st have one feature in common. No profession exists in which men
do not work for money; and the remuneration which is common to them
all gives them all an air of resemblance. This serves to explain
the opinions which the Americans entertain with respect to different
callings. In America no one is degraded because he works, for everyone
about him works also; nor is anyone humiliated by the notion of
receiving pay, for the President of the United States also works for
pay. He is paid for commanding, other men for obeying orders. In the
United States professions are more or less laborious, more or less
profitable; but they are never either high or low: every honest calling
is honorable.

Chapter XIX: That Almost All The Americans Follow Industrial Callings

Agriculture is, perhaps, of all the useful arts that which improves most
slowly amongst democratic nations. Frequently, indeed, it would seem
to be stationary, because other arts are making rapid strides towards
perfection. On the other hand, almost all the tastes and habits which
the equality of condition engenders naturally lead men to commercial and
industrial occupations.

Suppose an active, enlightened, and free man, enjoying a competency, but
full of desires: he is too poor to live in idleness; he is rich enough
to feel himself protected from the immediate fear of want, and he thinks
how he can better his condition. This man has conceived a taste for
physical gratifications, which thousands of his fellow-men indulge in
around him; he has himself begun to enjoy these pleasures, and he is
eager to increase his means of satisfying these tastes more completely.
But life is slipping away, time is urgent--to what is he to turn? The
cultivation of the ground promises an almost certain result to his
exertions, but a slow one; men are not enriched by it without patience
and toil. Agriculture is therefore only suited to those who have already
large, superfluous wealth, or to those whose penury bids them only seek
a bare subsistence. The choice of such a man as we have supposed is soon
made; he sells his plot of ground, leaves his dwelling, and embarks in
some hazardous but lucrative calling. Democratic communities abound
in men of this kind; and in proportion as the equality of conditions
becomes greater, their multitude increases. Thus democracy not only
swells the number of workingmen, but it leads men to prefer one kind
of labor to another; and whilst it diverts