Democracy in America

by Alexis de Tocqueville

The irresistible democratic revolution is the theme of Tocqueville’s three great books. It is set forth in his Introduction to Democracy in America (the first volume of which was published in 1835, the second in 1840). It is applied to his own time in his Souvenirs (written in 1851 but not for publication; first published only in 1893), in which he recounts the (ultimately) socialist revolution that he witnessed in 1848. And he uncovers its remote origins in The Old Regime and the Revolution, published in 1856 with a promise he could not fulfill to write further on the events of the Revolution and to provide a judgment on its result. Unlike other aristocrats of his time, Tocqueville did not despair of democracy. He neither scorned it nor opposed it. On the whole, he approved of it—or at least accepted it with every appearance of willingness. Readers of Democracy in America have always disagreed over how democratic he was both in mind and in heart, but it is fair to say that he directed much of his energy to warning the reactionaries in his country that democracy was irreversible as well as irresistible, and to showing them that it was wrong to hate the consequences of the French Revolution.

Yet Tocqueville’s reservations, his criticisms, his forebodings are not shared by Mill, who in a letter confessed to Tocqueville with some understatement that his article is “a shade or two more favorable to democracy than your book.”21 Mill believes, for example, that the tyranny of the majority that Tocqueville warns of in the first volume of Democracy in America could be avoided “if the people entertained the right idea of democracy.”22 To Tocqueville’s remark that the American people cheerfully exclude the ablest men from government, Mill responds that great talents are not ordinarily needed and that “in a settled state of things, the commanding intellects will always prefer to govern mankind from their closets, by means of literature and science, leaving the mechanical details of government to mechanical minds.”23 Here is wondrous confidence in the capability of intelligence to run the world, unsurprisingly combined with contempt for the actual operation of self-government, of which Tocqueville made so much.

THE WRITING OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA44 Before writing Democracy in America, Tocqueville took a trip to America of a little more than nine months in the company of his friend Gustave de Beaumont (1802–1866). Like Tocqueville, Beaumont was a magistrate; the two had studied law together and served on the same court at Versailles.45 In 1829 they both attended Guizot’s lectures on the “history of civilization in France,” a statement of the historical liberalism Tocqueville himself was to maintain.46 Then, in 1831, they came to America as collaborators in a grand project to see “what a great republic is,” as Tocqueville put it in a letter to another friend.47 Tocqueville was drawn to America to observe the future society of “almost complete equality of social conditions” toward which he believed Europe was moving inexorably. Although he said later that he did not go to America with the idea of writing a book, it seems clear that he and Beaumont went with a large joint project in mind, for both refer to it in contemporaneous letters. They also had a definite smaller project to study penal reform in America, which Tocqueville described as a “pretext” for the voyage.48 But on returning to France he and Beaumont made good on the pretext and wrote a book, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France, which appeared soon after, in January 1833.

During the nine-month trip in America, Tocqueville and Beaumont followed an efficient itinerary. With time out for rest, research, and conversation with useful or important Americans, they still went almost everywhere. Starting from New York they traveled upstate to Buffalo, proceeding through the Great Lakes to the frontier, as it was then, in Michigan and Wisconsin. There followed two weeks in Canada, from which they descended to Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore. Next they went west to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, then south to Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans, then north through the southeastern states to Washington and at last back to New York, from which they returned to France. Like tourists seeking characteristic experiences, they rode on steamboats (one of which sank) and stayed in a log cabin. They found it easy to gain access to prominent Americans, and met with John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Albert Gallatin, James Kent, Francis Lieber, Daniel Webster, Sam Houston, Roger Taney, Charles Carroll, and many others less well known.

The two volumes of Democracy in America were published five years apart, in 1835 and 1840. They had different contents and different receptions. The first volume, with its lively picturing of America, was a sensation and made Tocqueville famous; in France it was saluted by such great names as Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Guizot, Royer-Collard, and Sainte-Beuve. The second volume with its somber analysis of democracy was received without enthusiasm, an event that somewhat disconcerted its author.52 The letter to John Stuart Mill quoted above, in which Tocqueville said that Mill was the only one to have understood him, was written in 1840 after the second volume came out. He went on to muse that there was something obscure and problematic in the second volume that “does not capture the mind of the crowd,” and that he had wanted to portray the “general traits of democratic societies of which no complete model yet exists.” In response, Mill assured him that the thoughts in the second volume were deeper and more recondite than those in the first.

More significant, apparently, than the founding was the point of departure of the American people a century and a half earlier when the Puritans arrived. The American point of departure was the seed (germe) of America, not its form, so to speak the baby in its cradle (DA I 1.2). That seed, not the later, more deliberate founding, is the key, Tocqueville says, to almost the whole of his work. Americans did not make themselves democrats but came to America as democrats. America, to which the Puritans came for a reason, is the only nation whose point of departure is clear rather than shrouded in ignorance and fable.

The idea of “social state” means that regimes do not have control over their pasts, although Tocqueville admits that the illiberality of Puritan democracy had to be addressed later on and was indeed reformed. In any case the Puritan point of departure seems to have an artificial clarity since Tocqueville does not go back to examine the social state that produced it. And he says expressly that Puritans were not the only first Americans; he has chosen them as the most significant.

Since all individuals in a democracy regard themselves and are accepted as equal, other individuals are not really different from oneself but similar. They are not really other in the deep sense implied by the dichotomy of self-other to be found in Hegel’s theory or its variants. Here there is no real reconciliation between self and other in which one self finds itself in the other. Rather, that reconciliation is assumed from the beginning. The democrat considers others to be like himself, and if they are truly different, he sees them to be like himself regardless. He ignores or flattens out any differences that might call equality into question. Humanity consists of those like oneself, and so compassion for those in distress is not demeaning, admiration for those who have done better is not humiliating. Envy is more likely, however.

As soon as citizens began to own land other than by feudal tenure, and transferable wealth was recognized, and could in its turn create influence and give power, discoveries in the arts could not be made, nor improvements in commerce and industry be introduced, without creating almost as many new elements of equality among men. From that moment on, all processes discovered, all needs that arise, all desires that demand satisfaction bring progress toward universal leveling. The taste for luxury, the love of war, the empire of fashion, the most superficial passions of the human heart as well as the most profound, seem to work in concert to impoverish the rich and enrich the poor. Once works of the intellect had become sources of force and wealth, each development of science, each new piece of knowledge, each new idea had to be considered as a seed of power put within reach of the people.

The entire book that you are going to read was written under the pressure of a sort of religious terror in the author’s soul, produced by the sight of this irresistible revolution that for so many centuries has marched over all obstacles, and that one sees still advancing today amid the ruins it has made. It is not necessary that God himself speak in order for us to discover sure signs of his will; it suffices to examine the usual course of nature and the continuous tendency of events; I know without the Creator’s raising his voice that the stars follow the arcs in space that his finger has traced. If long observation and sincere meditation led men in our day to recognize that the gradual and progressive development of equality is at the same time the past and the future of their history, this discovery alone would give that development the sacred character of the sovereign master’s will. To wish to stop democracy would then appear to be to struggle against God himself, and it would only remain for nations to accommodate themselves to the social state that Providence imposes on them.

Among no people of Europe has the great social revolution I have just described made more rapid progress than among us; but here it has always proceeded haphazardly. Never have heads of state thought at all to prepare for it in advance; it is made despite them or without their knowing it. The most powerful, most intelligent, and most moral classes of the nation have not sought to take hold of it so as to direct it. Democracy has therefore been abandoned to its savage instincts; it has grown up like those children who, deprived of paternal care, rear themselves in the streets of our towns and know only society’s vices and miseries. One still seemed ignorant of its existence when it unexpectedly took power.

I conceive a society, then, which all, regarding the law as their work, would love and submit to without trouble; in which the authority of government is respected as necessary, not divine, and the love one would bear for a head of state would not be a passion, but a reasoned and tranquil sentiment. Each having rights and being assured of preserving his rights, a manly confidence and a sort of reciprocal condescension between the classes would be established, as far from haughtiness as from baseness. The people, instructed in their true interests, would understand that to profit from society’s benefits, one must submit to its burdens. The free association of citizens could then replace the individual power of nobles, and the state would be sheltered from both tyranny and license.

But we, leaving the social state of our forebears, throwing their institutions, their ideas, and their mores pell-mell behind us—what have we gained in its place? The prestige of royal power has vanished without being replaced by the majesty of the laws; in our day the people scorn authority, but they fear it, and fear extracts more from them than was formerly given out of respect and love. I perceive that we have destroyed the individual entities that were able to struggle separately against tyranny; but I see that it is government alone that inherits all the prerogatives extracted from families, from corporations, or from men: the force of a small number of citizens, sometimes oppressive, but often protective, has therefore been succeeded by the weakness of all. The division of fortunes has diminished the distance separating the poor from the rich; but in coming closer they seem to have found new reasons for hating each other, and casting glances full of terror and envy, they mutually repel each other from power; for the one as for the other, the idea of rights does not exist, and force appears to both as the sole argument in the present and the only guarantee of the future.

Society is tranquil not because it is conscious of its force and well-being, but on the contrary, because it believes itself weak and infirm; it fears it will die if it makes an effort: each feels the ill, but no one has the courage and energy needed to seek something better; like the passions of old men that end only in impotence, desires, regrets, sorrows, and joys produce nothing visible or lasting.

I end by pointing out myself what a great number of readers will consider the capital defect in the work. This book is not precisely in anyone’s camp; in writing it I did not mean either to serve or to contest any party; I undertook to see, not differently, but further than the parties; and while they are occupied with the next day, I wanted to ponder the future.

All that was offered to view in those enchanted places seemed prepared for the needs of men or calculated for his pleasures. Most of the trees were laden with nourishing fruits, and those least useful to man charmed his regard with the dazzle and variety of their colors. In a forest of fragrant lemon trees, wild figs, round-leafed myrtle, acacias and oleander, all interlaced by flowering vines, a multitude of birds unknown in Europe displayed their wings, sparkling with purple and azure, and mixed the concert of their voices with the harmonies of a nature full of movement and life.*3 Death was hidden beneath that brilliant cloak; but they did not then perceive it, and besides, in the air of those climates reigned a certain enervating influence that attached man to the present and rendered him careless of the future. North America presented a different aspect: everything there was grave, serious, solemn; one would have said that it had been created to become the domain of the intellect, as the other was to be the dwelling of the senses.

The coarseness of men of the people in orderly countries comes not only from the fact that they are ignorant and poor, but from the fact that while being so, they find themselves in daily contact with enlightened and wealthy men. The sight of their misfortune and weakness, which contrasts every day with the happiness and power of some of those like them, excites anger and fear at the same time in their hearts; the sense of their inferiority and dependence irritates and humiliates them. That internal state of soul is reproduced in their mores as well as in their language; they are at once insolent and base. The truth of this is easily proved by observation. The people are coarser in aristocratic countries than everywhere else, in opulent cities than in the countryside. In places where one encounters men so strong and so wealthy, the weak and poor feel overwhelmed by their own baseness; not discovering any point by which they could regain equality, they wholly despair for themselves and allow themselves to fall below human dignity. This distressing effect of the contrast of conditions is not found in savage life: the Indians, at the same time that they are all ignorant and poor, are all equal and free.

Although the vast country that I have just described was inhabited by numerous tribes of natives, one can justly say that at the period of discovery it still formed only a wilderness. The Indians occupied it, but they did not possess it. It is by agriculture that man appropriates the soil, and the first inhabitants of North America lived from products of the hunt. Their implacable prejudices, their indomitable passions, their vices, and perhaps still more their savage virtues, delivered them to an inevitable destruction.

When, after having attentively studied the history of America, one carefully examines its political and social state, one feels profoundly convinced of this truth: there is not one opinion, one habit, one law, I could say one event, that the point of departure does not explain without difficulty. Those who read this book will therefore find in the present chapter the seed of what is to follow and the key to almost the whole work.

The bond of language is perhaps the strongest and most lasting that can unite men. All the emigrants spoke the same tongue; they were all children of one and the same people. Born in a country that the struggle of parties had agitated for centuries, and where factions had been obliged in their turn to place themselves under the protection of the laws, their political education had taken place in that rough school, and one saw more notions of rights, more principles of true freedom spread among them than in most of the peoples of Europe. In the period of the first emigrations, township government, that fertile seed of free institutions, had already entered profoundly into English habits, and with it the dogma of the sovereignty of the people was introduced into the very heart of the Tudor monarchy.

The character of the inhabitants, which had always been grave and reflective, had become austere and argumentative. Education had been much increased in these intellectual struggles; the mind had received a more profound cultivation. While they had been absorbed in speaking of religion, mores had become purer. All these general features of the nation were found more or less in the physiognomy of those of its sons who had come to seek a new future on the opposite shores of the ocean. One remark, moreover, which we shall have occasion to come back to later,*1 is applicable not only to the English, but also to the French, the Spanish, and all the Europeans who came successively to settle on the shores of the New World. All the new European colonies contained, if not the development, at least the seed of a complete democracy. Two causes led to this result: one can say that in general, on their departure from the mother country, the emigrants had no idea of any superiority whatsoever of some over others. It is hardly the happy and the powerful who go into exile, and poverty as well as misfortune are the best guarantees of equality known among men.

Now, aristocracy takes to the land; it attaches to the soil and leans on it; it is not established by privileges alone, nor constituted by birth; it is landed property transmitted by heredity. A nation can offer immense fortunes and great miseries; but if these fortunes are not territorial, one sees poor and rich within it; there is, to tell the truth, no aristocracy.

Virginia received the first English colony. The emigrants arrived there in 1607. Europe at that period was still singularly preoccupied with the idea that gold and silver mines made the wealth of peoples: a fatal idea that has more impoverished the European nations that gave themselves to it, and destroyed more men in America, than have war and all bad laws together. It was thus gold seekers who were sent to Virginia,1 people without resources or without [good] conduct, whose restive and turbulent spirits troubled the infancy of the colony2 and rendered its progress uncertain. Afterwards, the industrialists and farmers arrived, a more moral and tranquil race, but one that was elevated in almost no points above the level of the lower classes of England.3 No noble thought, no immaterial scheme presided at the foundation of the new settlements. Hardly had the colony been created when they introduced slavery;4 that was the capital fact that was bound to exert an immense influence on the character, the laws, and the whole future of the South.

The other colonies had been founded by adventurers without family; the emigrants of New England brought with them admirable elements of order and morality; they went to the wilderness accompanied by their wives and children. But what distinguished them above all from all the others was the very goal of their undertaking. It was not necessity that forced them to abandon their country; they left a social position they might regret and secure means of living; nor did they come to the New World in order to improve their situation or to increase their wealth; they tore themselves away from the sweetness of their native country to obey a purely intellectual need; in exposing themselves to the inevitable miseries of exile, they wanted to make an idea triumph.

Each year, the religious and political passions that rent the British Empire during all the reign of Charles I drove a new swarm of sectarians to the coasts of the Atlantic. In England, the home of Puritanism continued to have its place in the middle classes; it was from the heart of the middle classes that most of the emigrants came. The population of New England grew rapidly, and while the hierarchy of ranks still classed men despotically in the mother country, the colony more and more offered the new spectacle of a society homogeneous in all its parts. Democracy such as antiquity had not dared to dream of sprang full-grown and fully armed from the midst of the old feudal society. Content to keep the seeds of trouble and the elements of new revolutions at a distance, the English government looked unworried on this numerous emigration. It even favored it with all its power and seemed hardly occupied with the destiny of those who came to American soil to seek refuge from the harshness of its laws. One would have said that it regarded New England as a region left to the dreams of the imagination, which one ought to abandon to the free trials of innovators.

Among these memorials, we particularly distinguish, as one of the most characteristic, the code of laws that the little state of Connecticut passed in 1650.17 The legislators of Connecticut18 occupied themselves first with penal laws; and, to compose them, they conceived the strange idea of drawing from sacred texts: “If any man [after legal conviction], shall have or worship any other God but the Lord God,” they say to begin with, “he shall be put to death.”*5 There follow ten or twelve provisions of the same nature, borrowed from the texts of Deuteronomy, Exodus, and Leviticus. Blasphemy, sorcery, adultery,19 and rape are punished by death; insult done by a son to his parents is struck with the same penalty. In this way they carried the legislation of a rude and half-civilized people into the heart of a society whose spirit was enlightened and mores mild; so one never saw the death penalty laid down more profusely in the laws, or applied to fewer of the guilty. In this body of penal laws, the legislators are above all preoccupied with the care of maintaining moral order and good mores in society; so they constantly penetrate into the domain of conscience, and there is almost no sin that does not fall subject to the censure of the magistrate.

The Code of 1650 abounds with preventive measures. Laziness and drunkenness are severely punished.22 Innkeepers cannot furnish more than a certain quantity of wine to each consumer: a fine or the whip repress a simple lie when it can do harm.23 In other places, the legislator, forgetting completely the great principles of religious liberty he himself demanded in Europe, forces attendance at divine service by fear of fines,24 and he goes as far as to strike with severe penalties,25 and often death, Christians who wish to worship God according to a form other than his.26 Sometimes, finally, the ardor for regulation that possesses him brings him to become occupied with cares most unworthy of him. So it is that one finds in the same code a law that prohibits the use of tobacco.27 Furthermore, one must not lose sight of the fact that these bizarre or tyrannical laws were not imposed; that they were voted by the free concurrence of all the interested persons themselves; and that mores were still more austere and more puritanical than the laws.

Such lapses doubtless bring shame to the human mind; they attest to the inferiority of our nature, which, incapable of firmly grasping the true and the just, is most often reduced to choosing between two excesses. Beside this penal legislation, so strongly imprinted with the narrow spirit of sect and all the religious passions that persecution had exalted and that still fermented in the depth of souls, was placed and in a way connected to them a body of political laws which, drafted two hundred years ago, still seems to anticipate from very far the spirit of freedom in our age. The general principles on which modern constitutions rest, the principles that most Europeans of the seventeenth century hardly understood and whose triumph in Great Britain was then incomplete, were all recognized and fixed by the laws of New England: intervention of the people in public affairs, free voting of taxes, responsibility of the agents of power, individual freedom and judgment by jury were established there without discussion and in fact.

“It being one chief project,” says the law, “of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the scriptures, as in former times, keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times, by persuading them from the use of tongues, so that at least, the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded with false glosses of saint seeming deceivers; and that learning may not be buried in the grave of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors . . .”39 There follow the provisions that create schools in all townships and oblige the inhabitants, under penalty of heavy fines, to tax themselves to support them. In the most populous districts, high schools are founded in the same manner. Municipal magistrates must see to it that parents send their children to schools; they have the right to levy fines on those who refuse to; and if the resistance continues, society, then putting itself in place of the family, takes possession of the child and takes away from the parents the rights that nature gave them, but which they so poorly knew how to use.

When, after casting a rapid glance at American society in 1650, one examines the state of Europe, and particularly the continent, around that same period, one feels suffused with profound astonishment: everywhere on the continent of Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century, absolute royalty was triumphing over the debris of the oligarchic and feudal freedom of the Middle Ages. In the heart of that brilliant and literary Europe the idea of rights had perhaps never been more completely misunderstood; never had peoples less lived a political life; never had notions of true freedom less preoccupied minds; and it was then that these same principles, unknown in European nations or scorned by them, were being proclaimed in the wilderness of the New World and were becoming the future creed of a great people. In that society, so humble in appearance, the boldest theories of the human mind, with which undoubtedly no statesman then had deigned to be occupied, were brought into practice; left to the originality of its nature, the imagination of man improvised there an unprecedented legislation.

Men sacrifice their friends, their family, and their native country to a religious opinion; one can believe them to be absorbed in the pursuit of the intellectual good that they have come to buy at such a high price. One nevertheless sees them seeking with an almost equal ardor material wealth and moral satisfactions, Heaven in the other world and well-being and freedom in this one. In their hands, political principles, laws, and human institutions seem malleable things that can be turned and combined at will. Before them fall the barriers that imprisoned the society in whose bosom they were born; old opinions that have been directing the world for centuries vanish; an almost boundless course, a field without a horizon, are discovered: the human mind rushes toward them; it traverses them in all directions; but, when it arrives at the limits of the political world, it halts; trembling, it leaves off the use of its most formidable faculties; it abjures doubt; it renounces the need to innovate; it even abstains from sweeping away the veil of the sanctuary; it bows with respect before truths that it accepts without discussion. Thus in the moral world, everything is classified, coordinated, foreseen, decided in advance. In the political world, everything is agitated, contested, uncertain; in the one, there is passive though voluntary obedience; in the other, there are independence, contempt for experience, and jealousy of every authority. Far from harming each other, these two ...

The laws that we have just cited are very recent; but who could understand them without going back to the very origin of the colonies? I do not doubt that in our day the penal part of this legislation is only very rarely applied; laws preserve their inflexibility when mores have already bent with the movement of time. Nevertheless, observation of Sunday in America is still what strikes the foreigner most vividly. There is, notably, a great American town in which, from Saturday evening on, social movement is almost suspended. You go through it at the hour that seems to invite the mature to business and youth to pleasures, and you find yourself in profound solitude. Not only does no one work, but no one appears to live. One hears neither the movement of industry nor the accents of joy, not even the confused murmur that constantly rises from within a great city. Chains are put up in the vicinity of churches; only with regret do the half-closed shutters of houses allow a ray of sun to penetrate the dwellings of citizens. Now and then you barely perceive an isolated man who glides noiselessly across deserted intersections and along abandoned streets. At daybreak of the next day, the rumble of vehicles, the noise of hammers, the cries of the population again begin to make themselves heard; the city awakens; a restive crowd hurries toward the hearths of commerce and industry; everything moves, everything is agitated, everything presses around you.

Smith’s book is esteemed and deserves to be. The author is one of the most celebrated adventurers who appeared in the century full of adventures at the end of which he lived: the book itself breathes that ardor of discoveries, that spirit of enterprise which characterized men then; one finds in it those chivalrous mores that they mixed with trade and that they made use of in the acquisition of wealth. But what is above all remarkable in Captain Smith is that he mixes with the virtues of his contemporaries qualities that remained foreign to most of them; his style is simple and clear, his accounts all have the stamp of truth, his descriptions are not adorned.

Beverley was originally from Virginia, which makes him commence by saying, “If I might be so happy, as to settle my credit with the reader, the next favour I wou’d ask of him, shou’d be, not to criticize too unmercifully upon my style. I am an Indian, and don’t pretend to be exact in my language.”†1 Despite this modesty of a colonist, the author gives evidence throughout the whole course of his book that he tolerates with impatience the supremacy of the mother country. One also finds in Beverley’s work numerous traces of that spirit of civil freedom that henceforth animated the English colonies of America. One also encounters in it a trace of the divisions that have existed for so long in their midst and that delayed their independence. Beverley detests his Catholic neighbors of Maryland even more than the English government. The style of this author is simple; his accounts are often full of interest and inspire confidence. The French translation of Beverley’s history is found in the Bibliotheque Royale.

First, It will be a service unto the Church of great consequence, to carry the Gospel into those parts of the world (North America), and raise a bulwark against the kingdom of antichrist, which the Jesuits labour to rear up in all parts of the world. Secondly, All other Churches of Europe have been brought under desolations; and it may be feared that the like judgments are coming upon us; and who knows but God hath provided this place (New England) to be a refuge for many, whom he means to save out of the General Destruction. Thirdly, The land grows weary of her inhabitants, insomuch that man, which is the most precious of all creatures, is here more vile and base than the earth he treads upon: children, neighbours, and friends, especially the poor, are counted the greatest burdens, which if things were right would be the chiefest earthly blessings. Fourthly, We are grown to that intemperance in all excess of riot, as no mean estate almost will suffice a man to keep sail with his equals, and he that fails in it, must live in scorn and contempt: hence it comes to pass, that all arts and trades are carried in that deceitful manner, and unrighteous course, as it is almost impossible for a good upright man to maintain his constant charge, and live comfortably in them. Fifthly, The schools of learning and religion are so corrupted, as [. . .] most children, even the best, wittiest, and of the fairest hopes, are perverted, corrupted, and utterly overthrown, by the multitude of e...

One rightly esteems Jeremy Belknap’s work, entitled History of New Hampshire, 2 vols. in octavo, printed in Boston in 1792. See particularly in the work of Belknap, chapter 3 of the first volume. In that chapter the author gives extremely precious details about the political and religious principles of the Puritans, about the causes of their emigration, and about their laws. One finds in it this curious citation from a sermon pronounced in 1663: “It concerneth New England always to remember, that they are originally a plantation religious, not a plantation of trade. The profession of the purity of doctrine, worship and discipline is written upon her forehead. Let merchants, and such as are increasing cent per cent remember this, and that worldly gain was not the end and design of the people of New England but religion. And if any man among us make religion as twelve, and the world as thirteen, such an one hath not the spirit of a true New Englandman.”*5 Readers will encounter in Belknap more general ideas and more force of thought than other American historians have presented up to the present. I do not know if this book is found in the Bibliothèque Royale.

A great part of the new colonists, says [William] Stith (History of Virginia), were young people of disordered families whose parents had sent them to spare them from an ignominious fate; former domestics, fraudulent bankrupts, debauched persons and other people of this kind, more suited to pillage and destroy than to consolidate the settlement, formed the rest. Seditious heads easily carried this troop along into all sorts of extravagances and excesses.