supply the means of agitation, because the physical
position of the country opens so wide a field to industry that man is
able to accomplish the most surprising undertakings with his own native
resources. Nevertheless, ambitious men are interested in the creation of
parties, since it is difficult to eject a person from authority upon the
mere ground that his place is coveted by others. The skill of the actors
in the political world lies therefore in the art of creating parties. A
political aspirant in the United States begins by discriminating his own
interest, and by calculating upon those interests which may be collected
around and amalgamated with it; he then contrives to discover some
doctrine or some principle which may suit the purposes of this new
association, and which he adopts in order to bring forward his party and
to secure his popularity; just as the imprimatur of a King was in former
days incorporated with the volume which it authorized, but to which it
nowise belonged. When these preliminaries are terminated, the new party
is ushered into the political world.

All the domestic controversies of the Americans at first appear to a
stranger to be so incomprehensible and so puerile that he is at a
loss whether to pity a people which takes such arrant trifles in good
earnest, or to envy the happiness which enables it to discuss them. But
when he comes to study the secret propensities which govern the factions
of America, he easily perceives that the greater part of them are more
or less connected with one or the other of those two divisions which
have always existed in free communities. The deeper we penetrate into
the working of these parties, the more do we perceive that the object
of the one is to limit, and that of the other to extend, the popular
authority. I do not assert that the ostensible end, or even that the
secret aim, of American parties is to promote the rule of aristocracy or
democracy in the country; but I affirm that aristocratic or democratic
passions may easily be detected at the bottom of all parties, and that,
although they escape a superficial observation, they are the main point
and the very soul of every faction in the United States.

To quote a recent example. When the President attacked the Bank, the
country was excited and parties were formed; the well-informed classes
rallied round the Bank, the common people round the President. But it
must not be imagined that the people had formed