their private vanity to their vanity as a nation. The restless and
insatiable vanity of a democratic people originates so entirely in the
equality and precariousness of social conditions, that the members of
the haughtiest nobility display the very same passion in those lesser
portions of their existence in which there is anything fluctuating or
contested. An aristocratic class always differs greatly from the other
classes of the nation, by the extent and perpetuity of its privileges;
but it often happens that the only differences between the members who
belong to it consist in small transient advantages, which may any day be
lost or acquired. The members of a powerful aristocracy, collected in
a capital or a court, have been known to contest with virulence those
frivolous privileges which depend on the caprice of fashion or the
will of their master. These persons then displayed towards each
other precisely the same puerile jealousies which animate the men of
democracies, the same eagerness to snatch the smallest advantages which
their equals contested, and the same desire to parade ostentatiously
those of which they were in possession. If national pride ever entered
into the minds of courtiers, I do not question that they would display
it in the same manner as the members of a democratic community.

Chapter XVII: That The Aspect Of Society In The United States Is At Once
Excited And Monotonous

It would seem that nothing can be more adapted to stimulate and to feed
curiosity than the aspect of the United States. Fortunes, opinions,
and laws are there in ceaseless variation: it is as if immutable nature
herself were mutable, such are the changes worked upon her by the hand
of man. Yet in the end the sight of this excited community becomes
monotonous, and after having watched the moving pageant for a time the
spectator is tired of it. Amongst aristocratic nations every man is
pretty nearly stationary in his own sphere; but men are astonishingly
unlike each other--their passions, their notions, their habits, and
their tastes are essentially different: nothing changey, but everything
differs. In democracies, on the contrary, all men are alike and do
things pretty nearly alike. It is true that they are subject to great
and frequent vicissitudes; but as the same events of good or adverse
fortune are continually recurring, the name of the actors only is
changed, the piece is always the same. The aspect of American soci