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CHAPTER V.
HOW DEMOCRACY AFFECTS THE RELATION OF MASTERS AND SERVANTS.
An American who had travelled for a long time in Europe once
said to me, “The English treat their servants with a stiffness and
imperiousness of manner which surprise us; but on the other hand
the French sometimes treat their attendants with a degree of
familiarity or of politeness which we cannot conceive. It looks as
if they were afraid to give orders: the posture of the superior and
the inferior is ill-maintained.”—The remark was a just one, and I
have often made it myself. I have always considered England as
the country in the world where, in our time, the bond of domestic
service is drawn most tightly, and France as the country where it
is most relaxed. Nowhere have I seen masters stand so high or
so low as in these two countries. Between these two extremes the
Americans are to be placed. Such is the fact as it appears upon
the surface of things: to discover the causes of that fact, it is
necessary to search the matter thoroughly.
No communities have ever yet existed in which social conditions have been so equal that there were neither rich nor poor, and consequently neither masters nor servants. Democracy does not prevent the existence of these two classes, but it changes their dispositions, and modifies their mutual relations.
Among aristocratic nations servants form a distinct class, not more variously composed than that of masters. A settled order is soon established; in the former as well as in the latter class a scale is formed, with numerous distinctions or marked gradations of rank, and generations succeed each other thus without any change of position. These two communities are superposed one above the other, always distinct, but regulated by analogous principles. This aristocratic constitution does not exert a less powerful influence on the notions and manners of servants than on those of masters; and,
