The United States constitute a society which moves under the impulse and by the guidance of instinct, rather than according to any premeditated plan; it does know itself. It rejects the tyranny of a past, which is exclusively military in its character, and yet is deeply imbued with the sentiment of order. It has been nurtured in the hatred of the old political systems of Europe; but a feeling of the necessity of self-restraint runs through its veins. It is divided between its instinctive perceptions of the future and its aversion to the past; between its thirst after freedom, and its hunger for social order; between its religious veneration of experience, and its horror of the violence of past ages.
Michel Chevalier, Society, Manners and Politics in the United States Being a Series of Letters on North America (translated from the Third Edition, 1839), p. 333.
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Michel Chevalier
