h in aristocratic society the master and servant have no natural
resemblance--although, on the contrary, they are placed at an immense
distance on the scale of human beings by their fortune, education, and
opinions--yet time ultimately binds them together. They are connected
by a long series of common reminiscences, and however different they
may be, they grow alike; whilst in democracies, where they are naturally
almost alike, they always remain strangers to each other. Amongst an
aristocratic people the master gets to look upon his servants as an
inferior and secondary part of himself, and he often takes an interest
in their lot by a last stretch of egotism.

Servants, on their part, are not averse to regard themselves in the same
light; and they sometimes identify themselves with the person of the
master, so that they become an appendage to him in their own eyes as
well as in his. In aristocracies a servant fills a subordinate position
which he cannot get out of; above him is another man, holding a superior
rank which he cannot lose. On one side are obscurity, poverty, obedience
for life; on the other, and also for life, fame, wealth, and command.
The two conditions are always distinct and always in propinquity; the
tie that connects them is as lasting as they are themselves. In this
predicament the servant ultimately detaches his notion of interest from
his own person; he deserts himself, as it were, or rather he transports
himself into the character of his master, and thus assumes an imaginary
personality. He complacently invests himself with the wealth of those
who command him; he shares their fame, exalts himself by their rank,
and feeds his mind with borrowed greatness, to which he attaches
more importance than those who fully and really possess it. There is
something touching, and at the same time ridiculous, in this strange
confusion of two different states of being. These passions of masters,
when they pass into the souls of menials, assume the natural dimensions
of the place they occupy--they are contracted and lowered. What was
pride in the former becomes puerile vanity and paltry ostentation in the
latter. The servants of a great man are commonly most punctilious as to
the marks of respect due to him, and they attach more importance to his
slightest privileges than he does himself. In France a few of these old
servants of the aristocracy are still to be met with here and there;
they have survived their race