Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885Various
General
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
Furthermore, American society is not in danger from revolution. Here,
again, I do not mean that the United States are exempt from the
operation of every one of the causes—such a cause as the division
between rich and poor, for instance—which may lead to revolution. But I
mean that comparatively with the old countries of Europe they are free
from the danger of revolution; and I believe that the good elements in
them will make a way for them to escape out of what they really have
of this danger also, to escape in the future as well as now—the future
for which some observers announce this danger as so certain and so
formidable. Lord Macaulay predicted that the United States must come
in time to just the same state of things which we witness in England;
that the cities would fill up and the lands become occupied, and then,
he said, the division between rich and poor would establish itself on
the same scale as with us, and be just as embarrassing. He forgot that
the United States are without what certainly fixes and accentuates the
division between rich and poor—the distinction of classes. Not only
have they not the distinction between noble and bourgeois, between
aristocracy and middle class; they have not even the distinction
between bourgeois and peasant or artisan, between middle and lower
class. They have nothing to create it and compel their recognition of
it. Their domestic service is done for them by Irish, Germans, Swedes,
Negroes. Outside domestic service, within the range of conditions which
an American may in fact be called upon to traverse, he passes easily
from one sort of occupation to another, from poverty to riches, and
from riches to poverty. No one of his possible occupations appears
degrading to him or makes him lose caste; and poverty itself appears to
him as inconvenient and disagreeable rather than as humiliating. When
the immigrant from Europe strikes root in his new home, he becomes as
the American.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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