al but their commercial
passions; or, to speak more correctly, they introduce the habits they
contract in business into their political life. They love order, without
which affairs do not prosper; and they set an especial value upon a
regular conduct, which is the foundation of a solid business; they
prefer the good sense which amasses large fortunes to that enterprising
spirit which frequently dissipates them; general ideas alarm their
minds, which are accustomed to positive calculations, and they hold
practice in more honor than theory.

It is in America that one learns to understand the influence which
physical prosperity exercises over political actions, and even over
opinions which ought to acknowledge no sway but that of reason; and it
is more especially amongst strangers that this truth is perceptible.
Most of the European emigrants to the New World carry with them that
wild love of independence and of change which our calamities are so apt
to engender. I sometimes met with Europeans in the United States who had
been obliged to leave their own country on account of their political
opinions. They all astonished me by the language they held, but one of
them surprised me more than all the rest. As I was crossing one of the
most remote districts of Pennsylvania I was benighted, and obliged
to beg for hospitality at the gate of a wealthy planter, who was a
Frenchman by birth. He bade me sit down beside his fire, and we began to
talk with that freedom which befits persons who meet in the backwoods,
two thousand leagues from their native country. I was aware that my host
had been a great leveller and an ardent demagogue forty years ago, and
that his name was not unknown to fame. I was, therefore, not a little
surprised to hear him discuss the rights of property as an economist or
a landowner might have done: he spoke of the necessary gradations which
fortune establishes among men, of obedience to established laws, of
the influence of good morals in commonwealths, and of the support which
religious opinions give to order and to freedom; he even went to far
as to quote an evangelical authority in corroboration of one of his
political tenets.

I listened, and marvelled at the feebleness of human reason. A
proposition is true or false, but no art can prove it to be one or the
other, in the midst of the uncertainties of science and the conflicting
lessons of experience, until a new incident disperses the clouds of
doubt; I