HKB
large fortunes, to that enterprising spirit which frequently dissipates them; general ideas alarm their minds, which are accustomed to positive calculations; and they hold practice in more honor than theory.
It is in America that one learns to understand the influence which physical prosperity exercises over political actions, and even over opinions which ought to acknowledge no sway but that of reason; and it is more especially among strangers that this truth is perceptible. Most of the European emigrants to the New World carry with them that wild love of independence and of change, which our calamities are apt to engender. I sometimes met with Europeans, in the United States, who had been obliged to leave their own country on account of their political opinions. They all astonished me by the language they held; but one of them surprised me more than all the rest. As I was crossing one of the most remote districts of Pennsylvania, I was benighted, and obliged to beg for hospitality at the gate of a wealthy planter, who was a Frenchman by birth. He bade me sit down beside his fire, and we began to talk with that freedom which befits persons who meet in the backwoods, two thousand leagues from their native country. I was aware that my host had been a great leveller and an ardent demagogue, forty years ago, and that his name was not unknown to fame. I was therefore not a little surprised to hear him discuss the rights of property as an economist or a landowner might have done: he spoke of the necessary gradations which fortune established among men, of obedience to established laws, of the influence of good morals in commonwealths, and of the support which religious opinions give to order and to freedom; he even went so far as to quote an evangelical authority in corroboration of one of his political tenets.
I listened, and marvelled at the feebleness of human reason. A proposition is true or false, but no art can prove it to be one or the other, in the midst of the uncertainties of science and the conflicting lessons of experience, until a new incident disperses the clouds of doubt; I was poor, I become rich; and I am not to expect that prosperity will act upon my conduct, and leave my judgment free: my opinions change with my fortune, and the happy circumstances which I turn to my advantage, furnish me with that decisive argument which was before wanting.
[The sentence beginning "I was poor, I become rich," &c, struck the editor, on perusal, as obscure, if not contradictory. The original seems more explicit, and justice to the author seems to require that it should be presented to the reader. "J'étais pauvre, me voici riche; du moins, si le bien-être, en agissant sur ma conduite, laissait mon jugement en liberté! Mais non, mes opinions sont en effet changées avec ma fortune, et, dans l'événement heureux dont je profite, j'ai réellement découvert la raison déterminante qui jusque-là m'avait manqué."--American Editor.]
The influence of prosperity acts still more freely upon the American than upon strangers. The American has always seen the connexion of public order and public prosperity, intimately united as they are, go on before his eyes; he does not conceive that one can subsist without the other; he has therefore nothing to forget: nor has he, like so many Europeans, to unlearn the lessons of his early education.
INFLUENCE OF THE LAWS UPON THE MAINTENANCE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC IN THE UNITED STATES.
Three principal Causes of the Maintenance of the democratic Republic.--Federal Constitutions.--Municipal Institutions.--Judicial Power.