h a people.
Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its
strength, and its greatness. Commercial business is there like a vast
lottery, by which a small number of men continually lose, but the State
is always a gainer; such a people ought therefore to encourage and do
honor to boldness in commercial speculations. But any bold speculation
risks the fortune of the speculator and of all those who put their trust
in him. The Americans, who make a virtue of commercial temerity, have
no right in any case to brand with disgrace those who practise it. Hence
arises the strange indulgence which is shown to bankrupts in the United
States; their honor does not suffer by such an accident. In this respect
the Americans differ, not only from the nations of Europe, but from all
the commercial nations of our time, and accordingly they resemble none
of them in their position or their wants.

In America all those vices which tend to impair the purity of morals,
and to destroy the conjugal tie, are treated with a degree of severity
which is unknown in the rest of the world. At first sight this seems
strangely at variance with the tolerance shown there on other subjects,
and one is surprised to meet with a morality so relaxed and so austere
amongst the selfsame people. But these things are less incoherent
than they seem to be. Public opinion in the United States very gently
represses that love of wealth which promotes the commercial greatness
and the prosperity of the nation, and it especially condemns that laxity
of morals which diverts the human mind from the pursuit of well-being,
and disturbs the internal order of domestic life which is so necessary
to success in business. To earn the esteem of their countrymen, the
Americans are therefore constrained to adapt themselves to orderly
habits--and it may be said in this sense that they make it a matter of
honor to live chastely.

On one point American honor accords with the notions of honor
acknowledged in Europe; it places courage as the highest virtue, and
treats it as the greatest of the moral necessities of man; but the
notion of courage itself assumes a different aspect. In the United
States martial valor is but little prized; the courage which is best
known and most esteemed is that which emboldens men to brave the
dangers of the ocean, in order to arrive earlier in port--to support the
privations of the wilderness without complaint, and solitude more cruel