With these impressions and opinions, I arrived from South America in the America which symbolises in the eyes of the world the practical spirit. And in this America, to my no small surprise, I found the opposite policy to this in actual operation, with all the effects which I imagined must follow it; in particular, the growing difficulty of making democratic institutions work smoothly, with an electoral body so swollen, so enormous, and so varied and heterogeneous. I often had occasion, when speaking or writing in the United States, to remember that the cosmopolitan electoral body which is the base of the democracy of the United States recalls that of Rome, where the freedmen—the immigrants of the time—became citizens, and were inscribed in the electoral lists, whatever their national origin, and even if they were all foreigners, barbarians some of them, uncivilised the rest. Nevertheless, there is between the United States and Ancient Rome one essential difference; and that is, that in the Roman Republic, the electoral operations were concentrated in the capital, so that the number of persons who took part in them, the really active electoral body, was extremely small; while in the United States, the electors are numbered by millions, and are scattered over a continent. Do not most of the difficulties and inconveniences of which I have heard America complain in connection with its internal politics arise from the enormous size of the electoral body and from its heterogeneity? For both of these are unique phenomena in the history of the world, as until now every democracy has governed small, and often the tiniest of, states. So this experiment, which America is making, without being compelled to do so by any historical necessity, is a new and bold one, the final result of which it is difficult to foretell. As a matter of fact, the ancient national oligarchies, which governed North America, for so many years after it had gained its independence, did not open the doors of the constitution to the immigrant multitudes who threatened, if admitted, to swamp them. It would have been easy to keep at least the first Europe-born generation out of politics, because—as I have already said—the greater number of immigrants arrive in America without the vaguest idea, much less ambition, of obtaining what, in a democracy, are the political rights of a citizen, and only want big salaries.