. To his vehemence they
secretly oppose their inertia; to his revolutionary tendencies their
conservative interests; their homely tastes to his adventurous passions;
their good sense to the flights of his genius; to his poetry their
prose. With immense exertion he raises them for an instant, but they
speedily escape from him, and fall back, as it were, by their own
weight. He strains himself to rouse the indifferent and distracted
multitude, and finds at last that he is reduced to impotence, not
because he is conquered, but because he is alone.

I do not assert that men living in democratic communities are naturally
stationary; I think, on the contrary, that a perpetual stir prevails
in the bosom of those societies, and that rest is unknown there; but I
think that men bestir themselves within certain limits beyond which
they hardly ever go. They are forever varying, altering, and restoring
secondary matters; but they carefully abstain from touching what is
fundamental. They love change, but they dread revolutions. Although the
Americans are constantly modifying or abrogating some of their laws,
they by no means display revolutionary passions. It may be easily seen,
from the promptitude with which they check and calm themselves when
public excitement begins to grow alarming, and at the very moment when
passions seem most roused, that they dread a revolution as the worst
of misfortunes, and that every one of them is inwardly resolved to make
great sacrifices to avoid such a catastrophe. In no country in the world
is the love of property more active and more anxious than in the United
States; nowhere does the majority display less inclination for those
principles which threaten to alter, in whatever manner, the laws
of property. I have often remarked that theories which are of a
revolutionary nature, since they cannot be put in practice without a
complete and sometimes a sudden change in the state of property and
persons, are much less favorably viewed in the United States than in
the great monarchical countries of Europe: if some men profess them,
the bulk of the people reject them with instinctive abhorrence. I do not
hesitate to say that most of the maxims commonly called democratic in
France would be proscribed by the democracy of the United States. This
may easily be understood: in America men have the opinions and passions
of democracy, in Europe we have still the passions and opinions of
revolution. If ever America