of armies, where glory had a reward, and eloquence an object!

My youth no longer felt itself prematurely old; a soft, a hidden ardour, penetrated slowly and dissolved, as by enchantment, the learned doubts, the ironical reserves, the selfish discouragements that we almost all carry with us in our chilled consciences.

I also felt a singular pleasure in finding myself in a real democracy. I am not one of those who accept democracy only with a sort of melancholy resignation, as a fact, as a social necessity, against which all resistance would be vain; I like it from taste; I admire it from preference, when it puts equality under the ægis of liberty, and not under that of despotism. It suits me better to find equals among men, rather than inferiors. 'Nihil humani a me alienum puto.' But this upright, healthy, vital feeling, that draws man towards man, that has no need of dress, fictions, rules, formalities, is hardly to be found pure and unalloyed in old societies. Too much. envy and hatred are mixed with equality, when it comes after too long a servitude. I find a kind of baseness in its ever anxious pride, in its tacit or avowed intention to sacrifice to its own interests the sacred interests of liberty, in its hackneyed flatteries of the multitude, in its instinctive respect for force, in its cruel and unjust suspicions, in its envious fear of any solitary greatness. Habits of thought are slow to be changed.

In the United States, liberty and equality are closely mingled in equal proportions to make up the democratic spirit. Everything has favoured this happy

marriage: the immense territories that offer independence to any industrious man, the respect necessarily accorded to labour in a new society, the uncertainty and instability of destinies, the narrow circumscription of the functions of the state, the absence of all historic and traditional guidance, the necessity under which the citizens lie of constantly defending their rights and interests, the complete separation of Church and State, which makes the consciences of all familiar with the exercise of the highest and most delicate of liberties.

Democratic theorists have expressed three fears: they have thought that the excessive development of individualism would be fatal to the disinterested passion to which is given the name of patriotism; that the dominion of uncontrolled and unbridled majorities in the midst of every liberty would destroy the sense of liberty itself; lastly, they have thought that a general and uniform cultivation would gradually reduce all intelligences to the level of a common mediocrity.

I do not believe that the United States have thus far justified any of these fears: their patriotism has been striking enough to all the world. What have they not sacrificed for that, Union which Europe was pleased to call chimerical; to that Constitution, which is not only the charter of their liberties, but the security of their national grandeur? On this first point it seems to me there is really nothing to be said, and all commentary would be vain.

Will it be said that liberty is dying out in a country which, in the midst of a frightful war, has exercised all its great political functions as quietly as in the past;

which has asked no other weapons but the law to defend itself from the savage fury of treason? Whatever the calumniators of the United States may have said, liberty has not received any severe wound in the midst of so many convulsions and catastrophes. Never has the nation uttered cowardly shrieks to invoke a Cæsar; never has she dreamed of buying victory by her own servitude.

Lastly, is it true that democracy is the enemy of all greatness and all originality, that it destroys independence of mind, that its manners are coarse, common, and tyrannical, that it respects nothing but wealth and success? More than one foreigner, thrown into the eddies of American democracy, like a buoy tossed by every wave, has perhaps received these impressions. From habit you no longer see a ground-work of common places and vulgarities, that is familiar to you from childhood, in your own country. It is this ground-work that first strikes the eye in a new country, and for a long time you see nothing else. American coarseness has besides something sharper, more aggressive, more living, and, for that very reason, more unpleasant than that humble, resigned, almost bovine coarseness of European multitudes. But in no country have you the right to judge a nation by the chance pictures of the public squares and streets. Nothing is, I think, more difficult than to justly appreciate the American character; to distinguish what is essential from that which is merely accidental; what belongs to the soil from that which is only an impure and temporary alloy. Americans sometimes say that no one can understand them but them

selves; and I have heard so many ridiculous judgments passed upon them, that I am not far from thinking they are right.

At once ardent and cold, irritable and patient, vindictive and generous, communicative and reserved, grasping and prodigal, the American seems at first a tissue of contradictions. You are astonished to find so much cunning with so much frankness, such deep-laid plans under such easy indifference, such simple habits in the midst of wealth, such great refinement in obscure situations, so much diplomacy in the village, so much rusticity in the city. The American is not systematic; he always subordinates the means to the end; he can profit by circumstances, by men, even by chance. What he cannot carry by force he gains by patience, but he does not wear out his patience when audacity will succeed. There are no illusions for him : he has deep feelings, but no sentimentality. He is never imposed upon: in the statesman, the priest, the orator, he looks only for the man.

Also, I believe him to surpass all nations and all races in the knowledge of the human heart. That is his great, his one, his insatiable curiosity; art, abstract ideas, nature, philosophy, come very far behind. His memory seems able to contain all names, all genealogies, all anecdotes, all dates: if he studies a doctrine, the sectary interests him as much as the sect. He loves the poet as much as the poem. Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, are personal friends for all Americans; they can sit by every hearth, all belongs to them; they are the real kings of this democracy, said to be so vulgar and

rapacious, and that is represented on its knees before the almighty dollar. If an American travels, it is to meet men; like Poussin, he always requires figures in a picture; what surprises him the most in any place is that he should be there; he has not yet reached the point of flying from himself, and seeking the half-sleep of sad contemplations; he is eminently sociable, but his sociability is not that common-place amiability that goes through empty forms: it is more exacting, it asks the new-comer, the unknown: Who are you? what do you bring me? what can you teach me? are you better than I am? are you a man? do you excel in anything? do you know how to cut down this tree, or can you translate Homer? He casts the line into all consciences, and, above all, despises useless people, folly, stupidity, and mental idleness.

No matter how much he may be imbued with the spirit of equality, he is always looking for superiors; but he can recognise a superior in a log-house in Maine as quickly as in a palace in the Fifth Avenue; under a farmer's coat as well as a pastor's gown.

In the very depths of his religion, I still find the same social instinct: he needs a doctrine that penetrates deeply into the abysses and windings of the human soul, that analyses its contradictions, its fantastic tendencies, its strangeness, with an almost cruel curiosity; or a religion that brings God down to man—a human, reforming, fraternal Jesus; he loves poetry, for poetry is nothing if not personal, if it does not touch the most vibrating chords of the soul. History could not be neglected by so political a people, and one so fond of