giving rise to the other.

On this point reasoning may seem to lead to the same result as
experience. Amongst a people whose ranks are nearly equal, no ostensible
bond connects men together, or keeps them settled in their station.
None of them have either a permanent right or power to command--none
are forced by their condition to obey; but every man, finding himself
possessed of some education and some resources, may choose his won path
and proceed apart from all his fellow-men. The same causes which make
the members of the community independent of each other, continually
impel them to new and restless desires, and constantly spur them
onwards. It therefore seems natural that, in a democratic community,
men, things, and opinions should be forever changing their form and
place, and that democratic ages should be times of rapid and incessant
transformation.

But is this really the case? does the equality of social conditions
habitually and permanently lead men to revolution? does that state of
society contain some perturbing principle which prevents the community
from ever subsiding into calm, and disposes the citizens to alter
incessantly their laws, their principles, and their manners? I do not
believe it; and as the subject is important, I beg for the reader's
close attention. Almost all the revolutions which have changed the
aspect of nations have been made to consolidate or to destroy social
inequality. Remove the secondary causes which have produced the great
convulsions of the world, and you will almost always find the principle
of inequality at the bottom. Either the poor have attempted to plunder
the rich, or the rich to enslave the poor. If then a state of society
can ever be founded in which every man shall have something to keep, and
little to take from others, much will have been done for the peace of
the world. I am aware that amongst a great democratic people there will
always be some members of the community in great poverty, and others in
great opulence; but the poor, instead of forming the immense majority
of the nation, as is always the case in aristocratic communities, are
comparatively few in number, and the laws do not bind them together by
the ties of irremediable and hereditary penury. The wealthy, on their
side, are scarce and powerless; they have no privileges which attract
public observation; even their wealth, as it is no longer incorporated
and bound up with the soil, is impalpable, and as i