Mr. Quincy also said to me: "I think our present happy state is even more due to circumstances outside our control than to our constitution. Here all a man's material needs are satisfied and furthermore we are born in freedom, knowing no other state. Massachusetts was very, very nearly as free before the Revolution as it is now. We have put the peoples name in place of that of the king. For the rest one finds nothing changed among us."

Note: One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government (when a people is happy enough to be able to do without it, a rare event) is the ripening of individual strength which never fails to follow from it. Each man learns to think and to act for himself without counting on the support of any outside power which, however watchful it be, can never answer all the needs of man in society.

The man thus used to seeking his well-being by his own efforts alone stands the higher in his own esteem as well as in that of others: he grows both stronger and greater of soul. Mr. Quincy gave an example of that state of things when he spoke of the man who sued the town that had let the public road fall into disrepair; the same goes for all the rest. If a man gets the idea of any social improvement whatsoever, a school, a hospital, a road, he does not think of turning to the authorities. He announces his plan, offers to carry it out, calls for the strength of other individuals to aid his efforts, and fights hand to hand against each obstacle.

I admit that in fact he often is less successful than the authorities would have been in his place, but, in the total, the general result of all these individual strivings amounts to much more than any administration could undertake; and moreover the influence of such a state of affairs on the moral and political character of a people would more than make up for all the inadequacies if there were any.

But one must say it again, there are but few peoples who can manage like that without government. Such a state of affairs can only exist at the two extremes of civilization. The savage with nought but his physical needs to satisfy, he too relies only on himself. For the civilized man to be able to do the same, he must have reached that state of society in which knowledge allows a man to see clearly what is useful for him and in which his passions do not prevent him carrying it out. The most important care of a good government should be to get people used little by little to managing without it.

(Tocqueville, p. 38)

20th September 1831. Boston is a pretty town in a picturesque site on several hills in the middle of the waters.

What we have seen of its inhabitants up to now is completely different from those of New York. Society, at least that to which we have been introduced, and I think it the best, is almost exactly like that of the upper classes in Europe. Luxury and refinement prevail there. Almost all the women speak French well, and all the men we have met up till now have been in Europe. Their manners are distinguished and their conversation turns on intellectual subjects; one feels one has escaped from those commercial habits and that money-conscious spirit which makes New York society so vulgar.

In Boston there are already a certain number of people, who, having nothing to do, seek out the pleasures of the mind. There are some people who write. We have already seen three or four very nice libraries, all literary. (I ought also to note that we hardly see anyone except people of distinction. But they are of a different sort from the men of distinction in New York). Besides it would seem that the prejudice against people who do nothing (by and large a useful prejudice) is still strong at Boston. As in all the States that we have been through up to now, at Boston intellectual work is especially directed to religious subjects. Out of twenty-five semi-periodical works or magazines that we found in the Athenaeum there are twelve that are more or less concerned with religious matters.

(Tocqueville, p. 208)

"Have you," I asked him, "a collection of laws regulating municipal government?"
"No," answered Mr. Gray, "we have general principles. All the rest is a matter of custom."

Q. What are those principles and how are they applied in practice?
A. The general principle is that the whole people by its representatives has the right to look after all
local affairs, but it should refrain from exercising that right in everything that relates to the internal
management of the localities, police laws, administration of the revenues, and undertakings which only concern the locality.
The Legislature never does interfere in these matters: the local authorities themselves do all these things through their annually appointed officers. The rules agreed is that as long as the local authority is acting only on its own account and does not injure anybody's rights, it is all-powerful in its sphere. Hence, it has the unlimited right to tax itself to meet the cost of certain undertakings, and its budget is never subject to review.

Q. When a local authority disobeys the law, what happens then?
A. The Prosecutor General cites it as it would an individual before the grand jury of the county in which it is placed. None of its inhabitants can be a juror, and if there is just cause, it is fined. ...

(Tocqueville, p. 40)

Journal entry on morals
M/Morals
Mr. Clay, who apparently is busy making statistical researches in this matter, told Beaumont that in Boston there were about 2,000 prostitutes. (I have great difficulty believing it). They are recruited from the country girls, who, having been seduced, have to escape from their neighborhood and family and find themselves without resources. It seems that the young men of the town frequent them.

But the fact is hidden with extreme care and the evil is limited to that, without ever passing the domestic threshold, or disturbing family life. A man who was not convicted, but suspected, of carrying on an intrigue, would immediately be excluded from society. All doors would be shut against him. Mr. Dwight told me that a venereal disease was a mark of infamy which it was very hard to wash off.

Moreover the police does not interfere in any way with prostitutes. The Americans say that it would legitimate the evil if such a remedy were used against it. Mr. Dwight told us (a thing we had already had occasion to notice in the prison reports) that of all the prisoners those who were most seldom to reform were the women of loose morals.

(Tocqueville, p. 231)

"We Europeans think we can make republics by organizing a great political assembly. But on the contrary of all forms of government a republic is the one that grows most from roots in the whole of society.

Consider this country. The republic is everywhere, in the streets as much as in Congress. If there is something blocking the public way, the neighbors on the spot form a body to discuss it; they appoint a commission and put the trouble to rights by their collective effort sensibly directed. When there is a public ceremony, or a banquet, you will see it is just the same, a meeting, a discussion and an executive power will spring out of it. The idea of an authority pre-existent to those who need it, does to come into anybody's head: the people have something of the republic in the marrow of their bones."

At another time he said to us:

"How can a man who has seen America imagine that one could transplant her political laws to Europe and, especially, do so all at once. Since I have seen this country I cannot believe that M. de Lafayette held his theories in good faith; one could not deceive oneself so clumsily. For my part I get more and more inclined every day to think that constitutions and political laws are nothing in themselves. They are dead creations to which only the manners and political situation of a people can give life."

We asked him: "Is it true that morals are as chaste here as people pretend?"

He answered: "Morals are less chaste among the lower classes than among the enlightened classes; but I think that they are better than among the same classes in Europe. As to the enlightened classes, one could not imagine more perfect morals. I do not think that there has been a single intrigue in Boston society. A woman suspected is lost. But the women are very coquettish; they even are bolder in their coquettishness than our women are, for they know that they cannot beyond a certain point and that nobody will think that they will go beyond it. But I still prefer our European women with all their weaknesses to the icy, egoistic virtue of women of America.

Q. To what to you attribute the incredible control which people get here over their passion?
A. To a thousand causes: to the physical constitution, to the remains (?) of puritanism, to habits of work, to the absence of an idle or corrupted class, such as a garrison for instance, to early marriages, even to the construction of the houses, which makes the secret of an illicit liaison almost impossible to hide.

Q. People say that the young men are not chaste before marriage?
A. No, they are like English too, coarse in their tastes, but like them, they make a complete distinction between the society in which they habitually live and they which serves for their pleasures. They are as two worlds which have nothing in common one with the other. They do not try at all to seduce honest women.

While we were walking with Mr. Lieber, he pointed out a gentleman who was passing near us and said: "That man is the sheriff; he was a colonel in the army. Yesterday we met him society at the house of the Mayor of the town, Mr. Otis (P/index). Well, two months ago I saw him hang two men."

"How could that be?" said we.

"In America the sheriffs perform the functions of executioner."

Q. And there is no shame attached to such functions?
A. By no means. The sheriff executing a criminal is only obeying the law in the same way as the magistrate who condemns him to death; neither hatred nor contempt clings to his profession. It is in this respect for the agents of the law, deriving from the extreme respect in which the law itself is held (because one has made it) that makes the people feel no animosity against police officers, tax collectors and customs officials. All these employments are respected.

Reflection: What gives us most trouble in Europe in men born in a lower station in life, who have received an education which makes them long to get out of it without giving them the means to do so. In America this disadvantage of education in hardly noticeable. Education always provides the means needed to grow rich and does not create any social malaise.

(Tocqueville, p. 42)

Today I was present at a hearing in the Circuit Court. The case was as follows: a ship had been insured; it was lost. The insurer claimed that the ship was not seaworthy. The case was brought before a jury whose verdict established that the ship was in fit state to sail at the time of the agreement. ...

Counsel for the insured - Mr. Fletcher, a very good Boston lawyer - began by answering several complaints that had been made against the jury that had given the verdict in his favor. The jury were capable men. They had given their sustained attention to the case. Then dealing with the point of law, he maintained that if the judges were given discretionary power to annul the different verdicts of the juries, the institution of the jury would become a mere show without power.

He admitted nonetheless that in cases where a jury had been moved by passion, or had made a palpable and clear mistake, there was occasion to quash the verdict. But he maintained that, apart from these extraordinary cases, in all cases where, when a matter was doubtful, the jury had only followed an opinion not shared by the judge, the latter had the right to reshape the verdict. He went on from that to argue the facts.

We could not be there to hear the answer, but during the interval we were talking to one of the judges, and he said to us: "I see that what you have just heard surprises you; you cannot form a clear idea of the limits within which the functions of jury and judge are performed. Such limits are effectively fixed more by practice than by theory. We have in fact the right to quash the jury's verdict for any reason whatsoever, and send the case back before another lot of men. But it is a right that we only use in the last extremity, and when the mistake or the passion could not escape anybody's notice.

"The people attaches great importance to decision by the juries, even in civil matters; it keeps a very jealous eye open to see that nothing is done to undermine the moral authority of the jury. When a judge quashes a verdict, he takes on himself an immense responsibility. For my part I do not think that I have quashed more than ten in my life, and when I see that a jury has come to a decision for reasons which, without convincing me, nonetheless have some weight, I leave the appreciation entirely to them and respect their opinion. 99 appeals in 100 fail. And out of 50 plaintiffs there is perhaps only one who appeals to us. It is in this way that the institution of the jury, which one could make almost illusory by following theories, regains all its power in practice."

(Tocqueville, p. 229)