PREFACE BY THE EDITOR
One of the most acute observers of American Society—M. de Tocqueville—maintains that it is only a development in advance of a condition to which Society everywhere is tending, and that through the impulse of irresistible laws. The effects of this tendency is an equalizing of the relations of Society, and is a necessary outcome of the progress of civilization. He allows indeed that this tendency admits of being directed; and he considers it to be the duty of statesmen so to guide its force as to prevent those shocks to Society which inevitably result from leaving it to be directed by the ignorant or the vicious. The policy of our own wisest statesmen for the last forty years may also be said to be a consequence of this philosophic conviction.
Our interest in the manifestations of the tendency of American Society is increased by the consideration that it is our own transplanted unto new soil, without those checks to its development which cling to a Society that may be said to have grown in the soil. To change the figure:—Society here may be compared to a machine of very complicated mechanism, a great many of whose parts seem to answer no other purpose than to act as drags upon its movements, while they are so intimately related to its essential principles that it is very difficult to estimate what might be the result of their removal. Society in America
