16. Chapter XVI: Why The National Vanity Of The Americans Is More
Restless And Captious Than That Of The English
All free nations are vainglorious, but national pride is not
displayed by all in the same manner. The Americans in their
intercourse with strangers appear impatient of the smallest
censure and insatiable of praise. The most slender eulogium is
acceptable to them; the most exalted seldom contents them; they
unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their
entreaties they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as
if, doubting their own merit, they wished 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 quarrel at the
same time. If I say to an American that the country he lives in
is a fine one, "Ay," 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," says he, "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
garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to
respect it. [7]
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 vaunting
privileges which everyone perceives and 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
haughtiest 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 puerile jealousies which
animate the men of democracies, the same eagerness to snatch the
smallest advantages which their 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
courtiers, I do not question that they would display it in the
same manner as the members of a democratic community.