150 All Honest Callings are Honorable (1840)

Amongst a democratic people where there is no hereditary wealth, every man works to earn a living, or has worked, or is born of parents who have worked. The notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural, and honest condition of human existence. Not only is labor not dishonorable amongst such a people, but it is held in honor; the prejudice is not against it but in its favor. In the United States a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit or to public business. He would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living. It is for the purpose of escaping this obligation to work that so many rich Americans come to Europe, where they find some scattered remains of aristocratic society amongst which idleness is still held in honor.

Equality of conditions not only ennobles the notion of labor in men’s estimation, but it raises the notion of labor as a source of profit. No profession exists in which men do not work for money, and the remuneration which is common to them all gives them all an air of resemblance. This serves to explain the opinions which the Americans entertain with respect to different callings. In America no one is degraded because he works, for everyone about him works also. Nor is anyone humiliated by the notion of receiving pay, for the President of the United States also works for pay. He is paid for commanding, other men for obeying orders. In the United States professions are more or less laborious, more or less profitable. But they are never either high or low. Every honest calling is honorable.

The United States of America have only been emancipated for half a century from the state of colonial dependence in which they stood to Great Britain. The number of large fortunes there is small and capital is still scarce. Yet no people in the world has made such rapid progress in trade and manufactures as the Americans. They constitute at the present day the second maritime nation in the world and although their manufactures have to struggle with almost insurmountable natural impediments, they are not prevented from making great and daily advances. In the United States the greatest undertakings and speculations are executed without difficulty because the whole population is engaged in productive industry and because the poorest as well as the most opulent members of the commonwealth are ready to combine their efforts for these purposes. The consequence is that a stranger is constantly amazed by the immense public works executed by a nation which contains, so to speak, no rich men. The Americans arrived but as yesterday on the territory which they inhabit and they have already changed the whole order of nature for their own advantage. They have joined the Hudson to the Mississippi and made the Atlantic Ocean communicate with the Gulf of Mexico across a continent of more than five hundred leagues in extent which separates the two seas. The longest railroads which have been constructed up to the present time are in America. But what most astonishes me in the United States is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings as the innumerable multitude of small ones. Almost all the farmers of the United States combine some trade with agriculture; most of them make agriculture itself a trade. It seldom happens that an American farmer settles for good upon the land which he occupies. Especially in the districts of the far West he brings land into tillage in order to sell it again, and not to farm it. He builds a farmhouse on the speculation that, as the state of the country will soon be changed by the increase of population, a good price will be gotten for it. Every year a swarm of the inhabitants of the North arrive in the Southern States and settle in the parts where the cotton plant and the sugar cane grow. These men cultivate the soil in order to make it produce in a few years enough to enrich them and they already look forward to the time when they may return home to enjoy the competency thus acquired. Thus the Americans carry their business-like qualities into agriculture and their trading passions are displayed in that as in their other pursuits.

The Americans make immense progress in productive industry because they all devote themselves to it at once, and for this same reason they are exposed to very unexpected and formidable embarrassments. As they are all engaged in commerce, their commercial affairs are affected by such various and complex causes that it is impossible to foresee what difficulties may arise. As they are all more or less engaged in productive industry, at the least shock given to business all private fortunes are put in jeopardy at the same time and the State is shaken. I believe that the return of these commercial panics is an endemic disease of the democratic nations of our age. It may be rendered less dangerous but it cannot be cured because it does not originate in accidental circumstances, but in the temperament of these nations.

Source: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1875), II, 137-143. https://archive.org/details/toldcontemporari03hartrich/page/524/mode/2up