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 ...

托克维尔(1805-1859)，法国历史学家、社会学家。主要代表作有《论美国的民主》第一卷(1835)、《论美国的民主》第二卷(1840年)、《旧制度与大革命〉。《论美国的民主》使他享有世界声誉。其上卷的第一部分讲述美国的政治制度，第二部分对美国的民主进行社会学的分析。下卷分四个部分，以美国为背景发挥其政治哲学和政治社会学思想。出身贵族世家，经历过五个“朝代”(法兰西第一帝国、波旁复辟王朝、七月王朝、法兰西第二共和国、法兰西第二帝国)。前期热心于政治，1838年出任众议院议员，1848年二月革命后参与制订第二共和国宪法，1849年一度出任外交部长。1851年路易·波拿巴建立第二帝国，托克维尔对政治日益失望，从政治舞台上逐渐淡出，并逐渐认识到自己“擅长思想胜于行动”。《托克维尔回忆录》是一本关于1848年法国二月革命的回忆录，对其间许多人物(比如路易·菲力浦、路易·拿破仑、阿道夫·梯也尔、路易·勃朗等)的评述十分尖锐，用语几近刻薄。可能由于这个原因，该书在作者死后34年(1893年)才首次出版。