PREFACE. WRITTEN IN ENGLISH BY THE AUTHOR. The United States are about to commence the second century of their life as an independent commonwealth and as a republic. It is a curious fact that, at the same time, they evidently are entering upon a new phase of their political development. The era of buoyant youth is coming to a close: ripe and sober manhood is to take its place. I take it to be a good omen for the success of this work that just at this moment an English translation of it is to be offered to the American public. As all the sources I have been able to use, are, without a single exception, printed books well known to every student of American politics, no new facts are to be found in the work, and I even cannot claim that new views of importance have presented themselves to my mind. Yet I trust that it will not be considered as lost labor. There are, among the authors who have written on the constitutional law or the politics of the United States, more than one, whom, in all candidness, I do not pretend to equal in many very important respects. But I venture to assert that among all the works, covering about as large a ground as mine, there is not one to be found which has been written with as much soberness of mind. And it is not strange that it should be so. Among foreign authors there is but one whom, to some extent, I can consider as a predecessor. Tocqueville's work will always be read, not only with interest, but also with great profit. Yet even at the time it appeared, it failed to 230834 do justice to its subject. The great French scholar was a "doctrinarian." In his writings on French subjects the weakness of his political reasoning, consequent upon this unhistorical and unpolitical turn of his mind, is to a great extent made up by the vastness and thoroughness of his positive knowledge. In his work on "Democracy in America," on the contrary, it makes itself strongly felt on every page, because he lacks the necessary positive knowledge. As to my American predecessors I have one great advantage over all of them: I am a foreigner. This I consider to be an advantage, though, during my sojourn in the United States (1867-1872), I had frequently to hear: "You are a foreigner, you cannot fully understand our system of government." I, of course, do not deny that there is a certain something in the character of every nation which a foreigner will never be able to completely understand, because it cannot be grasped by the judgment; it can only be felt, and in order to feel it, one's flesh and blood must be filled with the national sentiment. But, however often my shot may have missed the mark in consequence of this lack of the national sentiment, though it might greatly impair the value of the work for other foreigners, it cannot possibly be fatal to it with regard to American readers, for they have the necessary corrective in their American feeling. On the other hand, it is much easier for a foreigner to guard his judgment from being betrayed by his feeling. He has only to ward off his prejudices. This, though no easy work, can be done to a high degree, while it is impossible to strip one's self of one's national sentiment, because this is a constitutive part of the individuality. The attempt to do it would inevitably lead from Scylla into Charybdis; it would result in an effort to do the work, so to say, as a reasoning machine without any feeling whatever. There are historians and political philosophers who pretend that this is the only correct way to treat historical and political problems. They may be good chroniclers and quite fit statesmen for some commonwealth in the clouds, but they will never be able to write a history or to make us understand the nature and the working of the government of an actual state. There is nothing in the life of a nation into which the nation's way of feeling does not enter as a constructive element of great force; and in order to understand a nation's way of feeling one has to feel with it. Several European critics of my work have been of opinion that my judgment of the American system of government and its working is an almost unqualified condemnation, and I do not doubt that some American readers will receive the same impression and laugh at my claiming to "feel" with the people of the United States. Yet the claim is well-founded. Icame to the United States as an emigrant, and one of the first things I did was to have my declaration of intending to become a citizen registered in the city hall of New York. I, in fact, felt with the people of the United States, before I commenced to study them and their institutions. For a considerable time, however, this feeling was partly of a kind to render my studies pretty fruitless. On the continent of Europe the United States are, even among the best educated classes, in a really astonishing degree, a terra incognita. Just on this account they have always been used with predilection as an illustration in the service of party ends. Their fate in this quality has been. pretty varied. In quick succession and more than once they have run through all the phases from the idol to a bugbear. I was inclined to look upon them in the light of the former, for Laboulaye was the butler who had filled my knapsack of expectations. So I was rather unprepared for Tammany Hall, the first institution I got somewhat better acquainted with. For a long time I was fairly bewildered by the throng of most opposite impressions, and even after I had read and studied many a good book, I searched in vain for a thread to lead me safely through this labyrinth. Only very gradually I succeeded in finding out what, up to this day, seems to me the one reason why all my efforts thus far had resembled so much a wild-goose chase. Without being fully conscious of it, I expected to find in everything something particular, quite different from what was known to me either by study or by personal observation; and this all the books I had read had failed to distinctly show me as a mistake which could not but be fatal to the success of my studies. That I at last became aware of the mistake, is the explanation of the claim raised before that I have studied. and written with more soberness of mind than any of my predecessors. And I beg leave to add that, after this veil had dropped from my eyes, my interest in the subject assumed quite a new character; from that moment it was decided that I had found the principal task of my life as a student and as a writer, for it is the work of a lifetime I have undertaken. Now it had fully come to what I would call my immediate consciousness that here was only an act of the one great drama, the history of western civilization; and that to express it strongly in order to be distinctthe players in it, the principal ones as well as the great mass, were neither demi-gods nor devils, but men, struggling, under many shortcomings, but with great energy, their way onward, not with startling leaps, but advancing step by step, just as all the rest of the great nations of the earth have had to do. Nothing was left of either the misty vagueness of the grand and wonderful fairy-tale or of the prickling atmosphere of the strange puzzle; I felt myself standing in the fresh and clear air of stern historical truth. The reflecting reader will find in this "confession of faith" the clue for the "method" of my studies, so far as he need care about it. Whether my hope, based on its |