Democracy In America, vol 1 | Page 3

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A request to all readers: I have tried to catch as many actual errors as I
could, but I am sure others exist. If you notice an error, please let me
know, identifying by chapter and paragraph where the mistake occurs.
David Reed, [email protected] or [email protected]

Democracy In America Alexis De Tocqueville Translator - Henry
Reeve

Book One
Introduction
Special Introduction By Hon. John T. Morgan
In the eleven years that separated the Declaration of the Independence
of the United States from the completion of that act in the ordination of
our written Constitution, the great minds of America were bent upon
the study of the principles of government that were essential to the
preservation of the liberties which had been won at great cost and with
heroic labors and sacrifices. Their studies were conducted in view of
the imperfections that experience had developed in the government of
the Confederation, and they were, therefore, practical and thorough.
When the Constitution was thus perfected and established, a new form
of government was created, but it was neither speculative nor
experimental as to the principles on which it was based. If they were
true principles, as they were, the government founded upon them was
destined to a life and an influence that would continue while the
liberties it was intended to preserve should be valued by the human
family. Those liberties had been wrung from reluctant monarchs in

many contests, in many countries, and were grouped into creeds and
established in ordinances sealed with blood, in many great struggles of
the people. They were not new to the people. They were consecrated
theories, but no government had been previously established for the
great purpose of their preservation and enforcement. That which was
experimental in our plan of government was the question whether
democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not
degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without
saving to the people the power so often found necessary of repressing
or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person of a single
despot.
When, in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville came to study Democracy in
America, the trial of nearly a half-century of the working of our system
had been made, and it had been proved, by many crucial tests, to be a
government of "liberty regulated by law," with such results in the
development of strength, in population, wealth, and military and
commercial power, as no age had ever witnessed.
[See Alexis De Tocqueville]
De Tocqueville had a special inquiry to prosecute, in his visit to
America, in which his generous and faithful soul and the powers of his
great intellect were engaged in the patriotic effort to secure to the
people of France the blessings that Democracy in America had
ordained and established throughout nearly the entire Western
Hemisphere. He had read the story of the FrenchRevolution, much of
which had been recently written in the blood of men and women of
great distinction who were his progenitors; and had witnessed the
agitations and terrors of the Restoration and of the Second Republic,
fruitful in crime and sacrifice, and barren of any good to mankind.
He had just witnessed the spread of republican government through all
the vast continental possessions of Spain in America, and the loss of
her great colonies. He had seen that these revolutions were
accomplished almost without the shedding of blood, and he was filled
with anxiety to learn the causes that had placed republican government,
in France, in such contrast with Democracy in America.
De Tocqueville was scarcely thirty years old when he began his studies
of Democracy in America. It was a bold effort for one who had no
special training in government, or in the study of political economy, but

he had the example of Lafayette in establishing the military foundation
of these liberties, and of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and
Hamilton, all of whom were young men, in building upon the
Independence of the United States that wisest