DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said, at the time of its discovery by Europeans, to have form. ed one great desert. The Indians occupied, without possess- ing it. It is by agricultural labor that man appropriates the soil, and the early inhabitants of North America lived by the produce of the chase. Their implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more, perhaps, their savage virtues, consigned them to inevitable destruction. The ruin of these nations began from the day when Europeans landed on their shores: it has proceeded ever since, and we are now seeing the completion of it. They seemed to have been placed by Providence-amid the riches of the New World to enjoy them for a season, and then surrender them. Those coasts, so admirably adapted for commerce and industry; those wide and deep rivers; that inexhaustible valley of the 'Mississippi; the whole continent, in short, seemed prepared to be the abode of a great nation, yet unborn. In that land the great experiment was to be made by civilized man, of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis; and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past. CHAPTER II. ORIGIN OF THE ANGLO-AMERICANS AND ITS IMPORTANCE, lit RELATION TO THEIR FUTURE CONDITION. Utility of knowing the Origin of Nations in order to understand their social Condition and their Laws.?America the only Country in which the Starting-Point of a great People has been clearly observable.?In what respects all who emigrated to British America were similar.?In what they differed.?Remark applicable to all the Europeans who established themselves on the shores ...