than privations--the courage which renders them almost insensible to the
loss of a fortune laboriously acquired, and instantly prompts to fresh
exertions to make another. Courage of this kind is peculiarly necessary
to the maintenance and prosperity of the American communities, and it is
held by them in peculiar honor and estimation; to betray a want of it is
to incur certain disgrace.

I have yet another characteristic point which may serve to place the
idea of this chapter in stronger relief. In a democratic society like
that of the United States, where fortunes are scanty and insecure,
everybody works, and work opens a way to everything: this has changed
the point of honor quite round, and has turned it against idleness.
I have sometimes met in America with young men of wealth, personally
disinclined to all laborious exertion, but who had been compelled to
embrace a profession. Their disposition and their fortune allowed them
to remain without employment; public opinion forbade it, too imperiously
to be disobeyed. In the European countries, on the contrary, where
aristocracy is still struggling with the flood which overwhelms it, I
have often seen men, constantly spurred on by their wants and desires,
remain in idleness, in order not to lose the esteem of their equals; and
I have known them submit to ennui and privations rather than to work.
No one can fail to perceive that these opposite obligations are two
different rules of conduct, both nevertheless originating in the notion
of honor.

What our forefathers designated as honor absolutely was in reality only
one of its forms; they gave a generic name to what was only a species.
Honor therefore is to be found in democratic as well as in aristocratic
ages, but it will not be difficult to show that it assumes a different
aspect in the former. Not only are its injunctions different, but we
shall shortly see that they are less numerous, less precise, and that
its dictates are less rigorously obeyed. The position of a caste is
always much more peculiar than that of a people. Nothing is so much out
of the way of the world as a small community invariably composed of the
same families (as was for instance the aristocracy of the Middle
Ages), whose object is to concentrate and to retain, exclusively and
hereditarily, education, wealth, and power amongst its own members. But
the more out of the way the position of a community happens to be, the
more numerous are its specia