VIRGINIA

The United States has the first, England and more especially France, the third. Causes of malaise for these two powers; but it does not always depend on the peoples to arrive at the first state, and often, by wishing for it, they fall into the second.

This should take a fairly high place in the collection of word puzzles.

(Tocqueville, p. 248)

- Trade
How can one doubt that the Union will one day, and that day is drawing near, become the leading maritime power in the world? By herself alone, and for herself alone, she is already trading on a huge scale, and is destined to do so on a much greater scale still; moreover it is to enrich her that Spanish America is getting civilized.

It is easy to foresee that all the imports and exports of the new republics will be carried in American ships. One is all the more convinced of that when one reflects that the South of the United States has no trade. It is the North of the Union that undertakes the carriage of the produce of the South. And yet the race is English in the South as in the North. Can one believe that the Spaniards in the tropics and on the equator would ever have more industries than the English on the thirty-fifth parallel?

England will be the only rival of the United States as supplier of Spanish America (when the latter feels the needs of a civilized people). But the Americans will easily win, because they are nearer and sail their ships more cheaply.

This commercial movement will for America still further delay the moment of plenitude, which is so much to be feared, and will put off the century of revolutions.

(Tocqueville, p. 249)

- Mr. Joel Roberts Poinsett
I am convinced, Mr. Poinsett said to me today (16th January 1832), that even nowadays in America the Lutherans would burn the Calvinists, the latter the Unitarians and the Catholics all the others, if the civil power was given to any of those persuasions. There is always deep hatred between them.

(Tocqueville, p. 271)

[written] Jan. 16, 1831

We therefore left Charleston on our right and, passing successively across the States of Mississip[p]i, Alabama, Georgia, and the two Carolinas, we finally reached Norfolk yesterday. This morning we took a boat on the Chesapeake[e] to reach Washington, where we will arrive tomorrow and stay three weeks. But two days are needed to reach New York from there.

The journey from New Orleans to Norfolk was, as I said before, very interesting but very tough, several sections that we crossed being savage still.

Yet, and here's the odd thing about it, for five or six years I have not been as well as during the two months just elapsed. I am, at the moment, the strength of the expedition; but I am expecting Beaumont
to resume his advantage when we get back to France.

If ever I write a book of medicine, I undertake that it will not resemble those published every day. I shall argue and prove that in order to be well one must first dine on corn and pig, eat little, much, not at all, as opportunity offers; bed on the floor and sleep with one's clothes on; pass in a week from ice to heat and from heat to ice; put one's shoulder to the wheel or wake up in a ditch; above all not think, that's the main point; bury oneself in nature as much as possible; resemble, if one can, an oyster.

I think it was Rousseau who said that the man who thought was a man depraved. In his place I should have said that the man who thinks is an animal who does not digest. Let's not think, then, dear sister, trust me; or if we have to, let it be only about our dinner (future, of course).

I leave you to reflect on my last phrase, which is very profound, and I abandon you to put myself to bed. ...

(Pierson, p. 636)

* Pierson adds the following excerpt from Beaumont's letter to his father as a footnote:
"Here I am at the end of all my great American journeys and, dieu merci, I am as well as when I set out. Our plan was to stop at Charleston, but on the way toward that city we were held back en route by several accidents like overturned bridges, impassable roads and smashed carriages, so that our advance was slowed down, and we calculated that if we delayed any longer in getting to Washington we wouldn't reach it soon enough to listen to the interesting discussions just now taking place in Congress. ... "

(Pierson, p. 637)