Bellows George New York 1911

New York 1911, George Bellows

Tocqueville's object (he said) was 'to abate the claims of the aristocrats' and 'prepare them for an irresistible future' - which he saw to be emerging in America. 'The gradual development of the principle of equality is a Providential fact,' and Tocqueville traces the implication in American institutions.

Tocqueville grasped the moral content of America. He saw, for the first time, Christianity intimately wedded to the freedom and market system of the secular world. 'In Europe I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other, but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country. Religion must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of the country.' Most Americans held religion 'to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.' Religion underpinned republican government.

The Rev. Louis Dwight said to Tocqueville that the Americans were the best-educated people in the world: 'Everyone takes it for granted that education will be moral and religious. There would be a general outcry, a kind of popular uprising, against anyone who tried to introduce a contrary system, and everyone would say it would be better to have no education at all than an education of that sort. It is from the Bible that all our children learn to read.'

Since the colonial period, America had rejoiced in the highest rate of adult literacy in the world.

It was remarkable the essential moralism and religiosity of American secular life.

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