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. *a
[Footnote a: See Appendix U.]
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.