his
interest in the first place, and as a portion of his right in the
second.

But epochs sometimes occur, in the course of the existence of a nation,
at which the ancient customs of a people are changed, public morality
destroyed, religious belief disturbed, and the spell of tradition
broken, whilst the diffusion of knowledge is yet imperfect, and the
civil rights of the community are ill secured, or confined within very
narrow limits. The country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the
eyes of the citizens; they no longer behold it in the soil which they
inhabit, for that soil is to them a dull inanimate clod; nor in the
usages of their forefathers, which they have been taught to look upon
as a debasing yoke; nor in religion, for of that they doubt; nor in
the laws, which do not originate in their own authority; nor in the
legislator, whom they fear and despise. The country is lost to their
senses, they can neither discover it under its own nor under borrowed
features, and they entrench themselves within the dull precincts of
a narrow egotism. They are emancipated from prejudice without having
acknowledged the empire of reason; they are neither animated by the
instinctive patriotism of monarchical subjects nor by the thinking
patriotism of republican citizens; but they have stopped halfway between
the two, in the midst of confusion and of distress.

In this predicament, to retreat is impossible; for a people cannot
restore the vivacity of its earlier times, any more than a man can
return to the innocence and the bloom of childhood; such things may
be regretted, but they cannot be renewed. The only thing, then, which
remains to be done is to proceed, and to accelerate the union of private
with public interests, since the period of disinterested patriotism is
gone by forever.

I am certainly very far from averring that, in order to obtain this
result, the exercise of political rights should be immediately granted
to all the members of the community. But I maintain that the most
powerful, and perhaps the only, means of interesting men in the welfare
of their country which we still possess is to make them partakers in the
Government. At the present time civic zeal seems to me to be inseparable
from the exercise of political rights; and I hold that the number of
citizens will be found to augment or to decrease in Europe in proportion
as those rights are extended.

In the United States the inhabitants were thrown b