bout it. I accost an American sailor, and I inquire why the
ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time;
he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day
making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost
useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years. In these words,
which fell accidentally and on a particular subject from a man of rude
attainments, I recognize the general and systematic idea upon which a
great people directs all its concerns.

Aristocratic nations are naturally too apt to narrow the scope of human
perfectibility; democratic nations to expand it beyond compass.

Chapter IX: The Example Of The Americans Does Not Prove That A
Democratic People Can Have No Aptitude And No Taste For Science,
Literature, Or Art

It must be acknowledged that amongst few of the civilized nations of
our time have the higher sciences made less progress than in the United
States; and in few have great artists, fine poets, or celebrated writers
been more rare. Many Europeans, struck by this fact, have looked upon it
as a natural and inevitable result of equality; and they have supposed
that if a democratic state of society and democratic institutions were
ever to prevail over the whole earth, the human mind would gradually
find its beacon-lights grow dim, and men would relapse into a period of
darkness. To reason thus is, I think, to confound several ideas which
it is important to divide and to examine separately: it is to mingle,
unintentionally, what is democratic with what is only American.

The religion professed by the first emigrants, and bequeathed by them
to their descendants, simple in its form of worship, austere and
almost harsh in its principles, and hostile to external symbols and to
ceremonial pomp, is naturally unfavorable to the fine arts, and only
yields a reluctant sufferance to the pleasures of literature. The
Americans are a very old and a very enlightened people, who have fallen
upon a new and unbounded country, where they may extend themselves at
pleasure, and which they may fertilize without difficulty. This state
of things is without a parallel in the history of the world. In America,
then, every one finds facilities, unknown elsewhere, for making or
increasing his fortune. The spirit of gain is always on the stretch, and
the human mind, constantly diverted from the pleasures of imagination
and the labors of the intellect, is th