Kindle Notes & Highlights
poverty, along with wretchedness, offers the best guarantee of equal status known to man.
In 1649, a solemn association was formed in Boston to issue warnings concerning the worldly indulgence of long hair.
American civil and criminal law recognizes only two courses of action: prison or bail. The first step in this procedure is to obtain bail money from the defendant or, on his refusal, to imprison him. After that, they examine the validity of the accusation and the seriousness of the charges. Clearly such a legislative procedure disadvantages the poor and favors only the wealthy.
But also, we encounter in the hearts of men a degenerate taste for equality which inspires the weak to bring the strong down to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in a state of slavery to inequality in a state of freedom.
In the United States, therefore, it was never intended for a man in a free country to have the right to do anything he liked; rather, social duties were imposed upon him more various than anywhere else.
The German Empire, people keep saying, has never been able to take advantage of its strength. Agreed. But why? Because the strength of the nation has never been centralized;
Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts.
Suppose an individual thinks of some enterprise which might have some direct connection with the welfare of society. It does not occur to him to seek support from public authority. He publishes a plan, offers to carry it out, summons the help of other individuals and struggles personally against all obstacles. Doubtless, he often has less success than the state would have enjoyed in his stead but, in the longer term, the combined result of all these individual enterprises exceeds greatly what government could achieve.
Once the American republics begin to degenerate, I believe we shall easily recognize that to be so; it will be enough to notice whether the number of political judgments increases.
The English, having beheaded one of their kings and dismissed another, still dropped to their knees before the successors of those princes.
For to wish the representative to be armed with excessive power and, at the same time, elected, is, in my opinion, to express two contradictory aims.
In elective states, on the other hand, the machinery of government, to some extent, ceases to function of its own accord as an election approaches and even for some time prior.
it is an axiom of political science in the United States that the only means of neutralizing the effect of newspapers is to multiply their numbers.
In other words, democratic government is the only one where those who vote for the tax can evade the obligation to pay it.
So, America is a land of freedom where the foreigner, to avoid offending anyone, must not speak freely about either individuals, or the state, or the governed, or the government, or public and private undertakings, indeed about anything he encounters except perhaps climate and the soil both of which, however, some Americans are ready to defend as if they had helped to create them.
In America, the proletariat does not exist. Since each man has some private possessions to protect, he acknowledges the right, in principle, to own property.
I know of no country where there is generally less independence of thought and real freedom of debate than in America.
If America has not yet found any great writers, we should not look elsewhere for reasons; literary genius does not thrive without freedom of thought and there is no freedom of thought in America.
How can we deny the incredible influence of military glory on the opinion of a nation? General Jackson, chosen by the Americans twice as head of their government, is a man of a violent disposition and mediocre ability; nothing in the course of his career has ever proved that he had the necessary qualities to govern a free nation. In addition, the majority of the enlightened classes in the Union has always been against him. So, who has placed him upon the President’s chair and still keeps him there? The recollection of a victory he won twenty years ago beneath the walls of New Orleans; now,
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I believe that the Indian race of North America is doomed to perish and I cannot help thinking that the day the Europeans settle on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, it will have ceased to exist.9
The Spanish, using unparalleled atrocities which bring an indelible shame upon themselves, have not succeeded in exterminating the Indian race, nor even in preventing them from sharing their rights; the Americans of the United States have attained both these results with amazing ease, quietly, legally, and generously, with no spilling of blood, with no violation to the great moral principles29 in the eyes of the world. Men could not be destroyed with more respect for the laws of humanity.
Racial prejudice seems to me stronger in those states which have abolished slavery than in those where slavery still exists and nowhere is it as intolerant as in those states where slavery has never been known.
In almost all the states where slavery has been abolished, voting rights have been granted to the Negro but, if he comes forward to vote, he risks his life.
If I absolutely had to predict the future, I would say that, in the likely course of events, the abolition of slavery in the South will increase the repulsion the white population feels for the blacks.
in America, centralization is not at all popular and there is no better way of flattering the majority than by rising up against the so-called encroachments of central government.
Thus, democracy not only directs the human mind to the useful arts but also persuades craftsmen to produce many second-rate goods and consumers to put up with them.
The ever-growing crowd of readers and the continuous need they have for something new ensures the sale of books no one much esteems.
It is a strange thing to see the feverish enthusiasm which accompanies the Americans’ pursuit of prosperity and the way they are ceaselessly tormented by the vague fear that they have failed to choose the shortest route to achieve it.
No matter what anation does, it will never succeed in reaching perfectly equal conditions. If it did have the misfortune to achieve an absolute and complete leveling, there would still remain the inequalities of intelligence which come directly from God and will always elude the lawmakers.
Since every single one of them is more or less involved in industry, at the slightest shock experienced by business all private fortunes stumble at the same time and the state begins to totter. I believe that the recurrence of industrial crises is an endemic sickness for all democracies in our day. It can be made less dangerous but not completely cured because it does not stem from an accident but from the very temperament of such nations.
While the worker, more and more, restricts his intelligence to the study of one single detail, the boss daily surveys an increasing field of operation and his mind expands as the former’s narrows. Soon the one will need only physical strength without intelligence; the other needs knowledge and almost genius for success. The one increasingly looks like the administrator of a vast empire, the other, a brute.
Generally speaking, I think that the industrial aristocracy which we see rising before our eyes is one of the most harsh ever to appear on the earth; but at the same time, it is one of the most restrained and least dangerous.
I think that the social change which places father and son, servant and master and, in general, lower and upper classes on the same level, will gradually raise women to make them the equals of men.
They derive consolation from being supervised by thinking that they have chosen their supervisors.
