erve the activity, the information, and
the spirit of enterprise which keep society in perpetual labor, in those
American townships whose budgets are drawn up with small method and with
still less uniformity, I am struck by the spectacle; for to my mind the
end of a good government is to ensure the welfare of a people, and not
to establish order and regularity in the midst of its misery and its
distress. I am therefore led to suppose that the prosperity of the
American townships and the apparent confusion of their accounts, the
distress of the French communes and the perfection of their budget,
may be attributable to the same cause. At any rate I am suspicious of a
benefit which is united to so many evils, and I am not averse to an evil
which is compensated by so many benefits.]

Granting for an instant that the villages and counties of the United
States would be more usefully governed by a remote authority which
they had never seen than by functionaries taken from the midst of
them--admitting, for the sake of argument, that the country would be
more secure, and the resources of society better employed, if the whole
administration centred in a single arm--still the political advantages
which the Americans derive from their system would induce me to prefer
it to the contrary plan. It profits me but little, after all, that a
vigilant authority should protect the tranquillity of my pleasures
and constantly avert all dangers from my path, without my care or my
concern, if this same authority is the absolute mistress of my liberty
and of my life, and if it so monopolizes all the energy of existence
that when it languishes everything languishes around it, that when it
sleeps everything must sleep, that when it dies the State itself must
perish.

In certain countries of Europe the natives consider themselves as a kind
of settlers, indifferent to the fate of the spot upon which they live.
The greatest changes are effected without their concurrence and (unless
chance may have apprised them of the event) without their knowledge; nay
more, the citizen is unconcerned as to the condition of his village, the
police of his street, the repairs of the church or of the parsonage; for
he looks upon all these things as unconnected with himself, and as the
property of a powerful stranger whom he calls the Government. He has
only a life-interest in these possessions, and he entertains no notions
of ownership or of improvement. This want of