Home, Sweet Home
French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the USA in the 1830s, and found a degree of contentment that he rarely found in Europe.
1831
King William IV 1830-1837
Photo by Daderot, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
Blair House in Mendocino, California. In 1798, US President John Adams told officers of the militia in Massachusetts that the nation’s Constitution was quite unlike the governments of Continental Europe. They sought to bridle human wickedness with punitive regulations, whereas in America the liberal system of government relied on the People to conduct themselves with restraint. De Tocqueville was privileged to witness that for himself. See A Moral and Religious People.
Introduction
Alexis De Tocqueville went to the USA in 1831, to see for himself how the former colony’s experiment in Constitutional liberty, now almost fifty years old, was working out. His own experience in Europe was that no government could hold back the destructive forces of democracy once they had been unleashed, but he found that in America some of those forces were kept under restraints stronger than any law.
IN Europe almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life. To despise the natural bonds and legitimate pleasures of home, is to contract a taste for excesses, a restlessness of heart, and the evil of fluctuating desires. Agitated by the tumultuous passions which frequently disturb his dwelling, the European is galled by the obedience which the legislative powers of the State exact.
But when the American retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the image of order and of peace. There his pleasures are simple and natural, his joys are innocent and calm; and as he finds that an orderly, life is the surest path to happiness, he accustoms himself without difficulty to moderate his opinions as well as his tastes. Whilst the European endeavours to forget his domestic troubles by agitating society, the American derives from his own home that love of order which he afterwards carries with him into public affairs.
From ‘Democracy in America’ Vol. 1 (1835), by Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859).
