We are not just towards the United States. Their civilization, so different from ours, wounds us in various ways, and we turn from them in the ill-humor excited by their real defects, without taking note enough of their eminent qualities. This country, which possesses neither church, nor State, nor army, nor governmental protection; this country, born yesterday, and born under a Puritanic influence; this country, without past history, without monuments, separated from the Middle Ages by the double interval of centuries and beliefs; this rude country of farmers and pioneers, has nothing fitted to please us. It has the exuberant life and the eccentricities of youth; that is, it affords to our mature experience inexhaustible subjects of blame and raillery.

We are so little inclined to admire it, that we seek in its territorial configuration for the essential explanation of its success. Is it so difficult to maintain good order and liberty at home when one has immense deserts to people, when land offers itself without stint to the labor of man?—I do not see, for my part, that land is lacking at Buenos Ayres, at Montevideo, in Mexico, or in any of the pronunciamento republics that cover South America. It seems to me that the Turks have room before them, and that the Middle Ages were not suffering precisely from an excess of population when they presented everywhere the spectacle of anarchy and oppression.

Be sure that the United States, which have something to learn of us, have also something to teach us. Theirs is a great community, which it does not become us to pass by in disdain. The more it differs from our own Europe, the more necessary is impartial attention to comprehend and appreciate it. Especially is it impossible for us to form an enlightened opinion of the present crisis, unless we begin by taking into consideration the surroundings in which it has broken out. The nature of the struggle and its probable issue, the difficulties of the present, and the chances of the future, will be clear to us only on condition of our making a study of the United States. A few details will, therefore, be permitted me.

Among the Yankees, the faults are on the surface. I am not one to justify Lynch law, whatever may be the necessities which exist in the Far West. Riots in the United States are cited which have performed their work of fire and devastation, and which no one has dared treat rigorously afterwards, for fear of incurring disgrace from the sovereign people; but I remember, I fancy, that similar things have been seen in Paris itself. We will not, therefore, lay too great stress on them.

One thing that is not seen in Paris, is, unhappily, remarked in America: the general tendency among women to substitute masculine qualities which scarcely befit them, for the feminine qualities which constitute their grace, their strength, and their dignity; thence results a certain something unpleasant and rude which does no credit to the New World. I by no means admire coarseness, and I do not admit that it is the necessary companion of energy; the tone of the journals and of the debates in Congress is often calculated to excite a just reprobation. There is in the United States a levelling spirit, a jealousy of acquired superiority, and, above all, of inherited distinctions, which proceeds from the worst sentiments of the heart. What is graver still, the tender and gentle side of the human soul, such as shines forth in the Gospel, appears too rarely among this people, where the Gospel, notwithstanding, is in honor, but where the labor of a gigantic growth has developed the active instead of the loving virtues; the Americans are cold even when good, charitable and devout.

They may love money, and often concentrate their thoughts on the means of making it; I will not contest this, although I doubt, on seeing what passes among ourselves, whether we have the right to cast the stone at them; especially as American liberality, as I shall presently show, is of a nature to put our parsimony to shame. As to the bankrupt acts, of which American creditors have many times complained, nothing can justify them; yet here again the rÔle of pedagogue scarcely becomes us. If more than one American railroad company have taken advantage of a crisis to declare without much dishonor, a suspension of payment, it is not proved that these suspensions of payment must be converted into bankruptcy. If more than one town or more than one county make the half yearly payments of their debts with reluctance, the courts always do fair justice on this ill will; there are some countries, Russia, for instance, where the courts do not do as much. If, in fine, at one time, a number of States failed to keep their engagements, and a single one dared proclaim the infamous doctrine of repudiation, all have since paid, except one State of the extreme South, Mississippi. Once more, are we sure of being in a position to reprove such misdeeds; we, whose governments, anterior to '89, made use, without much scruple, of the fall of stocks, and bankruptcies; we, whose debt, on emerging from the Revolution, took the significant name of tiers consolidÉ?

Let us not forget that the population of the United States has increased tenfold since the close of the last century; they have received immigrants annually, by hundreds of thousands, who have not always been the elite of the Old World. Must not this perpetual invasion of strangers promptly transformed into citizens, have necessarily introduced into the decision of public affairs some elements of immorality? I admire the honorable and religious spirit of the Americans which has been able to assimilate and rule to such a degree these great masses of Irish and Germans. Few countries would have endured a like ordeal as well.

Remark that, in spite of all, public order is maintained without paid troops, (Continental Europe will find it hard to credit this.) Tranquillity reigns in the largest cities of the United States; respect for the law is in every heart; great ballotings take place, millions of excited men await the result with trembling; yet, notwithstanding, not an act of violence is committed. American riots—for some there are—are certainly less numerous than ours; and they have the merit of not being transformed into revolutions.

The greater part of the immigrants remain, of course, in the large cities; here they come almost to make the laws, and here, too, noble causes encounter the most opponents. Mr. Lincoln, to cite an example, received only a minority of suffrages in the city of New York, whilst the unanimity of the country suffrages secured him the vote of the State. Contempt of the colored class, that crime of the North, breaks out most of all in the large cities, and particularly among agglomerations of immigrants; none are harsher to free negroes, it must be admitted, than newly-landed Europeans who have come to seek a fortune in America.

As to crimes, they are numerous only in cities; still the criminal records of the United States appear somewhat full when compared with ours. I know how great a part of this must be assigned to the insufficiency of repression; in America, criminals doubtless escape punishment much oftener than among us. Notwithstanding, there is real security; and a child might travel over the entire West without being exposed to the slightest danger.

M. de Tocqueville has said that morals are infinitely more rigid in North America than elsewhere. This is not, it seems to me, a trifling advantage. Whatever may be the depravity of the seaports, where the whole world holds rendezvous, it remains certain that it does not penetrate into the interior of the country. Open the journals and novels of the United States; you will not find a corrupt page in them. You might leave them all on the drawing-room table, without fearing to call a blush to the brow of a woman, or to sully the imagination of a child.

In the heart of the manufacturing States, model villages are found, in which every thing is combined to protect the artisans of both sexes from the perils that await them in other countries. Who has not heard of the town of Lowell, where farmers' daughters go to earn their dowry, where the labor of the factories brings no dissipation in its train, where the workwomen read, write, teach Sunday-schools, where their morality detracts nothing from their liberty and progress? When I have added that the United States have not a single foundling asylum, it seems to me that I have indicated what we are to think at once of their good morals and good sense.

And let not the Americans he represented as a people at once honest and narrow-minded. If they are still far from our level—and this must necessarily be true, in an artistic and literary point of view—we are not, however, at liberty to despise a country which counts such names as Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Cooper, Poe, Washington Irving, Channing, Prescott, Motley, and Bancroft. Note that among these names, men of imagination hold a prominent place, which proves, we may say in passing, that the country where we oftenest hear the exclamation, "Of what use is it?" agrees in finding poetry of some use. And I speak here neither of orators, like Mr. Seward or Mr. Douglas, nor of scholars, like Lieutenant Maury, nor of those who, like Fulton or Morse, have applied science to art: judgment has been passed on all these points.

But the true superiority of Americans is in the universality of common instruction. The Puritans, who came hither with their Bibles, were of necessity zealous founders of schools; the Bible and the school go together. See, therefore, what the schools are in the United States! The State of Massachusetts alone, which does not number a million of souls, devotes five millions yearly to its public instruction. If other States are far from equalling it in academies and higher institutions, all are on a level with it as regards primary schools; a man or woman, therefore, is rarely found outside the class of immigrants, who does not possess a solid knowledge of the elementary sciences, the extent of which would excite our surprise. By the side of the primary school, and to complete its instruction in the religious point of view, the Americans have everywhere opened Sunday-schools, kept gratuitously by volunteer teachers, among whom have figured many men of the highest standing, several of whom have been Presidents of the Confederation. These Sunday-schools, not less than twenty thousand in number, and superintended by one hundred and fifty thousand teachers, count more than a million of pupils, of which ten thousand at least are adults. Calculate the power of such an instrument!

People read enormously in America. There is a library in the meanest cabin of roughly-hewn logs, constructed by the pioneers of the West. These poor log-houses almost always contain a Bible, often journals, instructive books, sometimes even poetry. We in Europe, who fancy ourselves fine amateurs of good verses, would scarcely imagine that copies of Longfellow are scattered among American husbandmen. The political journals have many subscribers; those of the religious papers are no less numerous. I know of a monthly journal designed for children, (the Child's Paper,) of which three hundred thousand copies are printed. This is the intellectual aliment of the country. In the towns, lectures are added to books, journals, and reviews: in all imaginable subjects, this community, which the Government does not charge itself with instructing, (at least, beyond the primary education,) educates and develops itself with indefatigable ardor. Ideas are agitated in the smallest market-town; life is everywhere.

Accustomed to act for themselves, knowing that they cannot count on the administrative patronage of the State, the Americans excel in bringing individual energies into action. There are few functionaries, few soldiers, and few taxes among them. They know nothing, like us, of that malady of public functions, the violence of which increases in proportion as we advance. They know nothing of those enormous imposts under which Europe is bending by degrees—those taxes which almost suppress property by overburdening its transmission; they have not come to the point of finding it very natural to devote one or two millions every year to the expenses of the State, and no theory has been formed to prove to them that of all the expenses of the citizens, this is applied to the best purpose. They have not entered with the Old World into that rivalry of armaments in which each nation, though it become exhausted in the effort, is bound to keep on a level with its neighbors, and in which no one will be stronger in the end when the whole world shall be subjugated. Their ten thousand regulars suffice, and they have their militia for extraordinary occasions. Lastly, their Federal debt is insignificant; and, if the private debts of a few States reach a high figure, they are nowhere of a nature to impose on the tax-payers a large surplus of charges.

All of the great liberties exist in the United States: liberty of the press, liberty of speech, right of assemblage, right of association. Except in the slave States, where the national institutions have been subjected to deplorable mutilations in fact, every citizen can express his opinion and maintain it openly, without meeting any other obstacle than the contrary opinion, which is expressed with equal freedom.

But there is one ground above all where we should acknowledge the superiority of America: I mean, religious liberty. We are still in the beginning of doubts upon the point as to where the interference of the State should cease; in what measure it should govern the belief of the citizens, and its manifestation. These questions, alas, are still propounded among us. And there are countries at our doors, where men shudder at the mere idea that the law may some day cease to decide for each in what manner he is bound to worship God, that the courts may cease to punish those whose conscience turns aside from the path of the nation. Protestant Sweden but lately condemned dissenters to fine and imprisonment; Catholic Spain daily inflicts the severest penalties on those who suffer themselves to profess or to propagate beliefs which are not those of the country—those who sell the Scriptures, and those who read them.

The United States have not only proclaimed and loyally carried out the glorious principle of religious liberty, but have adopted as a corollary another principle, much more contested among us, but which I believe destined also to make the tout of the world: the principle of separation of Church and State. That believers should support their own worship, that religious and political questions should never be blended, that the two provinces should remain distinct, is a simple idea which seems most strange to us to-day. It will make its way like all other true ideas, which begin as paradoxes and end by becoming axioms. Meanwhile, the American Confederation enjoys an advantage which more than one European government, I suspect, would at some moments purchase at a high price: it has not to trouble itself about religious interests, either in its action without or its administration within. If there are conflicts everywhere in the spiritual order, it leaves them to struggle and become resolved in the spiritual order, without needing to trouble itself in the matter. Hence arises for the State a freedom of bearing, a simplicity of conduct, which we, who have to steer adroitly through so many dangers, can hardly comprehend. The American government is sure of never offending any church—it knows none; it does not interfere either to combat or to aid them; it has renounced, once for all, intervention, in the domain of conscience.

The result, doubtless, is, that this domain is not so well ordered as in Europe; the administrative ecclesiastical state has by no means submitted to such regulation. Is that to say that this inconvenience (if it be one) is not largely compensated for by its advantages? Is it nothing to suppress inheritance in religious matters, and to force each soul to question itself as to what it believes? In the United States, adhesion to a church is an individual, spontaneous act, resulting from a voluntary determination. This is so true that four-fifths of the inhabitants of the country do not bear, the title of church members. Although attending worship, although manifesting an interest and zeal in the subject to which we are little accustomed, although assiduous church-goers, and liberal givers, they have not yet felt within themselves a conviction strong and clear enough to make a public profession of faith. Think what we may of such a system, we must avow, at least, that it implies a profound respect for sacred things; nothing can less resemble that indolent and formal assent which we give, in conformity with custom, and without binding ourselves, in earnest, to the religion that prevails among us.

Hence arises something valiant in American convictions. Hence arises also, it may be said, that dispersion of sects, the picture of which is so often drawn for us. I am far from loving the spirit of sectarianism, and I am careful not to present the American churches as the beau ideal in religious matters. The sectarian spirit, the fundamental trait of which is to confound unity with uniformity, to transform divergencies into separations, to refuse to admit into the bosom of the church the element of diversity and of liberty; to exact the signing of a theological formula, and the formal adhesion as a whole to a collection of dogmas and practices, without tolerating the slightest shade of difference—the sectarian spirit, with its narrowness, with its traditions of men, with its exaggeration of little things, with its separate denominations, is certainly not worthy of admiration. I reject it in America as elsewhere, but I think it well to state that the religious disruption produced by it has been much exaggerated. We must greatly abbreviate the formidable list of churches furnished us by travellers. Putting aside those which have no value, either as to influence or numbers, we reduce the numbers of denominations existing in the United States, outside the Roman Catholic church, to five, (and these are too many;) namely: Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Episcopal, and Presbyterian. The remainder is composed of small eccentric congregations which spring up and die, and of which no one takes heed, except a few tourists, who are always willing to note down extraordinary facts.

We will add that the sectarian spirit is now attacked in America, and that the essential unity which binds the members of the five denominations together, in spite of some external differences, is manifesting itself forcibly. Not only does the evangelical alliance prove to the most sceptical that this unity is real, but a fact peculiar to the United States, the great awakening produced by the crisis of 1857, has given evidence of the perfect harmony of convictions. In the innumerable meetings caused to spring up by this awakening from one end of the country to the other, it has been impossible to distinguish Baptists, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists from each other. All have been there, and no one has betrayed by the least shade of dogmatism those self-styled profound divisions about which so much noise is made. I invite those still in doubt to look at the manner in which public worship is established in the West: as soon as a few men have formed a settlement, a missionary comes to visit them; no one inquires about his denomination, for the Bible that he brings is the Bible of all, and the salvation, through Christ, which he proclaims, is the faith of all. It suffices, besides, to see this entire people, so restless, so laborious, leaving its business on Sunday to occupy itself with the thoughts of another life; it suffices to observe the unanimous uprising of the public conscience at the rumor of an attack directed against the Gospel, to perceive that unity subsists beneath lamentable divisions, and that individual conviction creates the most active of all cohesive powers in the heart of human communities; I know of no cement that equals it.

If individual convictions are a strong bond, they are also an inexhaustible source of life. It is easy to assure ourselves of this by a brief survey of the proofs of Christian liberality which are displayed in the United States. Here, there is no legal charity, no aid to be expected from the government, either for the support of churches, or for that of the sick and poor; the voluntary system must suffice for all. And, in fact, it does suffice for all.

What is the first thing in question? To collect thirty million francs annually for the payment of the clergy. The thirty millions are furnished: poor and rich, all give eagerly, and without compulsion. The next thing in question is to provide for the construction of new churches; now, it is necessary to finish not less than three of these daily, for the clearing of the forests advances with rapid strides, and a thousand churches, at least, are built every year. The majority of these churches are doubtless composed of beams laid one upon another, then painted white, or left of the natural color, and surmounted by a bell; they are simple and inexpensive, and, in the infant villages, the streets of which are still blocked up by trees left standing, the place, serving at once for a church and a school, where the people gather round an itinerant preacher, is not decorated with much sumptuousness; yet these new edifices demand annually from twelve to fifteen millions.

Next come the religious societies. In the West, preachers are needed, hardy laborers, who live in privations, traversing vast solitudes on horseback, and journeying continually, without repose, until their strength is exhausted. Eight hundred missionaries or agents are required for the American Board of Missions, for the Presbyterians, the Baptists, and all the other churches. Now, they cannot send them to the four quarters of the globe without providing for their wants. The Bible Society, which prints three hundred thousand Bibles annually, the Religious Tract Society, which publishes every year five millions of tracts, and which, in New York alone, employs a thousand visitors or distributors; the various works, in a word, expend from nine to ten million francs.

Such, then, is the budget of voluntary charity in the United States.^[A] It amounts to fifty or sixty million francs, without counting the very considerable donations destined to public instruction; without counting (and this is immense) the relief of the sick and the poor. You will scarcely find a village in the whole United States that has not its benevolent society, and private benevolence, which is the best, also carries on its work, independently of societies. I know of no country where acts of profuse liberality are more frequent; one man founds a hospital, another an observatory. Asylums are opened for all human unfortunates, for lunatics, the blind, the deaf, orphans, abandoned children.

Was I not right in saying that this is a great people? Whatever may be its vices, we are not at liberty to speak of it with disdain. If the Americans know how to make a fortune, they know, also, how to make a noble use of their fortune; accused with reason, as they are, of being too often preoccupied with questions of profit, we have seen them retrenching much of their luxury since the commercial crisis, yet economizing very little in their charities. The budget of the churches and religious societies remained intact at the very time that embarrassment was everywhere prevailing. I cannot help believing that there are peculiar blessings attached to so many voluntary sacrifices which carry back the mind to the early ages of Christianity. We may be sure that the religion that costs something, brings something also in return.

FOOTNOTES:[A] It seems that I have understated the truth; but I prefer to do so; I wish, above all, to avoid exaggeration.