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CHAPTER XI.
PECULIAR EFFECTS OF THE LOVE OF PHYSICAL GRATIFICATIONS IN
DEMOCRATIC AGES.
It may be supposed, from what has just been said, that the love
of physical gratifications must constantly urge the Americans to
irregularities in morals, disturb the peace of families, and threaten
the security of society at large. Such is not the case: the passion
for physical gratifications produces in democracies effects very
different from those which it occasions in aristocratic nations.
It sometimes happens that, wearied with public affairs and sated with opulence, amid the ruins of religious belief and the decline of the State, the heart of an aristocracy may by degrees be seduced to the pursuit of sensual enjoyments only. At other times the power of the monarch or the weakness of the people, without stripping the nobility of their fortune, compels them to stand aloof from the administration of affairs, and while the road to mighty enterprise is closed, abandons them to the inquietude of their own desires; they then fall back heavily upon themselves, and seek in the pleasures of the body oblivion of their former greatness.
When the members of an aristocratic body are thus exclusively devoted to the pursuit of physical gratifications, they commonly concentrate in that direction all the energy which they derive from their long experience of power. Such men are not satisfied with the pursuit of comfort; they require sumptuous depravity and splendid corruption. The worship they pay the senses is a gorgeous one; and they seem to vie with each other in the art of degrading their own natures. The stronger, the more famous, and the more free an aristocracy has been, the more depraved will it then become; and however brilliant may have been the lustre of its virtues, I dare predict that they will always be surpassed by the splendour of its vices.
