Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume I.Scott, Walter
History
Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume I.
Scott, Walter
France -- History -- 1789-1815; Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821
powerful neighbours from swallowing up their little community in the
rage of conquest.
America must certainly be accounted a successful attempt to establish a
republic on a much larger scale than those we have mentioned. But that
great and flourishing empire consists, it must be remembered, of a
federative union of many states, which, though extensive in territory,
are comparatively thin in occupants. There do not exist in America, in
the same degree, those circumstances of a dense and degraded population,
which occasion in the old nations of Europe such an infinite difference
of knowledge and ignorance, of wealth the most exuberant, and indigence
the most horrible. No man in America need be poor, if he has a hatchet
and arms to use it. The wilderness is to him the same retreat which the
world afforded to our first parents. His family, if he has one, is
wealth; if he is unencumbered with wife or children, he is the more
easily provided for. A man who wishes to make a large fortune, may be
disappointed in America; but he who seeks, with a moderate degree of
industry, only the wants which nature demands, is certain to find them.
An immense proportion of the population of the United States consists of
agriculturists, who live upon their own property, which is generally of
moderate extent, and cultivate it by their own labour. Such a situation
is peculiarly favourable to republican habits. The man who feels himself
really independent,--and so must each American who can use a spade or an
axe,--will please himself with the mere exertion of his freewill, and
form a strong contrast to the hollowing, bawling, blustering rabble of a
city, where a dram of liquor, or the money to buy a meal, is sure to
purchase the acclamation of thousands, whose situation in the scale of
society is too low to permit their thinking of their political right as
a thing more valuable than to be bartered against the degree of
advantage they may procure, or of a license which they may exercise, by
placing it at the disposal of one candidate or another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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