discussion, the morals of the people were reformed. All these national
features are more or less discoverable in the physiognomy of those
adventurers who came to seek a new home on the opposite shores of the
Atlantic.

Another remark, to which we shall hereafter have occasion to recur, is
applicable not only to the English, but to the French, the Spaniards,
and all the Europeans who successively established themselves in the New
World. All these European colonies contained the elements, if not the
development, of a complete democracy. Two causes led to this result. It
may safely be advanced, that on leaving the mother-country the emigrants
had in general no notion of superiority over one another. The happy and
the powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of
equality among men than poverty and misfortune. It happened, however,
on several occasions, that persons of rank were driven to America
by political and religious quarrels. Laws were made to establish a
gradation of ranks; but it was soon found that the soil of America was
opposed to a territorial aristocracy. To bring that refractory land into
cultivation, the constant and interested exertions of the owner himself
were necessary; and when the ground was prepared, its produce was found
to be insufficient to enrich a master and a farmer at the same time.
The land was then naturally broken up into small portions, which the
proprietor cultivated for himself. Land is the basis of an aristocracy,
which clings to the soil that supports it; for it is not by privileges
alone, nor by birth, but by landed property handed down from generation
to generation, that an aristocracy is constituted. A nation may present
immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness, but unless those fortunes are
territorial there is no aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich
and that of the poor.