enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without
patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and
of intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have
preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present,
where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and
genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste
for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law;
where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and
where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable
or shameful, false or true? I cannot, however, believe that the Creator
made man to leave him in an endless struggle with the intellectual
miseries which surround us: God destines a calmer and a more certain
future to the communities of Europe; I am unacquainted with His designs,
but I shall not cease to believe in them because I cannot fathom them,
and I had rather mistrust my own capacity than His justice.

There is a country in the world where the great revolution which I am
speaking of seems nearly to have reached its natural limits; it has
been effected with ease and simplicity, say rather that this country
has attained the consequences of the democratic revolution which we
are undergoing without having experienced the revolution itself. The
emigrants who fixed themselves on the shores of America in the beginning
of the seventeenth century severed the democratic principle from all
the principles which repressed it in the old communities of Europe, and
transplanted it unalloyed to the New World. It has there been allowed to
spread in perfect freedom, and to put forth its consequences in the laws
by influencing the manners of the country.

It appears to me beyond a doubt that sooner or later we shall arrive,
like the Americans, at an almost complete equality of conditions. But I