Democracy in America: In Two Volumes

Conclusion

649 Conclusiona Here I am approaching the end. Until now, while speaking of the future destiny of the United States, I forced myself to divide my subject into various parts in order to study each one of them with more care. Now I would like to bring all of them together in a single point of view. What I will say will be less detailed, but more sure. I will see each object less distinctly; I will take up general facts with more certitude. I will be like a traveler who, while coming outside the walls of a vast city, climbs up the adjacent hill. As he moves away, the men that he has just left disappearfrom his view; their houses blend together; he no longer sees the public squares; he makes out the path of the streets with difficulty; but hiseyesfollowmore easily the contours of the city, and for the first time he grasps its form. It seems to me that I too discover before me the whole future of the English race in the New World. The details of this immense tableau have remained in shadow; but my eyes take in the entire view, and I conceive a clear idea of the whole. The territory occupied or possessed today by the United Statesof America forms about one-twentieth of inhabited lands.b However extensive these limits are, you would be wrong to believe that the Anglo-American race will stay within them forever; it is already spreading very far beyond. There was a time when we too were able to create in the American wila . In the manuscript, the conclusion is found in a jacket with the title: ⫽future of the republican principle in the united states.⫽ b. In an earlier draft, the conclusionbeganherewiththisparagraph:“⫽TheAmerican confederation occupies or possesses a territory whose surface is estimated at 2,257,3741 squaremiles. Thus the UnitedStatesalonehasunderitsdominationaboutone-twentieth of inhabited lands.⫽ “1. ⫽View of the United States, by Darby, p. 57.⫽” 650 conclusion derness a great French nation and balance the destinies of the New World with the English. France formerly possessed in North America a territory nearly as vast as the whole of Europe. The three greatestc rivers of the continent then flowed entirely under our laws. The Indian nations that live from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence to the Mississippi delta heard only our language spoken; all the European settlements spread over this immense space recalled the memory of the homeland; they were Louisbourg, Montmorency, Duquesne, Saint-Louis, Vincennes, La Nouvelle Orléans, all names dear to France and familiar to our ears. But acombinationof circumstancesthatwouldbetoolongtoenumerate1 deprived us of this magnificent heritage. Everyplace where the French were too few and not well established, they disappeared. What was left gathered into a small space and passed under other laws. The four hundred thousand French of Lower Canada today form like the remnant of an ancient people lost amid the waves of a new nation.d Around them the foreign population grows constantly; it is spreading in all directions; it even penetrates the ranks of the former masters of the soil, dominates in their cities, and distorts their c. The manuscript says: “The two greatest . . .” 1. In first place this one: free peoples accustomed to the municipal regime succeed much more easily than others in creating flourishing colonies. The habit of thinking foryourself and governing yourself is indispensable in a new country, where success necessarilydependsinlarge part on the individual efforts of the colonists. d. In a small fragment belonging to one of the appendices of the PenitentiarySystem, Tocqueville explains why according to him the French do not have good colonies (repeated in Écrits et discours politiques, OC, III, 1, pp. 35–40). Among the reasonsadvanced he cites the continental character of France, the love of the Frenchman for his country, the legal habits and bad political education that accustom citizens to the existence of a tutelary power ready to help in the slightest difficulty. In the same way Tocqueville explains how Canada, even better than France, allows the damaging effects of administrative centralization to be studied (L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, OC, II, 1, pp. 286– 87). See in this regard: Jean-Michel Leclerq, “Alexis de TocquevilleinCanada(24August to 2 September 1831),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 22, no. 3 (1968): 356–64; Edgar McInnis, “A Letter from Alexis de Tocqueville on the Canadian Rebellion of 1837,” Canadian Historical Review 19, no. 4...