imagination
of the poor is driven to seek another world; the miseries of real life
inclose it around, but it escapes from their control, and flies to seek
its pleasures far beyond. When, on the contrary, the distinctions
of ranks are confounded together and privileges are destroyed--when
hereditary property is subdivided, and education and freedom widely
diffused, the desire of acquiring the comforts of the world haunts the
imagination of the poor, and the dread of losing them that of the rich.
Many scanty fortunes spring up; those who possess them have a sufficient
share of physical gratifications to conceive a taste for these
pleasures--not enough to satisfy it. They never procure them without
exertion, and they never indulge in them without apprehension. They
are therefore always straining to pursue or to retain gratifications so
delightful, so imperfect, so fugitive.

If I were to inquire what passion is most natural to men who are
stimulated and circumscribed by the obscurity of their birth or the
mediocrity of their fortune, I could discover none more peculiarly
appropriate to their condition than this love of physical prosperity.
The passion for physical comforts is essentially a passion of the
middle classes: with those classes it grows and spreads, with them it
preponderates. From them it mounts into the higher orders of society,
and descends into the mass of the people. I never met in America with
any citizen so poor as not to cast a glance of hope and envy on the
enjoyments of the rich, or whose imagination did not possess itself by
anticipation of those good things which fate still obstinately withheld
from him. On the other hand, I never perceived amongst the wealthier
inhabitants of the United States that proud contempt of physical
gratifications which is sometimes to be met with even in the most
opulent and dissolute aristocracies. Most of these wealthy persons were
once poor; they have felt the sting of want; they were long a prey to
adverse fortunes; and now that the victory is won, the passions which
accompanied the contest have survived it: their minds are, as it were,
intoxicated by the small enjoyments which they have pursued for forty
years. Not but that in the United States, as elsewhere, there are a
certain number of wealthy persons who, having come into their property
by inheritance, possess, without exertion, an opulence they have not
earned. But even these men are not less devotedly attached