remains
of it are a few vestiges in the first years of childhood, when the
father exercises, without opposition, that absolute domestic authority,
which the feebleness of his children renders necessary, and which their
interest, as well as his own incontestable superiority, warrants. But
as soon as the young American approaches manhood, the ties of filial
obedience are relaxed day by day: master of his thoughts, he is soon
master of his conduct. In America there is, strictly speaking, no
adolescence: at the close of boyhood the man appears, and begins to
trace out his own path. It would be an error to suppose that this is
preceded by a domestic struggle, in which the son has obtained by a
sort of moral violence the liberty that his father refused him. The
same habits, the same principles which impel the one to assert
his independence, predispose the other to consider the use of that
independence as an incontestable right. The former does not exhibit any
of those rancorous or irregular passions which disturb men long after
they have shaken off an established authority; the latter feels none of
that bitter and angry regret which is apt to survive a bygone power. The
father foresees the limits of his authority long beforehand, and when
the time arrives he surrenders it without a struggle: the son looks
forward to the exact period at which he will be his own master; and he
enters upon his freedom without precipitation and without effort, as a
possession which is his own and which no one seeks to wrest from him. *a

[Footnote a: The Americans, however, have not yet thought fit to strip
the parent, as has been done in France, of one of the chief elements of
parental authority, by depriving him of the power of disposing of his
property at his death. In the United States there are no restrictions on
the powers of a testator. In this respect, as in almost all others, it
is easy to perceive, that if the political legislation of the Americans
is much more democratic than that of the French, the civil legislation
of the latter is infinitely more democratic than that of the former.
This may easily be accounted for. The civil legislation of France
was the work of a man who saw that it was his interest to satisfy the
democratic passions of his contemporaries in all that was not directly
and immediately hostile to his own power. He was willing to allow some
popular principles to regulate the distribution of property and the
government