Democracy in America

by Alexis de Tocqueville

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.