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Conclusion a - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition, vol. 2 [1835]

Edition used:

Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. Eduardo Nolla, translated from the French by James T. Schleifer. A Bilingual French-English editions, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010). Vol. 2.

Part of: Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition, 4 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Conclusiona

Here I am approaching the end. Until now, while speaking of the future destiny of the United States, I forced myself to divide my subject into various parts in order to study each one of them with more care.

Now I would like to bring all of them together in a single point of view. What I will say will be less detailed, but more sure. I will see each object less distinctly; I will take up general facts with more certitude. I will be like a traveler who, while coming outside the walls of a vast city, climbs up the adjacent hill. As he moves away, the men that he has just left disappear from his view; their houses blend together; he no longer sees the public squares; he makes out the path of the streets with difficulty; but his eyes follow more easily the contours of the city, and for the first time he grasps its form. It seems to me that I too discover before me the whole future of the English race in the New World. The details of this immense tableau have remained in shadow; but my eyes take in the entire view, and I conceive a clear idea of the whole.

The territory occupied or possessed today by the United States of America forms about one-twentieth of inhabited lands.b

However extensive these limits are, you would be wrong to believe that the Anglo-American race will stay within them forever; it is already spreading very far beyond.

There was a time when we too were able to create in the American wilderness a great French nation and balance the destinies of the New World with the English. France formerly possessed in North America a territory nearly as vast as the whole of Europe. The three greatestc rivers of the continent then flowed entirely under our laws. The Indian nations that live from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence to the Mississippi delta heard only our language spoken; all the European settlements spread over this immense space recalled the memory of the homeland; they were Louisbourg, Montmorency, Duquesne, Saint-Louis, Vincennes, La Nouvelle Orléans, all names dear to France and familiar to our ears.

But a combination of circumstances that would be too long to enumerate1 deprived us of this magnificent heritage. Everyplace where the French were too few and not well established, they disappeared. What was left gathered into a small space and passed under other laws. The four hundred thousand French of Lower Canada today form like the remnant of an ancient people lost amid the waves of a new nation.d Around them the foreign population grows constantly; it is spreading in all directions; it even penetrates the ranks of the former masters of the soil, dominates in their cities, and distorts their language. This population is identical to that of the United States. So I am right to say that the English race does not stop at the limits of the Union, but is advancing very far beyond toward the northeast.

In the northwest you find only a few unimportant Russian settlements; but in the southwest Mexico arises before the steps of the Anglo-American like a barrier.

Thus there are truly speaking only two rival races that share the New World today, the Spanish and the English.

The limits that are to separate these two races have been fixed by a treaty. But however favorable this treaty may be to the Anglo-Americans, I do not doubt that they are soon going to break it.

Beyond the frontiers of the Union, next to Mexico, extend vast provinces that still lack inhabitants. The men of the United States will penetrate these uninhabited areas even before those who have the right to occupy them. They will appropriate the soil, they will establish a society, and when the rightful owner finally appears, he will find the wilderness made fertile and foreigners calmly settled on his inheritance.

The land of the New World belongs to the first occupant, and empire is the prize for the race.

Countries already populated will have difficulty protecting themselves from invasion.

I have already spoken before about what is happening in the province of Texas. Each day the inhabitants of the United States enter little by little into Texas; they acquire lands there, and even while submitting to the laws of the country, they are establishing the dominion of their language and their mores. The province of Texas is still under the rule of Mexico; but soon you will no longer find any Mexicans there so to speak. Something similar is happening everywhere the Anglo-Americans enter into contact with populations of another origin.

You cannot conceal the fact that the English race has acquired an immense preponderance over all the other European races of the New World. It is very superior to them in civilization, in industry and in power. As long as it has before it only uninhabited or sparsely inhabited countries, as long as it does not find in its path aggregated populations, through which it will be impossible for it to clear a passage, you will see it spread without ceasing. It will not stop at lines drawn in treaties, but will overflow these imaginary dikes from all directions.

[{The Constitution of the United States has been credited with the progress that the population makes each year.}]

What also marvelously facilitates this rapid development of the English race in the New World is the geographic position that it occupies there.

When you go up toward the north above its northern frontiers, you find polar ice, and when you descend a few degrees below its southern limits, you get into the heat of the equator. So the English of America are located in the most temperate zone and the most habitable part of the continent.

You imagine that the prodigious movement that is noted in the increase of the population of the United States dates only from independence. That is an error. The population grew as quickly under the colonial system as today; it doubled the same in about twenty-two years. But then it applied to thousands of inhabitants; now it applies to millions. The same fact that passed unnoticed a century ago strikes all minds today.e

The English of Canada, who obey a king, increase in number and spread almost as quickly as the English of the United States, who live under a republican government.

During the eight years that the War of Independence lasted, the population did not cease to increase following the proportion previously indicated.

Although there then existed on the frontiers of the West great Indian nations allied with the English, the movement of emigration toward the West never, so to speak, relented. While the enemy ravaged the coasts of the Atlantic, Kentucky, the western districts of Pennsylvania, the state of Vermont and that of Maine filled up with inhabitants. Nor did the disorder that followed the war prevent the population from growing and stop its progressive march into the wilderness. Thus the difference in laws, the state of peace or the state of war, order or anarchy, influenced only in an imperceptible way the successive development of the Anglo-Americans.

This is easily understood. No causes exist that are general enough to make themselves felt at the same time at all the points of a territory so immense. Thus there is always a large portion of the country where you are sure to find a shelter from the calamities that strike another, and however great the evils may be, the remedy offered is always greater still.

So it must not be believed that it is possible to stop the expansion of the English race of the New World. The dismemberment of the Union, by leading to war on the continent, the abolition of the republic, by introducing tyranny there, can retard its development, but not prevent it from attaining the necessary complement of its destiny. There is no power on earth that can close to the steps of the emigrants this fertile wilderness that is open in all areas to industry and that presents a refuge from all miseries. Future events, whatever they may be, will not take away from the Americans either their climate, or their interior seas, or their great rivers, or the fertility of their soil. Bad laws, revolution and anarchy, cannot destroy among them the taste for well-being and the spirit of enterprise that seems the distinctive character of their race, or completely extinguish the knowledge that enlightens them.

[≠It would be as easy to stop the waves of the sea as to prevent the waves of Anglo-American emigration from reaching the shores of the Pacific Ocean.≠]

Thus amid the uncertainty of the future there is at least one event that is certain. At some period that we can call near at hand, since it concerns the life of peoples, the Anglo-Americans will cover alone all the immense space included between the areas of polar ice and the tropics; they will spread from the strands of the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of the Pacific.

I think that the territory over which the Anglo-American race must someday spread equals three-quarters of Europe.2 The climate of the Union is, everything considered, preferable to that of Europe; its natural advantages are as great; it is clear that its population cannot fail one day to be proportionate to ours.

Europe, divided among so many diverse peoples; Europe, through constantly recurring wars and the barbarism of the Middle Ages, succeeded in having four hundred ten inhabitants3 per square league. What cause so powerful could prevent the United States from having as many one day?

Many centuries will pass before the various offshoots of the English race of America cease showing a common physiognomy. You cannot foresee the period when man will be able to establish permanent inequality of conditions in the New World.

So whatever differences are made one day in the destiny of the various offshoots of the great Anglo-American family by peace or war, liberty or tyranny, prosperity or poverty, they will all at least preserve an analogous social state and will have in common customs and ideas that derive from the social state.

The bond of religion alone was sufficient in the Middle Ages to bring the diverse races that peopled Europe together in the same civilization. The English of the New World have a thousand other bonds with each other, and they live in a century when everything is trying to become equal among men.

The Middle Ages was a period of division. Each people, each province, each city, each family then tended strongly to become more individual.f Today an opposite movement makes itself felt; peoples seem to march toward unity. Intellectual links unite the most distant parts of the earth, and men cannot remain strangers to one another for a single day, or ignorant of what is happening in no matter what corner of the universe. Consequently you notice today less difference between Europeans and their descendants of the New World, despite the Ocean that divides them, than between certain cities of the XIIIth century that were separated only by a river.

If this movement of assimilation brings foreign peoples together, it is opposed with greater reason to the offshoots of the same people becoming strangers to each other.

So a time will come when you will be able to see in North America one hundred and fifty milliong men4 equal to one another, who will all belong to the same family, who will have the same point of departure, the same civilization, the same language, the same religion, the same habits, the same mores, and among whom thought will circulate with the same form and will be painted with the same colors. All the rest is doubtful, but this is certain. Now here is a fact entirely new in the world, and imagination itself cannot grasp its import.

Today there are two great peoples on earth who, starting from different points, seem to advance toward the same goal: these are the Russians and the Anglo-Americans.

Both grew up in obscurity; and while the attention of men was occupied elsewhere, they suddenly took their place in the first rank of nations, and the world learned of their birth and their greatness nearly at the same time.

All other peoples seem to have almost reached the limits drawn by nature, and have nothing more to do except maintain themselves; but these two are growing.5 All the others have stopped or move ahead only with a thousand efforts; these two alone walk with an easy and rapid stride along a path whose limit cannot yet be seen.

The American struggles against obstacles that nature opposes to him; the Russian is grappling with men. The one combats the wilderness and barbarism; the other, civilization clothed in all its arms. Consequently the conquests of the American are made with the farmer’s plow, those of the Russian with the soldier’s sword.

To reach his goal the first relies on personal interest, and, without directing them, allows the strength and reason of individuals to operate.

The second in a way concentrates all the power of society in one man.

The one has as principal means of action liberty; the other, servitude.

Their point of departure is different, their paths are varied; nonetheless, each one of them seems called by a secret design of Providence to hold in its hands one day the destinies of half the world.h

Notes

[a. ] In the manuscript, the conclusion is found in a jacket with the title: ≠future of the republican principle in the united states.≠

[c. ] The manuscript says: “The two greatest . . .”

[1. ] In first place this one: free peoples accustomed to the municipal regime succeed much more easily than others in creating flourishing colonies. The habit of thinking for yourself and governing yourself is indispensable in a new country, where success necessarily depends in large part on the individual efforts of the colonists.

[d. ] In a small fragment belonging to one of the appendices of the Penitentiary System, Tocqueville explains why according to him the French do not have good colonies (repeated in Écrits et discours politiques, OC, III, 1, pp. 35-40). Among the reasons advanced he cites the continental character of France, the love of the Frenchman for his country, the legal habits and bad political education that accustom citizens to the existence of a tutelary power ready to help in the slightest difficulty. In the same way Tocqueville explains how Canada, even better than France, allows the damaging effects of administrative centralization to be studied (L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, OC, II, 1, pp. 286-87). See in this regard: Jean-Michel Leclerq, “Alexis de Tocqueville in Canada (24 August to 2 September 1831),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 22, no. 3 (1968): 356-64; Edgar McInnis, “A Letter from Alexis de Tocqueville on the Canadian Rebellion of 1837,” Canadian Historical Review 19, no. 4 (1938): 394-97; and Gérard Bergeron, Quand Tocqueville et Siegfried nous observaient . . . (Quebec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1990).

[e. ] In the margin: “≠Nothing can slow it,

neither political event,

nor civil discords,

nor bad laws, nor wars.≠”

[2. ] The United States alone already covers a space equal to half of Europe. The surface of Europe is 500,000 square leagues; its population 205,000,000 inhabitants. Malte-Brun, vol. VI, book CXIV, p. 4.

[3. ] See Malte-Brun, vol. VI, book CXVI, p. 92.

[f. ] Tocqueville will for the first time use the term “individualism” in chapter II of the second part of the third volume.

[g. ] The figure is missing in the manuscript.

[4. ] It is the population proportionate to that of Europe, by taking the average of 410 men per square league.

[5. ] Russia is of all the nations of the Old World the one whose population is increasing most rapidly, keeping the proportion. [See Malte-Brun, vol. VI, p. 95.]

[h. ] This passage is one of the best known of the Democracy, and probably one of the most cited of the entire book. It gained Tocqueville a reputation as a prophet that has not failed to harm the overall interpretation of his work. If several critics have noted that a similar idea is found among authors as diverse as Edmund Dana, Alexander Hill Everett, the Abbé de Pradt, Madame de Staël, Edward Everett (in two reviews of Pradt), John Bristed, Stendhal, and Michel Chevalier, it must nonetheless be noted that the theories of Tocqueville sometimes differ perceptibly from those of these authors. M. de Pradt (Du système permanent de l’Europe à l’égard de la Russie et des affaires de l’Orient, Paris: Pichon and Didier, 1828), for example, does oppose two powers, but they are England as maritime force and Russia as land force. He only incidentally mentions that America could avenge Europe (p. 5). Alexander Everett (America: Or a General Survey of the Political Situation of the Several Powers of the Western Continent . . ., Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lee, 1827), for his part, conceives three great powers: Russia, England, and the United States.

You cannot understand why Tocqueville terminates his considerations with this affirmation if you forget that his interest in the United States is nearly equal to the one he had for Russia. This is clear not only in his correspondence with the Circourts, Greg, Madame Phillimore, Everett, or Corcelle, but also in long conversations that he was able to have with Theodore Sedgwick in 1834 or with Grandmaison twenty years later. The latter notes that in 1854, Tocqueville continued to think that the Slavic race and the Anglo-Saxon race would one day share the world. His interest in Russia had led him to read the work of Baron de Haxthausen (Études sur la situation intérieure, la vie nationale et les institutions rurales de la Russie, Hanover, 1847-1853, 3 vols.). Grandmaison reports that Tocqueville asserted: “a young and intelligent man, courageous enough to learn Russian and to spend some years in Russia, would find there the subject of a very curious study and of a book of high interest that would come to be a counterpart to his own work on America.” And he adds: “This idea preoccupied him a great deal; you felt with him the regret of not being able to execute it, and I believe he would have willingly pushed me into this undertaking, if I had given him the slightest opening from my side” (“Séjour d’Alexis de Tocqueville en Touraine, préparation du livre sur l’Ancien Régime,” Correspondant, 114, 1879, pp. 926-49; cf. p. 943). Beaumont, perhaps persuaded by the author, will do for the Revue des deux mondes a review of the book of Haxthausen (“La Russie et les Etats-Unis sous le rapport économique,” Revue des deux mondes, 2nd series, 5, 1854, pp. 1163-83). See note y for p. 158. Also see on this subject: René Rémond, Les États-Unis devant l’opinion française, 1815-1852, Paris: Armand Colin, 1962, I, pp. 378-79 note; Theodore Draper, “The Idea of the ‘Cold War’ and Its Prophets. On Tocqueville and Others,” Encounter, 52, 1979, pp. 34-45 (Draper insists on the fact that Tocqueville never considered a possible confrontation between the two countries); Bernard Fabian, Alexis de Tocqueville Amerikabild: Genetische Untersuchungen über Zusammenhänge mit der Zeitgenössischen, Insbesondere der Englischen Amerika-Interpretation, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1957; and Philip Merlan, “A Precursor of Tocqueville,” Pacific Historical Review 35, no. 4 (1966): 467-68.