WHAT WE ARE TO THINK OF THE UNITED STATES.
We are not just towards the United States. Their civilization, so
different from ours, wounds us in various ways, and we turn from them in
the ill-humor excited by their real defects, without taking note enough
of their eminent qualities. This country, which possesses neither
church, nor State, nor army, nor governmental protection; this country,
born yesterday, and born under a Puritanic influence; this country,
without past history, without monuments, separated from the Middle Ages
by the double interval of centuries and beliefs; this rude country of
farmers and pioneers, has nothing fitted to please us. It has the
exuberant life and the eccentricities of youth; that is, it affords to
our mature experience inexhaustible subjects of blame and raillery.
We are so little inclined to admire it, that we seek in its territorial
configuration for the essential explanation of its success. Is it so
difficult to maintain good order and liberty at home when one has
immense deserts to people, when land offers itself without stint to the
labor of man?--I do not see, for my part, that land is lacking at Buenos
Ayres, at Montevideo, in Mexico, or in any of the pronunciamento
republics that cover South America. It seems to me that the Turks have
room before them, and that the Middle Ages were not suffering precisely
from an excess of population when they presented everywhere the
spectacle of anarchy and oppression.
Be sure that the United States, which have something to learn of us,
have also something to teach us. Theirs is a great community, which it
does not become us to pass by in disdain. The more it differs from our
own Europe, the more necessary is impartial attention to comprehend and
appreciate it. Especially is it impossible for us to form an enlightened
opinion of the present crisis, unless we begin by taking into
consideration the surroundings in which it has broken out. The nature of
the struggle and its probable issue, the difficulties of the present,
and the chances of the future, will be clear to us only on condition of
our making a study of the United States. A few details will, therefore,
be permitted me.
Among the Yankees, the faults are on the surface. I am not one to
justify Lynch law, whatever may be the necessities which exist in the
Far West. Riots in the United States are cited which have performed
their work of fire and devastation, and which no one has dared treat
rigorously afterwards, for fear of incurring disgrace from the sovereign
people; but I remember, I fancy, that similar things have been seen in
Paris itself. We will not, therefore, lay too great stress on them.
One thing that is not seen in Paris, is, unhappily, remarked in America:
the general tendency among women to substitute masculine qualities which
scarcely befit them, for the feminine qualities which constitute their
grace, their strength, and their dignity; thence results a certain
something unpleasant and rude which does no credit to the New World. I
by no means admire coarseness, and I do not admit that it is the
necessary companion of energy; the tone of the journals and of the
debates in Congress is often calculated to excite a just reprobation.
There is in the United States a levelling spirit, a jealousy of acquired
superiority, and, above all, of inherited distinctions, which proceeds
from the worst sentiments of the heart. What is graver still, the
tender and gentle side of the human soul, such as shines forth in the
Gospel, appears too rarely among this people, where the Gospel,
notwithstanding, is in honor, but where the labor of a gigantic growth
has developed the active instead of the loving virtues; the Americans
are cold even when good, charitable and devout.
They may love money, and often concentrate their thoughts on the means
of making it; I will not contest this, although I doubt, on seeing what
passes among ourselves, whether we have the right to cast the stone at
them; especially as American liberality, as I shall presently show, is
of a nature to put our parsimony to shame. As to the bankrupt acts, of
which American creditors have many times complained, nothing can justify
them; yet here again the rôle of pedagogue scarcely becomes us. If more
than one American railroad company have taken advantage of a crisis to
declare without much dishonor, a suspension of payment, it is not proved
that these suspensions of payment must be converted into bankruptcy. If
more than one town or more than one county make the half yearly payments
of their debts with reluctance, the courts always do fair justice on
this ill will; there are some countries, Russia, for instance, where
the courts do not do as much. If, in fine, at one time, a number of
States failed to keep their engagements, and a single one dared proclaim
the infamous doctrine of repudiation, all have since paid, except one
State of the extreme South, Mississippi. Once more, are we sure of being
in a position to reprove such misdeeds; we, whose governments, anterior
to '89, made use, without much scruple, of the fall of stocks, and
bankruptcies; we, whose debt, on emerging from the Revolution, took the
significant name of _tiers consolidé?_
Let us not forget that the population of the United States has increased
tenfold since the close of the last century; they have received
immigrants annually, by hundreds of thousands, who have not always been
the elite of the Old World. Must not this perpetual invasion of
strangers promptly transformed into citizens, have necessarily
introduced into the decision of public affairs some elements of
immorality? I admire the honorable and religious spirit of the Americans
which has been able to assimilate and rule to such a degree these great
masses of Irish and Germans. Few countries would have endured a like
ordeal as well.
Remark that, in spite of all, public order is maintained without paid
troops, (Continental Europe will find it hard to credit this.)
Tranquillity reigns in the largest cities of the United States; respect
for the law is in every heart; great ballotings take place, millions of
excited men await the result with trembling; yet, notwithstanding, not
an act of violence is committed. American riots--for some there are--are
certainly less numerous than ours; and they have the merit of not being
transformed into revolutions.
The greater part of the immigrants remain, of course, in the large
cities; here they come almost to make the laws, and here, too, noble
causes encounter the most opponents. Mr. Lincoln, to cite an example,
received only a minority of suffrages in the city of New York, whilst
the unanimity of the country suffrages secured him the vote of the
State. Contempt of the colored class, that crime of the North, breaks
out most of all in the large cities, and particularly among
agglomerations of immigrants; none are harsher to free negroes, it must
be admitted, than newly-landed Europeans who have come to seek a fortune
in America.
As to crimes, they are numerous only in cities; still the criminal
records of the United States appear somewhat full when compared with
ours. I know how great a part of this must be assigned to the
insufficiency of repression; in America, criminals doubtless escape
punishment much oftener than among us. Notwithstanding, there is real
security; and a child might travel over the entire West without being
exposed to the slightest danger.
M. de Tocqueville has said that morals are infinitely more rigid in
North America than elsewhere. This is not, it seems to me, a trifling
advantage. Whatever may be the depravity of the seaports, where the
whole world holds rendezvous, it remains certain that it does not
penetrate into the interior of the country. Open the journals and novels
of the United States; you will not find a corrupt page in them. You
might leave them all on the drawing-room table, without fearing to call
a blush to the brow of a woman, or to sully the imagination of a child.
In the heart of the manufacturing States, model villages are found, in
which every thing is combined to protect the artisans of both sexes from
the perils that await them in other countries. Who has not heard of the
town of Lowell, where farmers' daughters go to earn their dowry, where
the labor of the factories brings no dissipation in its train, where the
workwomen read, write, teach Sunday-schools, where their morality
detracts nothing from their liberty and progress? When I have added
that the United States have not a single foundling asylum, it seems to
me that I have indicated what we are to think at once of their good
morals and good sense.
And let not the Americans he represented as a people at once honest and
narrow-minded. If they are still far from our level--and this must
necessarily be true, in an artistic and literary point of view--we are
not, however, at liberty to despise a country which counts such names as
Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Cooper, Poe, Washington Irving,
Channing, Prescott, Motley, and Bancroft. Note that among these names,
men of imagination hold a prominent place, which proves, we may say in
passing, that the country where we oftenest hear the exclamation, "Of
what use is it?" agrees in finding poetry of some use. And I speak here
neither of orators, like Mr. Seward or Mr. Douglas, nor of scholars,
like Lieutenant Maury, nor of those who, like Fulton or Morse, have
applied science to art: judgment has been passed on all these points.
But the true superiority of Americans is in the universality of common
instruction. The Puritans, who came hither with their Bibles, were of
necessity zealous founders of schools; the Bible and the school go
together. See, therefore, what the schools are in the United States! The
State of Massachusetts alone, which does not number a million of souls,
devotes five millions yearly to its public instruction. If other States
are far from equalling it in academies and higher institutions, all are
on a level with it as regards primary schools; a man or woman,
therefore, is rarely found outside the class of immigrants, who does not
possess a solid knowledge of the elementary sciences, the extent of
which would excite our surprise. By the side of the primary school, and
to complete its instruction in the religious point of view, the
Americans have everywhere opened Sunday-schools, kept gratuitously by
volunteer teachers, among whom have figured many men of the highest
standing, several of whom have been Presidents of the Confederation.
These Sunday-schools, not less than twenty thousand in number, and
superintended by one hundred and fifty thousand teachers, count more
than a million of pupils, of which ten thousand at least are adults.
Calculate the power of such an instrument!
People read enormously in America. There is a library in the meanest
cabin of roughly-hewn logs, constructed by the pioneers of the West.
These poor log-houses almost always contain a Bible, often journals,
instructive books, sometimes even poetry. We in Europe, who fancy
ourselves fine amateurs of good verses, would scarcely imagine that
copies of Longfellow are scattered among American husbandmen. The
political journals have many subscribers; those of the religious papers
are no less numerous. I know of a monthly journal designed for children,
(the _Child's Paper_,) of which three hundred thousand copies are
printed. This is the intellectual aliment of the country. In the towns,
lectures are added to books, journals, and reviews: in all imaginable
subjects, this community, which the Government does not charge itself
with instructing, (at least, beyond the primary education,) educates and
develops itself with indefatigable ardor. Ideas are agitated in the
smallest market-town; life is everywhere.
Accustomed to act for themselves, knowing that they cannot count on the
administrative patronage of the State, the Americans excel in bringing
individual energies into action. There are few functionaries, few
soldiers, and few taxes among them. They know nothing, like us, of that
malady of public functions, the violence of which increases in
proportion as we advance. They know nothing of those enormous imposts
under which Europe is bending by degrees--those taxes which almost
suppress property by overburdening its transmission; they have not come
to the point of finding it very natural to devote one or two millions
every year to the expenses of the State, and no theory has been formed
to prove to them that of all the expenses of the citizens, this is
applied to the best purpose. They have not entered with the Old World
into that rivalry of armaments in which each nation, though it become
exhausted in the effort, is bound to keep on a level with its neighbors,
and in which no one will be stronger in the end when the whole world
shall be subjugated. Their ten thousand regulars suffice, and they have
their militia for extraordinary occasions. Lastly, their Federal debt is
insignificant; and, if the private debts of a few States reach a high
figure, they are nowhere of a nature to impose on the tax-payers a large
surplus of charges.
All of the great liberties exist in the United States: liberty of the
press, liberty of speech, right of assemblage, right of association.
Except in the slave States, where the national institutions have been
subjected to deplorable mutilations in fact, every citizen can express
his opinion and maintain it openly, without meeting any other obstacle
than the contrary opinion, which is expressed with equal freedom.
But there is one ground above all where we should acknowledge the
superiority of America: I mean, religious liberty. We are still in the
beginning of doubts upon the point as to where the interference of the
State should cease; in what measure it should govern the belief of the
citizens, and its manifestation. These questions, alas, are still
propounded among us. And there are countries at our doors, where men
shudder at the mere idea that the law may some day cease to decide for
each in what manner he is bound to worship God, that the courts may
cease to punish those whose conscience turns aside from the path of the
nation. Protestant Sweden but lately condemned dissenters to fine and
imprisonment; Catholic Spain daily inflicts the severest penalties on
those who suffer themselves to profess or to propagate beliefs which are
not those of the country--those who sell the Scriptures, and those who
read them.
The United States have not only proclaimed and loyally carried out the
glorious principle of religious liberty, but have adopted as a corollary
another principle, much more contested among us, but which I believe
destined also to make the tout of the world: the principle of separation
of Church and State. That believers should support their own worship,
that religious and political questions should never be blended, that the
two provinces should remain distinct, is a simple idea which seems most
strange to us to-day. It will make its way like all other true ideas,
which begin as paradoxes and end by becoming axioms. Meanwhile, the
American Confederation enjoys an advantage which more than one European
government, I suspect, would at some moments purchase at a high price:
it has not to trouble itself about religious interests, either in its
action without or its administration within. If there are conflicts
everywhere in the spiritual order, it leaves them to struggle and become
resolved in the spiritual order, without needing to trouble itself in
the matter. Hence arises for the State a freedom of bearing, a
simplicity of conduct, which we, who have to steer adroitly through so
many dangers, can hardly comprehend. The American government is sure of
never offending any church--it knows none; it does not interfere either
to combat or to aid them; it has renounced, once for all, intervention,
in the domain of conscience.
The result, doubtless, is, that this domain is not so well ordered as in
Europe; the administrative ecclesiastical state has by no means
submitted to such regulation. Is that to say that this inconvenience (if
it be one) is not largely compensated for by its advantages? Is it
nothing to suppress inheritance in religious matters, and to force each
soul to question itself as to what it believes? In the United States,
adhesion to a church is an individual, spontaneous act, resulting from a
voluntary determination. This is so true that four-fifths of the
inhabitants of the country do not bear, the title of church members.
Although attending worship, although manifesting an interest and zeal in
the subject to which we are little accustomed, although assiduous
church-goers, and liberal givers, they have not yet felt within
themselves a conviction strong and clear enough to make a public
profession of faith. Think what we may of such a system, we must avow,
at least, that it implies a profound respect for sacred things; nothing
can less resemble that indolent and formal assent which we give, in
conformity with custom, and without binding ourselves, in earnest, to
the religion that prevails among us.
Hence arises something valiant in American convictions. Hence arises
also, it may be said, that dispersion of sects, the picture of which is
so often drawn for us. I am far from loving the spirit of sectarianism,
and I am careful not to present the American churches as the beau ideal
in religious matters. The sectarian spirit, the fundamental trait of
which is to confound unity with uniformity, to transform divergencies
into separations, to refuse to admit into the bosom of the church the
element of diversity and of liberty; to exact the signing of a
theological formula, and the formal adhesion as a whole to a collection
of dogmas and practices, without tolerating the slightest shade of
difference--the sectarian spirit, with its narrowness, with its
traditions of men, with its exaggeration of little things, with its
separate denominations, is certainly not worthy of admiration. I reject
it in America as elsewhere, but I think it well to state that the
religious disruption produced by it has been much exaggerated. We must
greatly abbreviate the formidable list of churches furnished us by
travellers. Putting aside those which have no value, either as to
influence or numbers, we reduce the numbers of denominations existing in
the United States, outside the Roman Catholic church, to five, (and
these are too many;) namely: Methodist, Baptist, Congregational,
Episcopal, and Presbyterian. The remainder is composed of small
eccentric congregations which spring up and die, and of which no one
takes heed, except a few tourists, who are always willing to note down
extraordinary facts.
We will add that the sectarian spirit is now attacked in America, and
that the essential unity which binds the members of the five
denominations together, in spite of some external differences, is
manifesting itself forcibly. Not only does the evangelical alliance
prove to the most sceptical that this unity is real, but a fact peculiar
to the United States, the great awakening produced by the crisis of
1857, has given evidence of the perfect harmony of convictions. In the
innumerable meetings caused to spring up by this awakening from one end
of the country to the other, it has been impossible to distinguish
Baptists, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists from each other. All have
been there, and no one has betrayed by the least shade of dogmatism
those self-styled profound divisions about which so much noise is made.
I invite those still in doubt to look at the manner in which public
worship is established in the West: as soon as a few men have formed a
settlement, a missionary comes to visit them; no one inquires about his
denomination, for the Bible that he brings is the Bible of all, and the
salvation, through Christ, which he proclaims, is the faith of all. It
suffices, besides, to see this entire people, so restless, so laborious,
leaving its business on Sunday to occupy itself with the thoughts of
another life; it suffices to observe the unanimous uprising of the
public conscience at the rumor of an attack directed against the Gospel,
to perceive that unity subsists beneath lamentable divisions, and that
individual conviction creates the most active of all cohesive powers in
the heart of human communities; I know of no cement that equals it.
If individual convictions are a strong bond, they are also an
inexhaustible source of life. It is easy to assure ourselves of this by
a brief survey of the proofs of Christian liberality which are displayed
in the United States. Here, there is no legal charity, no aid to be
expected from the government, either for the support of churches, or for
that of the sick and poor; the _voluntary system_ must suffice for all.
And, in fact, it does suffice for all.
What is the first thing in question? To collect thirty million francs
annually for the payment of the clergy. The thirty millions are
furnished: poor and rich, all give eagerly, and without compulsion. The
next thing in question is to provide for the construction of new
churches; now, it is necessary to finish not less than three of these
daily, for the clearing of the forests advances with rapid strides, and
a thousand churches, at least, are built every year. The majority of
these churches are doubtless composed of beams laid one upon another,
then painted white, or left of the natural color, and surmounted by a
bell; they are simple and inexpensive, and, in the infant villages, the
streets of which are still blocked up by trees left standing, the place,
serving at once for a church and a school, where the people gather round
an itinerant preacher, is not decorated with much sumptuousness; yet
these new edifices demand annually from twelve to fifteen millions.
Next come the religious societies. In the West, preachers are needed,
hardy laborers, who live in privations, traversing vast solitudes on
horseback, and journeying continually, without repose, until their
strength is exhausted. Eight hundred missionaries or agents are required
for the American Board of Missions, for the Presbyterians, the Baptists,
and all the other churches. Now, they cannot send them to the four
quarters of the globe without providing for their wants. The Bible
Society, which prints three hundred thousand Bibles annually, the
Religious Tract Society, which publishes every year five millions of
tracts, and which, in New York alone, employs a thousand visitors or
distributors; the various works, in a word, expend from nine to ten
million francs.
Such, then, is the budget of voluntary charity in the United States.[A]
It amounts to fifty or sixty million francs, without counting the very
considerable donations destined to public instruction; without counting
(and this is immense) the relief of the sick and the poor. You will
scarcely find a village in the whole United States that has not its
benevolent society, and private benevolence, which is the best, also
carries on its work, independently of societies. I know of no country
where acts of profuse liberality are more frequent; one man founds a
hospital, another an observatory. Asylums are opened for all human
unfortunates, for lunatics, the blind, the deaf, orphans, abandoned
children.
Was I not right in saying that this is a great people? Whatever may be
its vices, we are not at liberty to speak of it with disdain. If the
Americans know how to make a fortune, they know, also, how to make a
noble use of their fortune; accused with reason, as they are, of being
too often preoccupied with questions of profit, we have seen them
retrenching much of their luxury since the commercial crisis, yet
economizing very little in their charities. The budget of the churches
and religious societies remained intact at the very time that
embarrassment was everywhere prevailing. I cannot help believing that
there are peculiar blessings attached to so many voluntary sacrifices
which carry back the mind to the early ages of Christianity. We may be
sure that the religion that costs something, brings something also in
return.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote A: It seems that I have understated the truth; but I prefer to
do so; I wish, above all, to avoid exaggeration.]