And what is so extraordinary is that, at the very time when the inequality of fortunes is extending and an aristocracy is springing into being, the great levelling movement outside obliges the industrial or landed proprietors to hide their luxury, to dissimulate their wealth, for fear of being knocked on the head by their neighbours. These refuse to recognize the executive power; they dismiss the local authorities whom they have chosen at will, and elect others in their stead. This in no way disturbs order; practical democracy is observed, while the laws laid down by the same democracy in theory are laughed at. The family spirit scarcely exists; so soon as the child is fit to work, he has to fly with his own wings, like the newly-fledged bird. Out of these generations emancipated in a premature orphanage, and out of the emigrants arriving from Europe, are formed nomadic companies which clear the land, dig canals, and carry their trade in every direction without becoming attached to the soil; they run up houses in the desert in which the transient owner will live scarce a few days. A cold and hard egotism reigns in the towns; piastres and dollars, bank-notes and silver, the rise and fall of stocks, these form the sole subject of conversation: one imagines one's self on 'Change or in the counting-house of a large shop. The newspapers, huge in dimensions, are filled with business articles or scurrilous gossip. Could the Americans be unconsciously submitting to the law of a climate in which vegetable nature seems to have benefited at the expense of living nature, a law combated by some distinguished minds, and yet not put entirely out of court by its refutation? It might be worth while to inquire whether the American has not been too soon used up in philosophic liberty, as the Russian has been in civilized despotism. To sum up, the United States give the idea of a colony, not of a parent country; they have no past, their manners owe their existence to the laws. These citizens of the New World took rank among the nations at the moment when political ideas were entering upon an upward phase: this explains why they change with such extraordinary rapidity. A permanent form of society seems to become impracticable in their case, thanks, on the one hand, to the extreme weariness of individuals; on the other, to the impossibility of remaining in one spot, the necessity for movement, by which they are dominated: for one is never very firmly fixed where the household gods are wandering gods. Placed on the ocean road, at the head of progressive opinions as new as his country, the American seems to have received from Columbus a mission to discover fresh worlds rather than to create them. *