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CHAPTER III.
INDIVIDUALISM STRONGER AT THE CLOSE OF A DEMOCRATIC
REVOLUTION THAN AT OTHER PERIODS.
The period when the construction of democratic society upon the
ruins of an aristocracy has just been completed, is especially that
at which this separation of men from one another, and the egotism
resulting from it, most forcibly strike the observation. Democratic
communities not only contain a large number of independent
citizens, but they are constantly filled with men who, having entered
but yesterday upon their independent condition, are intoxicated
with their new power. They entertain a presumptuous confidence
in their strength, and as they do not suppose that they can
henceforward ever have occasion to claim the assistance of their
fellow-creatures, they do not scruple to show that they care for nobody
but themselves.
An aristocracy seldom yields without a protracted struggle, in the course of which implacable animosities are kindled between the different classes of society. These passions survive the victory, and traces of them may be observed in the midst of the democratic confusion which ensues.
Those members of the community who were at the top of the late gradations of rank cannot immediately forget their former greatness; they will long regard themselves as aliens in the midst of the newly composed society. They look upon all those whom this state of society has made their equals as oppressors, whose destiny can excite no sympathy; they have lost sight of their former equals, and feel no longer bound by a common interest to their fate: each of them, standing aloof, thinks that he is reduced to care for himself alone. Those, on the contrary, who were formerly at the foot of the social scale, and who have been
