to the
pleasures of material life. The love of well-being is now become the
predominant taste of the nation; the great current of man's passions
runs in that channel, and sweeps everything along in its course.

Chapter XI: Peculiar Effects Of The Love Of Physical Gratifications In
Democratic Ages

It may be supposed, from what has just been said, that the love
of physical gratifications must constantly urge the Americans to
irregularities in morals, disturb the peace of families, and threaten
the security of society at large. Such is not the case: the passion for
physical gratifications produces in democracies effects very different
from those which it occasions in aristocratic nations. It sometimes
happens that, wearied with public affairs and sated with opulence,
amidst the ruin of religious belief and the decline of the State, the
heart of an aristocracy may by degrees be seduced to the pursuit of
sensual enjoyments only. At other times the power of the monarch or the
weakness of the people, without stripping the nobility of their fortune,
compels them to stand aloof from the administration of affairs, and
whilst the road to mighty enterprise is closed, abandons them to the
inquietude of their own desires; they then fall back heavily upon
themselves, and seek in the pleasures of the body oblivion of their
former greatness. When the members of an aristocratic body are thus
exclusively devoted to the pursuit of physical gratifications, they
commonly concentrate in that direction all the energy which they derive
from their long experience of power. Such men are not satisfied with
the pursuit of comfort; they require sumptuous depravity and splendid
corruption. The worship they pay the senses is a gorgeous one; and they
seem to vie with each other in the art of degrading their own natures.
The stronger, the more famous, and the more free an aristocracy has
been, the more depraved will it then become; and however brilliant
may have been the lustre of its virtues, I dare predict that they will
always be surpassed by the splendor of its vices.

The taste for physical gratifications leads a democratic people into no
such excesses. The love of well-being is there displayed as a tenacious,
exclusive, universal passion; but its range is confined. To build
enormous palaces, to conquer or to mimic nature, to ransack the world in
order to gratify the passions of a man, is not thought of: but to add
a few roods of land to