(the _Child's Paper_,) of which three hundred thousand copies are
printed. This is the intellectual aliment of the country. In the towns,
lectures are added to books, journals, and reviews: in all imaginable
subjects, this community, which the Government does not charge itself
with instructing, (at least, beyond the primary education,) educates and
develops itself with indefatigable ardor. Ideas are agitated in the
smallest market-town; life is everywhere.

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