American Institutions And Their Influence

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I heard them inveigh against ambition and deceit, under whatever
political opinions these vices might chance to lurk; but I
learned from their discourses that men are not guilty in the eye
of God for any opinions concerning political government, which
they may profess with sincerity, any more than they are for their
mistakes in building a house or in driving a furrow. I perceived
that these ministers of the gospel eschewed all parties, with the
anxiety attendant upon personal interest. These facts convinced
me that what I had been told was true; and it then became my
object to investigate their causes, and to inquire how it
happened that the real authority of religion was increased by a
state of things which diminished its apparent force: these causes
did not long escape my researches.

The short space of threescore years can never content the
imagination of man; nor can the imperfect joys of this world
satisfy his heart. Man alone, of all created beings, displays a
natural contempt of existence, and yet a boundless desire to
exist; he scorns life, but he dreads annihilation. These
different feelings incessantly urge his soul to the contemplation
of a future state, and religion directs his musings thither.
Religion, then, is simply another form of hope; and it is no less
natural to the human heart than hope itself. Men cannot abandon
their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect,
and a sort of violent distortion of their true natures; but they
are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments; for
unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of
mankind. If we only consider religious institutions in a purely
human point of view, they may be said to derive an inexhaustible
element of strength from man himself, since they belong to one of
the constituent principles of human nature.

I am aware that at certain times religion may strengthen this
influence, which originates in itself, by the artificial power of
the laws, and by the support of those temporal institutions which
direct society. Religions, intimately united to the governments
of the earth, have been known to exercise a sovereign authority
derived from the twofold source of terror and of faith; but when
a religion contracts an alliance of this nature, I do not
hesitate to affirm that it commits the same error, as a man who
should sacrifice his future to his present welfare; and in
obtaining a power to which it has no claim, it risks that
authority which is rightfully its own. When a religion founds
its empire upon the desire of immortality which lives in every
human heart, it may aspire to universal dominion: but when it
connects itself with a government, it must necessarily adopt
maxims which are only applicable to certain nations. Thus, in
forming an alliance with a political power, religion augments its
authority over a few, and forfeits the hope of reigning over all.

As long as a religion rests upon those sentiments which are the
consolation of all affliction, it may attract the affections of
mankind. But if it be mixed up with the bitter passions of the
world, it may be constrained to defend allies whom its interests,
and not the principle of love, have given to it; or to repel as
antagonists men who are still attached to its own spirit, however
opposed they may be to the powers to which it is allied. The
church cannot share the temporal power of the state, without
being the object of a portion of that animosity which the latter
excites.

The political powers which seem to be most firmly established
have frequently no better guarantee for their duration, than the
opinions of a generation, the interests of the time, or the life
of an individual. A law may modify the social condition which
seems to be most fixed and determinate; and with the social
condition everything else must change. The powers of society are
more or less fugitive, like the years which we spend upon the
earth; they succeed each other with rapidity like the fleeting
cares of life; and no government has ever yet been founded upon
an invariable disposition of the human heart, or upon an
imperishable interest.

As long as religion is sustained by those feelings, propensities,
and passions, which are found to occur under the same forms at
all the different periods of history, it may defy the efforts of
time; or at least it can only be destroyed by another religion.
But when religion clings to the interests of the world, it
becomes almost as fragile a thing as the powers of the earth. It
is the only one of them all which can hope for immortality; but
if it be connected with their ephemeral authority, it shares
their fortunes, and may fall with those transient passions which
supported them for a day. The alliance which religion contracts
with political powers must needs be onerous to itself; since it
does not require their assistance to live, and by giving them its
assistance it may be exposed to decay.

The danger which I have just pointed out always exists, but it is
not always equally visible. In some ages governments seem to be
imperishable, in others the existence of society appears to be
more precarious than the life of man. Some constitutions plunge
the citizens into a lethargic somnolence, and others rouse them
to feverish excitement. When government appears to be so strong,
and laws so stable, men do not perceive the dangers which may
accrue from a union of church and state. When governments
display so much inconstancy, the danger is self-evident, but it
is no longer possible to avoid it; to be effectual, measures must
be taken to discover its approach.

In proportion as a nation assumes a democratic condition of
society, and as communities display democratic propensities, it
becomes more and more dangerous to connect religion with
political institutions; for the time is coming when authority
will be bandied from hand to hand, when political theories will
succeed each other, and when men, laws and constitutions, will
disappear or be modified from day to day, and this not for a
season only, but unceasingly. Agitation and mutability are
inherent in the nature of democratic republics, just as
stagnation and inertness are the law of absolute monarchies.

If the Americans, who change the head of the government once in
four years, who elect new legislators every two years, and renew
the provincial officers every twelvemonth; if the Americans, who
have abandoned the political world to the attempts of innovators,
had not placed religion beyond their reach, where could it abide
in the ebb and flow of human opinions? where would that respect
which belongs to it be paid, amid the struggles of faction? and
what would become of its immortality in the midst of perpetual
decay? The American clergy were the first to perceive this
truth, and to act in conformity with it. They saw that they must
renounce their religious influence, if they were to strive for
political power; and they chose to give up the support of the
state, rather than to share in its vicissitudes.

In America, religion is perhaps less powerful than it has been at
certain periods in the history of certain peoples; but its
influence is more lasting. It restricts itself to its own
resources, but of those none can deprive it: its circle is
limited to certain principles, but those principles are entirely
its own, and under its undisputed control.

On every side in Europe we hear voices complaining of the absence
of religious faith, and inquiring the means of restoring to
religion some remnant of its pristine authority. It seems to me
that we must first attentively consider what ought to be _the
natural state_ of men with regard to religion, at the present
time; and when we know what we have to hope and to fear, we may
discern the end to which our efforts ought to be directed.

The two great dangers which threaten the existence of religions
are schism and indifference. In ages of fervent devotion, men
sometimes abandon their religion, but they only shake it off in
order to adopt another. Their faith changes the objects to which
it is directed, but it suffers no decline. The old religion,
then, excites enthusiastic attachment or bitter enmity in either
party; some leave it with anger, others cling to it with
increased devotedness, and although persuasions differ,
irreligion is unknown. Such, however, is not the case when a
religious belief is secretly undermined by doctrines which may be
termed negative, since they deny the truth of one religion
without affirming that of any other. Prodigious revolutions then
take place in the human mind, without the apparent co-operation
of the passions of man, and almost without his knowledge. Men
lose the object of their fondest hopes, as if through
forgetfulness. They are carried away by an imperceptible current
which they have not the courage to stem, but which they follow
with regret, since it bears them from a faith they love, to a
scepticism that plunges them into despair.

In ages which answer to this description, men desert their
religious opinions from lukewarmness rather than from dislike;
they do not reject them, but the sentiments by which they were
once fostered disappear. But if the unbeliever does not admit
religion to be true, he still considers it useful. Regarding
religious institutions in a human point of view, he acknowledges
their influence upon manners and legislation. He admits that
they may serve to make men live in peace with one another and to
prepare them gently for the hour of death. He regrets the faith
which he has lost; and as he is deprived of a treasure which he
has learned to estimate at its full value, he scruples to take it
from those who still possess it.

On the other hand, those who continue to believe, are not afraid
openly to avow their faith. They look upon those who do not
share their persuasion as more worthy of pity than of opposition;
and they are aware, that to acquire the esteem of the
unbelieving, they are not obliged to follow their example. They
are hostile to no one in the world; and as they do not consider
the society in which they live as an arena in which religion is
bound to face its thousand deadly foes, they love their
contemporaries, while they condemn their weaknesses, and lament
their errors.

As those who do not believe, conceal their incredulity; and as
those who believe, display their faith, public opinion pronounces
itself in favor of religion: love, support, and honor, are
bestowed upon it, and it is only by searching the human soul,
that we can detect the wounds which it has received. The mass of
mankind, who are never without the feeling of religion, do not
perceive anything at variance with the established faith. The
instinctive desire of a future life brings the crowd about the
altar, and opens the hearts of men to the precepts and
consolations of religion.

But this picture is not applicable to us; for there are men among
us who have ceased to believe in Christianity, without adopting
any other religion; others who are in the perplexities of doubt,
and who already affect not to believe; and others, again, who are
afraid to avow that Christian faith which they still cherish in
secret.

Amid these lukewarm partisans and ardent antagonists, a small
number of believers exist, who are ready to brave all obstacles,
and to scorn all dangers in defence of their faith. They have
done violence to human weakness, in order to rise superior to
public opinion. Excited by the effort they have made, they
scarcely know where to stop; and as they know that the first use
which the French made, of independence, was to attack religion,
they look upon their contemporaries with dread, and they recoil
in alarm from the liberty which their fellow-citizens are seeking
to obtain. As unbelief appears to them to be a novelty, they
comprise all that is new in one indiscriminate animosity. They
are at war with their age and country, and they look upon every
opinion which is put forth there as the necessary enemy of the
faith.

Such is not the natural state of men with regard to religion at
the present day; and some extraordinary or incidental cause must
be at work in France, to prevent the human mind from following
its original propensities, and to drive it beyond the limits at
which it ought naturally to stop.

I am intimately convinced that this extraordinary and incidental
cause is the close connexion of politics and religion. The
unbelievers of Europe attack the Christians as their political
opponents, rather than as their religious adversaries; they hate
the Christian religion as the opinion of a party, much more than
as an error of belief; and they reject the clergy less because
they are the representatives of the Divinity, than because they
are the allies of authority.

In Europe, Christianity has been intimately united to the powers
of the earth. Those powers are now in decay, and it is, as it
were, buried under their ruins. The living body of religion has
been bound down to the dead corpse of superannuated polity; cut
the bonds which restrain it, and that which is alive will rise
once more. I know not what could restore the Christian church of
Europe to the energy of its earlier days; that power belongs to
God alone; but it may be the effect of human policy to leave the
faith in all the full exercise of the strength which it still
retains.

* * * * *

HOW THE INSTRUCTION, THE HABITS, AND THE PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE
OF THE AMERICANS PROMOTE THE SUCCESS OF
THEIR DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS.

What is to be understood by the instruction of the American
People.--The human Mind is more superficially instructed in the
United States than in Europe.--No one completely
uninstructed.--Reason of this Rapidity with which Opinions are
diffused even in the uncultivated States of the
West.--Practical Experience more serviceable to the Americans
than Book-learning.

I have but little to add to what I have already said, concerning
the influence which the instruction and the habits of the
Americans exercise upon the maintenance of their political
institutions.

America has hitherto produced very few writers of distinction; it
possesses no great historians, and not a single eminent poet.
The inhabitants of that country look upon what are properly
styled literary pursuits with a kind of disapprobation; and there
are towns of very second rate importance in Europe, in which more
literary works are annually published, than in the twenty-four
states of the Union put together. The spirit of the Americans is
averse to general ideas; and it does not seek theoretical
discoveries. Neither politics nor manufactures direct them to
these occupations; and although new laws are perpetually enacted
in the United States, no great writers have hitherto inquired
into the principles of their legislation. The Americans have
lawyers and commentators, but no jurists; and they furnish
examples rather than lessons to the world. The same observation
applies to the mechanical arts. In America, the inventions of
Europe are adopted with sagacity; they are perfected, and adapted
with admirable skill to the wants of the country. Manufactures
exist, but the science of manufacture is not cultivated; and they
have good workmen, but very few inventors. Fulton was obliged to
proffer his services to foreign nations for a long time before he
was able to devote them to his own country.

[The remark that in America "there are very good workmen but very
few inventors," will excite surprise in this country. The
inventive character of Fulton he seems to admit, but would
apparently deprive us of the credit of his name, by the remark
that he was obliged to proffer his services to foreign nations
for a long time. He might have added, that those proffers were
disregarded and neglected, and that it was finally in his own
country that he found the aid necessary to put in execution his
great project. If there be patronage extended by the citizens of
the United States to any one thing in preference to another, it
is to the results of inventive genius. Surely Franklin,
Rittenhouse, and Perkins, have been heard of by our author; and
he must have heard something of that wonderful invention, the
cotton-gin of Whitney, and of the machines for making cards to
comb wool. The original machines of Fulton for the application
of steam have been constantly improving, so that there is
scarcely a vestige of them remaining. But to sum up the whole in
one word, can it be possible that our author did not visit the
patent office at Washington? Whatever may be said of the
_utility_ of nine-tenths of the inventions of which the
descriptions and models are there deposited, no one who has ever
seen that depository, or who has read a description of its
contents, can doubt that they furnish the most incontestible
evidence of extraordinary inventive genius--a genius that has
excited the astonishment of other European
travellers.--_American Editor_.]

The observer who is desirous of forming an opinion on the state
of instruction among the Anglo-Americans, must consider the same
object from two different points of view. If he only singles out
the learned, he will be astonished to find how rare they are; but
if he counts the ignorant, the American people will appear to be
the most enlightened community in the world. The whole
population, as I observed in another place, is situated between
these two extremes.

In New England, every citizen receives the elementary notions of
human knowledge; he is moreover taught the doctrines and the
evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the
leading features of its constitution. In the states of
Connecticut and Massachusetts, it is extremely rare to find a man
imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly
ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon.

When I compare the Greek and Roman republics with these American
states; the manuscript libraries of the former, and their rude
population, with the innumerable journals and the enlightened
people of the latter; when I remember all the attempts which are
made to judge the modern republics by the assistance of those of
antiquity, and to infer what will happen in our time from what
took place two thousand years ago, I am tempted to burn my books,
in order to apply none but novel ideas to so novel a condition of
society.

What I have said of New England must not, however, be applied
indiscriminately to the whole Union: as we advance towards the
west or the south, the instruction of the people diminishes. In
the states which are adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico, a certain
number of individuals may be found, as in our own countries, who
are devoid of the rudiments of instruction. But there is not a
single district in the United States sunk in complete ignorance;
and for a very simple reason; the peoples of Europe started from
the darkness of a barbarous condition to advance toward the light
of civilisation; their progress has been unequal; some of them
have improved apace, while others have loitered in their course,
and some have stopped, and are still sleeping upon the way.

Such has not been the case in the United States. The
Anglo-Americans settled in a state of civilisation, upon that
territory which their descendants occupy; they had not to begin
to learn, and it was sufficient not to forget. Now the children
of these same Americans are the persons who, year by year,
transport their dwellings into the wilds: and with their
dwellings their acquired information and their esteem for
knowledge. Education has taught them the utility of instruction,
and has enabled them to transmit that instruction to their
posterity. In the United States society has no infancy, but it
is born in man's estate.

The Americans never use the word "peasant," because they have no
idea of the peculiar class which that term denotes; the ignorance
of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the
rusticity of the villager, have not been preserved among them;
and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the
coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of
civilisation. At the extreme borders of the confederate states,
upon the confines of society and of the wilderness, a population
of bold adventurers have taken up their abode, who pierce the
solitudes of the American woods, and seek a country there, in
order to escape that poverty which awaited them in their native
provinces. As soon as the pioneer arrives upon the spot which is
to serve him for a retreat, he fells a few trees and builds a
log-house. Nothing can offer a more miserable aspect than these
isolated dwellings. The traveller who approaches one of them
toward night-fall, sees the flicker of the hearth-flame through
the chinks in the walls; and at night, if the wind rises, he
hears the roof of boughs shake to and fro in the midst of the
great forest trees. Who would not suppose that this poor hut is
the asylum of rudeness and ignorance? Yet no sort of comparison
can be drawn between the pioneer and the dwelling which shelters
him. Everything about him is primitive and unformed, but he is
himself the result of the labor and the experience of eighteen
centuries. He wears the dress, and he speaks the language of
cities; he is acquainted with the past, curious of the future,
and ready for argument upon the present; he is, in short, a
highly civilized being, who consents, for a time, to inhabit the
back-woods, and who penetrates into the wilds of a New World with
the Bible, an axe, and a file of newspapers.

It is difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which
public opinion circulates in the midst of these
deserts.[Footnote:

I travelled along a portion of the frontier of the United States
in a sort of cart which was termed the mail. We passed, day and
night, with great rapidity along roads which were scarcely marked
out, through immense forests: when the gloom of the woods became
impenetrable, the coachman lighted branches of fir and we
journied along by the light they cast. From time to time we came
to a hut in the midst of the forest, which was a postoffice. The
mail dropped an enormous bundle of letters at the door of this
isolated dwelling, and we pursued our way at full gallop, leaving
the inhabitants of the neighboring log-houses to send for their
share of the treasure.

] I do not think that so much intellectual intercourse takes
place in the most enlightened and populous districts of
France.[Footnote:

In 1832, each inhabitant of Michigan paid a sum equivalent to 1
franc, 22 centimes (French money) to the postoffice revenue; and
each inhabitant of the Floridas paid 1 fr. 5 cent (See National
Calendar, 1833, p. 244.) In the same year each inhabitant of the
department du Nord, paid 1 fr. 4 cent, to the revenue of the
French postoffice. (See the Compte rendu de l'Administration des
Finances, 1833, p. 623.) Now the state of Michigan only
contained at that time 7 inhabitants per square league; and
Florida only 5; the instruction and the commercial activity of
these districts are inferior to those of most of the states in
the Union; while the department du Nord, which contains 3,400
inhabitants per square league, is one of the most enlightened and
manufacturing parts of France.

] It cannot be doubted that in the United States, the
instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support
of a democratic republic; and such must always be the case, I
believe, where instruction, which awakens the understanding, is
not separated from moral education which amends the heart. But I
by no means exaggerate this benefit, and I am still farther from
thinking, as so many people do think in Europe, that men can be
instantaneously made citizens by teaching them to read and write.
True information is mainly derived from experience, and if the
Americans had not been gradually accustomed to govern themselves,
their book-learning would not assist them much at the present
day.

I have lived a great deal with the people in the United States,
and I cannot express how much I admire their experience and their
good sense. An American should never be allowed to speak of
Europe; for he will then probably display a vast deal of
presumption and very foolish pride. He will take up with those
crude and vague notions which are so useful to the ignorant all
over the world. But if you question him respecting his own
country, the cloud which dimmed his intelligence will immediately
disperse; his language will become as clear and as precise as his
thoughts. He will inform you what his rights are, and by what
means he exercises them; he will be able to point out the customs
which obtain in the political world. You will find that he is
well acquainted with the rules of the administration, and that he
is familiar with the mechanism of the laws. The citizen of the
United States does not acquire his practical science and his
positive notions from books; the instruction he has acquired may
have prepared him for receiving those ideas, but it did not
furnish them. The American learns to know the laws by
participating in the act of legislation; and he takes a lesson in
the forms of government, from governing. The great work of
society is ever going on beneath his eyes, and, as it were, under
his hands.