verdict the death of a prisoner for want of food.[109] Debtors are not obliged here, to sleep edgeways, for want of the breadth of their backs on a prison floor.[110] Nor has any poor boy been imprisoned for a month in Bridewell for selling religious tracts without a hawker’s license.[111] The equality that consists in universal suffrage; the absence of privileged orders, and unrestrained industry, is the enviable felicity of the American nation. The people are, themselves, the lords of the soil, and acknowledge no superiors who can dictate to them in the election of other representatives than those of the community. There are no boroughs where the members monopolize the business of the place, or who chase away the stranger as if he were an enemy; or who can exact town taxes contrary to the will of their fellow citizens. Public accounts are not kept from public inspection. There is no separate borough representation to be hired over, or owned by the partisans of a ministry. The clergy are here exalted to the dignity of citizens, whose interests are identified with those of the people. Their condition, relatively to that of their adherents, is in every respect similar to the situation of dissenting clergymen in Britain. America elevates {177} no spiritual Lords, on wool-sacks, in her senate, to oppose the introduction of parochial schools. Nor is there any political body, which courts an alliance with the clergy. I have never heard of any parson who acts as a Justice of the Peace, or who intermixes his addresses to _the Great Object of religious worship_, with the eulogy of the Holy Alliance. The free scope given to industry is highly conducive to national prosperity. Every man is allowed to exert his talents, in the pursuit of any honest scheme, and in any part of the country, without being prevented by intolerant restrictions or internal taxes. His profits are his own; and he has no dread of their being wrested from him by the idle drones that infest other countries. Hence it is, that the United States abound in enterprizing people, who remove, without hesitation, to any part where they can suppose any advantage may arise, and adopt projects that would neither be tolerated nor thought of by people fettered by the trammels of impolicy. The first failure of a scheme is not here contemplated as finally ruinous, as a backward step is much more easily retrieved than in countries more thickly peopled, and where the avenues of commerce are narrowed by artificial obstructions. There are no branches of manufactures or professions of any kind, restricted to those who pay licenses to the government. The farming interest has no monopoly against the manufacturing: nor has the manufacturing any positive prohibition against the farmer. Local attachments are much weakened by the open prospects of an extensive country, by the abolition of primogenitureship, and by the introduction of laws that promote family justice.