bringing
individual energies into action. There are few functionaries, few
soldiers, and few taxes among them. They know nothing, like us, of that
malady of public functions, the violence of which increases in
proportion as we advance. They know nothing of those enormous imposts
under which Europe is bending by degrees--those taxes which almost
suppress property by overburdening its transmission; they have not come
to the point of finding it very natural to devote one or two millions
every year to the expenses of the State, and no theory has been formed
to prove to them that of all the expenses of the citizens, this is
applied to the best purpose. They have not entered with the Old World
into that rivalry of armaments in which each nation, though it become
exhausted in the effort, is bound to keep on a level with its neighbors,
and in which no one will be stronger in the end when the whole world
shall be subjugated. Their ten thousand regulars suffice, and they have
their militia for extraordinary occasions. Lastly, their Federal debt is
insignificant; and, if the private debts of a few States reach a high
figure, they are nowhere of a nature to impose on the tax-payers a large
surplus of charges.

All of the great liberties exist in the United States: liberty of the
press, liberty of speech, right of assemblage, right of association.
Except in the slave States, where the national institutions have been
subjected to deplorable mutilations in fact, every citizen can express
his opinion and maintain it openly, without meeting any other obstacle
than the contrary opinion, which is expressed with equal freedom.

But there is one ground above all where we should acknowledge the
superiority of America: I mean, religious liberty. We are still in the
beginning of doubts upon the point as to where the interference of the
State should cease; in what measure it should govern the belief of the
citizens, and its manifestation. These questions, alas, are still
propounded among us. And there are countries at our doors, where men
shudder at the mere idea that the law may some day cease to decide for
each in what manner he is bound to worship God, that the courts may
cease to punish those whose conscience turns aside from the path of the
nation. Protestant Sweden but lately condemned dissenters to fine and
imprisonment; Catholic Spain daily inflicts the severest penalties on
those who suffer themselves to profess or to propagate belief