12. Chapter XII: Why The Americans Raise Some Monuments So
Insignificant, And Others So Important
I have just observed, that in democratic ages monuments of
the arts tend to become more numerous and less important. I now
hasten to point out the exception to this rule. In a democratic
community individuals are very powerless; but the State which
represents them all, and contains them all in its grasp, is very
powerful. Nowhere do citizens appear so insignificant as in a
democratic nation; nowhere does the nation itself appear greater,
or does the mind more easily take in a wide general survey of it.
In democratic communities the imagination is compressed when men
consider themselves; it expands indefinitely when they think of
the State. Hence it is that the same men who live on a small
scale in narrow dwellings, frequently aspire to gigantic splendor
in the erection of their public monuments.
The Americans traced out the circuit of an immense city on
the site which they intended to make their capital, but which, up
to the present time, is hardly more densely peopled than
Pontoise, though, according to them, it will one day contain a
million of inhabitants. They have already rooted up trees for
ten miles round, lest they should interfere with the future
citizens of this imaginary metropolis. They have erected a
magnificent palace for Congress in the centre of the city, and
have given it the pompous name of the Capitol. The several
States of the Union are every day planning and erecting for
themselves prodigious undertakings, which would astonish the
engineers of the great European nations. Thus democracy not only
leads men to a vast number of inconsiderable productions; it also
leads them to raise some monuments on the largest scale: but
between these two extremes there is a blank. A few scattered
remains of enormous buildings can therefore teach us nothing of
the social condition and the institutions of the people by whom
they were raised. I may add, though the remark leads me to step
out of my subject, that they do not make us better acquainted
with its greatness, its civilization, and its real prosperity.
Whensoever a power of any kind shall be able to make a whole
people co-operate in a single undertaking, that power, with a
little knowledge and a great deal of time, will succeed in
obtaining something enormous from the co-operation of efforts so
multiplied. But this does not lead to the conclusion that the
people was very happy, very enlightened, or even very strong.
The Spaniards found the City of Mexico full of magnificent
temples and vast palaces; but that did not prevent Cortes from
conquering the Mexican Empire with 600 foot soldiers and sixteen
horses. If the Romans had been better acquainted with the laws
of hydraulics, they would not have constructed all the aqueducts
which surround the ruins of their cities -they would have made a
better use of their power and their wealth. If they had invented
the steam-engine, perhaps they would not have extended to the
extremities of their empire those long artificial roads which are
called Roman roads. These things are at once the splendid
memorials of their ignorance and of their greatness. A people
which should leave no other vestige of its track than a few
leaden pipes in the earth and a few iron rods upon its surface,
might have been more the master of nature than the Romans.