is manifest between them and their master appears to
be the necessary and unavoidable consequence of some hidden law of
Providence. In democracies the condition of domestic service does not
degrade the character of those who enter upon it, because it is freely
chosen, and adopted for a time only; because it is not stigmatized by
public opinion, and creates no permanent inequality between the servant
and the master. But whilst the transition from one social condition
to another is going on, there is almost always a time when men's
minds fluctuate between the aristocratic notion of subjection and
the democratic notion of obedience. Obedience then loses its moral
importance in the eyes of him who obeys; he no longer considers it as
a species of divine obligation, and he does not yet view it under
its purely human aspect; it has to him no character of sanctity or
of justice, and he submits to it as to a degrading but profitable
condition. At that moment a confused and imperfect phantom of equality
haunts the minds of servants; they do not at once perceive whether the
equality to which they are entitled is to be found within or without
the pale of domestic service; and they rebel in their hearts against a
subordination to which they have subjected themselves, and from which
they derive actual profit. They consent to serve, and they blush to
obey; they like the advantages of service, but not the master; or
rather, they are not sure that they ought not themselves to be masters,
and they are inclined to consider him who orders them as an unjust
usurper of their own rights. Then it is that the dwelling of every
citizen offers a spectacle somewhat analogous to the gloomy aspect of
political society. A secret and intestine warfare is going on there
between powers, ever rivals and suspicious of one another: the master is
ill-natured and weak, the servant ill-natured and intractable; the one
constantly attempts to evade by unfair restrictions his obligation to
protect and to remunerate--the other his obligation to obey. The reins
of domestic government dangle between them, to be snatched at by one
or the other. The lines which divide authority from oppression, liberty
from license, and right from might, are to their eyes so jumbled
together and confused, that no one knows exactly what he is, or what he
may be, or what he ought to be. Such a condition is not democracy, but
revolution.

Chapter VI: That Democratic Institutions