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.