, which will soon disappear with them
altogether. In the United States I never saw anyone at all like them.
The Americans are not only unacquainted with the kind of man, but it is
hardly possible to make them understand that such ever existed. It is
scarcely less difficult for them to conceive it, than for us to form a
correct notion of what a slave was amongst the Romans, or a serf in the
Middle Ages. All these men were in fact, though in different degrees,
results of the same cause: they are all retiring from our sight, and
disappearing in the obscurity of the past, together with the social
condition to which they owed their origin.

Equality of conditions turns servants and masters into new beings, and
places them in new relative positions. When social conditions are nearly
equal, men are constantly changing their situations in life: there is
still a class of menials and a class of masters, but these classes are
not always composed of the same individuals, still less of the same
families; and those who command are not more secure of perpetuity than
those who obey. As servants do not form a separate people, they have
no habits, prejudices, or manners peculiar to themselves; they are not
remarkable for any particular turn of mind or moods of feeling. They
know no vices or virtues of their condition, but they partake of the
education, the opinions, the feelings, the virtues, and the vices of
their contemporaries; and they are honest men or scoundrels in the same
way as their masters are. The conditions of servants are not less equal
than those of masters. As no marked ranks or fixed subordination are to
be found amongst them, they will not display either the meanness or the
greatness which characterizes the aristocracy of menials as well as all
other aristocracies. I never saw a man in the United States who reminded
me of that class of confidential servants of which we still retain a
reminiscence in Europe, neither did I ever meet with such a thing as a
lackey: all traces of the one and of the other have disappeared.

In democracies servants are not only equal amongst themselves, but it
may be said that they are in some sort the equals of their masters. This
requires explanation in order to be rightly understood. At any moment a
servant may become a master, and he aspires to rise to that condition:
the servant is therefore not a different man from the master. Why
then has the former a right to command, and what compels