
to seek its pleasures far beyond. When, on the contrary, the
distinctions of ranks are confounded together and privileges are
destroyed -when hereditary property is subdivided, and education
and freedom widely diffused, the desire of acquiring the comforts
of the world haunts the imagination of the poor, and the dread of
losing them that of the rich. Many scanty fortunes spring up;
those who possess them have a sufficient share of physical
gratifications to conceive a taste for these pleasures -not
enough to satisfy it. They never procure them without exertion,
and they never indulge in them without apprehension. They are
therefore always straining to pursue or to retain gratifications
so delightful, so imperfect, so fugitive.
If I were to inquire what passion is most natural to men who
are stimulated and circumscribed by the obscurity of their birth
or the mediocrity of their fortune, I could discover none more
peculiarly appropriate to their condition than this love of
physical prosperity. The passion for physical comforts is
essentially a passion of the middle classes: with those classes
it grows and spreads, with them it preponderates. From them it
mounts into the higher orders of society, and descends into the
mass of the people. I never met in America with any citizen so
poor as not to cast a glance of hope and envy on the enjoyments
of the rich, or whose imagination did not possess itself by
anticipation of those good things which fate still obstinately
withheld from him. On the other hand, I never perceived amongst
the wealthier inhabitants of the United States that proud
contempt of physical gratifications which is sometimes to be met
with even in the most opulent and dissolute aristocracies. Most
of these wealthy persons were once poor; they have felt the sting
of want; they were long a prey to adverse fortunes; and now that
the victory is won, the passions which accompanied the contest
have survived it: their minds are, as it were, intoxicated by the
small enjoyments which they have pursued for forty years. Not but
that in the United States, as elsewhere, there are a certain
number of wealthy persons who, having come into their property by
inheritance, possess, without exertion, an opulence they have not
earned. But even these men are not less devotedly attached to
the pleasures of material life. The love of well-being is now
become the predominant taste of the nation; the great current of
man's passions runs in that channel, and sweeps everything along
in its course.