ken not to confound the principle of equality
itself with the revolution which finally establishes that principle in
the social condition and the laws of a nation: here lies the reason of
almost all the phenomena which occasion our astonishment. All the old
political powers of Europe, the greatest as well as the least, were
founded in ages of aristocracy, and they more or less represented or
defended the principles of inequality and of privilege. To make the
novel wants and interests, which the growing principle of equality
introduced, preponderate in government, our contemporaries had to
overturn or to coerce the established powers. This led them to make
revolutions, and breathed into many of them, that fierce love of
disturbance and independence, which all revolutions, whatever be their
object, always engender. I do not believe that there is a single country
in Europe in which the progress of equality has not been preceded or
followed by some violent changes in the state of property and persons;
and almost all these changes have been attended with much anarchy and
license, because they have been made by the least civilized portion of
the nation against that which is most civilized. Hence proceeded the
two-fold contrary tendencies which I have just pointed out. As long as
the democratic revolution was glowing with heat, the men who were
bent upon the destruction of old aristocratic powers hostile to that
revolution, displayed a strong spirit of independence; but as the
victory or the principle of equality became more complete, they
gradually surrendered themselves to the propensities natural to that
condition of equality, and they strengthened and centralized their
governments. They had sought to be free in order to make themselves
equal; but in proportion as equality was more established by the aid
of freedom, freedom itself was thereby rendered of more difficult
attainment.

These two states of a nation have sometimes been contemporaneous:
the last generation in France showed how a people might organize a
stupendous tyranny in the community, at the very time when they were
baffling the authority of the nobility and braving the power of all
kings--at once teaching the world the way to win freedom, and the way to
lose it. In our days men see that constituted powers are dilapidated
on every side--they see all ancient authority gasping away, all ancient
barriers tottering to their fall, and the judgment of the wisest is