Accustomed to act for themselves, knowing that they cannot count on the administrative patronage of the State, the Americans excel in bringing individual energies into action.  There are few functionaries, few soldiers, and few taxes among them.  They know nothing, like us, of that malady of public functions, the violence of which increases in proportion as we advance.  They know nothing of those enormous imposts under which Europe is bending by degrees—­those taxes which almost suppress property by overburdening its transmission; they have not come to the point of finding it very natural to devote one or two millions every year to the expenses of the State, and no theory has been formed to prove to them that of all the expenses of the citizens, this is applied to the best purpose.  They have not entered with the Old World into that rivalry of armaments in which each nation, though it become exhausted in the effort, is bound to keep on a level with its neighbors, and in which no one will be stronger in the end when the whole world shall be subjugated.  Their ten thousand regulars suffice, and they have their militia for extraordinary occasions.  Lastly, their Federal debt is insignificant; and, if the private debts of a few States reach a high figure, they are nowhere of a nature to impose on the tax-payers a large surplus of charges.

All of the great liberties exist in the United States:  liberty of the press, liberty of speech, right of assemblage, right of association.  Except in the slave States, where the national institutions have been subjected to deplorable mutilations in fact, every citizen can express his opinion and maintain it openly, without meeting any other obstacle than the contrary opinion, which is expressed with equal freedom.

But there is one ground above all where we should acknowledge the superiority of America:  I mean, religious liberty.  We are still in the beginning of doubts upon the point as to where the interference of the State should cease; in what measure it should govern the belief of the citizens, and its manifestation.  These questions, alas, are still propounded among us.  And there are countries at our doors, where men shudder at the mere idea that the law may some day cease to decide for each in what manner he is bound to worship God, that the courts may cease to punish those whose conscience turns aside from the path of the nation.  Protestant Sweden but lately condemned dissenters to fine and imprisonment; Catholic Spain daily inflicts the severest penalties on those who suffer themselves to profess or to propagate beliefs which are not those of the country—­those who sell the Scriptures, and those who read them.