But I am of opinion that if we do not succeed in gradually
introducing democratic institutions into France, and
if we despair of imparting to the citizens those ideas
and sentiments which first prepare them for freedom,
and afterwards allow them to enjoy it, there will be
no independence at all, either for the middling classes
or the nobility, for the poor or for the rich, but
an equal tyranny over all; and I foresee that if the
peaceable empire of the majority be not founded amongst
us in time, we shall sooner or later arrive at the
unlimited authority of a single despot.
The Present And Probable Future Condition Of The Three
Races Which Inhabit The Territory Of The United States
The principal part of the task which I had imposed
upon myself is now performed. I have shown, as
far as I was able, the laws and the manners of the
American democracy. Here I might stop; but the
reader would perhaps feel that I had not satisfied
his expectations.
The absolute supremacy of democracy is not all that
we meet with in America; the inhabitants of the New
World may be considered from more than one point of
view. In the course of this work my subject has
often led me to speak of the Indians and the Negroes;
but I have never been able to stop in order to show
what place these two races occupy in the midst of
the democratic people whom I was engaged in describing.
I have mentioned in what spirit, and according to
what laws, the Anglo-American Union was formed; but
I could only glance at the dangers which menace that
confederation, whilst it was equally impossible for
me to give a detailed account of its chances of duration,
independently of its laws and manners. When speaking
of the united republican States, I hazarded no conjectures
upon the permanence of republican forms in the New
World, and when making frequent allusion to the commercial
activity which reigns in the Union, I was unable to
inquire into the future condition of the Americans
as a commercial people.
These topics are collaterally connected with my subject
without forming a part of it; they are American without
being democratic; and to portray democracy has been
my principal aim. It was therefore necessary to
postpone these questions, which I now take up as the
proper termination of my work.
The territory now occupied or claimed by the American
Union spreads from the shores of the Atlantic to those
of the Pacific Ocean. On the east and west its
limits are those of the continent itself. On the
south it advances nearly to the tropic, and it extends
upwards to the icy regions of the North. The
human beings who are scattered over this space do not
form, as in Europe, so many branches of the same stock.
Three races, naturally distinct, and, I might almost
say, hostile to each other, are discoverable amongst
them at the first glance. Almost insurmountable
barriers had been raised between them by education
and by law, as well as by their origin and outward
characteristics; but fortune has brought them together
on the same soil, where, although they are mixed, they
do not amalgamate, and each race fulfils its destiny
apart.
