17. Chapter XVII: That The Aspect Of Society In The United States Is
At Once Excited And Monotonous
It would seem that nothing can be more adapted to stimulate
and to feed curiosity than the aspect of the United States.
Fortunes, opinions, and laws are there in ceaseless variation: it
is as if immutable nature herself were mutable, such are the
changes worked upon her by the hand of man. Yet in the end the
sight of this excited community becomes monotonous, and after
having watched the moving pageant for a time the spectator is
tired of it. Amongst aristocratic nations every man is pretty
nearly stationary in his own sphere; but men are astonishingly
unlike each other -their passions, their notions, their habits,
and their tastes are essentially different: nothing changey, but
everything differs. In democracies, on the contrary, all men are
alike and do things pretty nearly alike. It is true that they
are subject to great and frequent vicissitudes; but as the same
events of good or adverse fortune are continually recurring, the
name of the actors only is changed, the piece is always the same.
The aspect of American society is animated, because men and
things are always changing; but it is monotonous, because all
these changes are alike.
Men living in democratic ages have many passions, but most
of their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed
from it. The cause of this is, not that their souls are
narrower, but that the importance of money is really greater at
such times. When all the members of a community are independent
of or indifferent to each other, the co-operation of each of them
can only be obtained by paying for it: this infinitely multiplies
the purposes to which wealth may be applied, and increases its
value. When the reverence which belonged to what is old has
vanished, birth, condition, and profession no longer distinguish
men, or scarcely distinguish them at all: hardly anything but
money remains to create strongly marked differences between them,
and to raise some of them above the common level. The
distinction originating in wealth is increased by the
disappearance and diminution of all other distinctions. Amongst
aristocratic nations money only reaches to a few points on the
vast circle of man's desires -in democracies it seems to lead to
all. The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, either as a
principal or an accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the
Americans do: this gives to all their passions a sort of family
likeness, and soon renders the survey of them exceedingly
wearisome. This perpetual recurrence of the same passion is
monotonous; the peculiar methods by which this passion seeks its
own gratification are no less so.
In an orderly and constituted democracy like the United
States, where men cannot enrich themselves by war, by public
office, or by political confiscation, the love of wealth mainly
drives them into business and manufactures. Although these
pursuits often bring about great commotions and disasters, they
cannot prosper without strictly regular habits and a long routine
of petty uniform acts. The stronger the passion is, the more
regular are these habits, and the more uniform are these acts.
It may be said that it is the vehemence of their desires which
makes the Americans so methodical; it perturbs their minds, but
it disciplines their lives.
The remark I here apply to America may indeed be addressed
to almost all our contemporaries. Variety is disappearing from
the human race; the same ways of acting, thinking, and feeling
are to be met with all over the world. This is not only because
nations work more upon each other, and are more faithful in their
mutual imitation; but as the men of each country relinquish more
and more the peculiar opinions and feelings of a caste, a
profession, or a family, they simultaneously arrive at something
nearer to the constitution of man, which is everywhere the same.
Thus they become more alike, even without having imitated each
other. Like travellers scattered about some large wood, which is
intersected by paths converging to one point, if all of them
keep, their eyes fixed upon that point and advance towards it,
they insensibly draw nearer together -though they seek not,
though they see not, though they know not each other; and they
will be surprised at length to find themselves all collected on
the same spot. All the nations which take, not any particular
man, but man himself, as the object of their researches and their
imitations, are tending in the end to a similar state of society,
like these travellers converging to the central plot of the
forest.