tion as nations become more like each other, they
become reciprocally more compassionate, and the law of nations is
mitigated.

Chapter II: That Democracy Renders The Habitual Intercourse Of The
Americans Simple And Easy

Democracy does not attach men strongly to each other; but it places
their habitual intercourse upon an easier footing. If two Englishmen
chance to meet at the Antipodes, where they are surrounded by strangers
whose language and manners are almost unknown to them, they will first
stare at each other with much curiosity and a kind of secret uneasiness;
they will then turn away, or, if one accosts the other, they will
take care only to converse with a constrained and absent air upon very
unimportant subjects. Yet there is no enmity between these men; they
have never seen each other before, and each believes the other to be a
respectable person. Why then should they stand so cautiously apart? We
must go back to England to learn the reason.

When it is birth alone, independent of wealth, which classes men in
society, everyone knows exactly what his own position is upon the
social scale; he does not seek to rise, he does not fear to sink. In
a community thus organized, men of different castes communicate very
little with each other; but if accident brings them together, they are
ready to converse without hoping or fearing to lose their own position.
Their intercourse is not upon a footing of equality, but it is not
constrained. When moneyed aristocracy succeeds to aristocracy of birth,
the case is altered. The privileges of some are still extremely great,
but the possibility of acquiring those privileges is open to all: whence
it follows that those who possess them are constantly haunted by the
apprehension of losing them, or of other men's sharing them; those who
do not yet enjoy them long to possess them at any cost, or, if they
fail to appear at least to possess them--which is not impossible. As the
social importance of men is no longer ostensibly and permanently fixed
by blood, and is infinitely varied by wealth, ranks still exist, but it
is not easy clearly to distinguish at a glance those who respectively
belong to them. Secret hostilities then arise in the community; one set
of men endeavor by innumerable artifices to penetrate, or to appear to
penetrate, amongst those who are above them; another set are constantly
in arms against these usurpers of their rights; or rather the same
individual