“ It is difficult for us, who have had the good fortune to be born amongst men like ourselves by nature, and equal to ourselves by law, to conceive the irreconcilable differences which separate the negro from the European in America. ”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835). copy citation
| Author | Alexis de Tocqueville |
|---|---|
| Source | Democracy in America |
| Topic | fortune difference |
| Date | 1835 |
| Language | English |
| Reference | |
| Note | Translated by Henry Reeve |
| Weblink | http://www.gutenberg.org/files/815/815-h/815-h.htm |
Context
“[ To induce the whites to abandon the opinion they have conceived of the moral and intellectual inferiority of their former slaves, the negroes must change; but as long as this opinion subsists, to change is impossible.]
It is difficult for us, who have had the good fortune to be born amongst men like ourselves by nature, and equal to ourselves by law, to conceive the irreconcilable differences which separate the negro from the European in America. But we may derive some faint notion of them from analogy. France was formerly a country in which numerous distinctions of rank existed, that had been created by the legislation. Nothing can be more fictitious than a purely legal inferiority;”
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