chloe wrote:
Alexis de TocquevilleµÄ½Ü×÷¡£ÕªÂ¼Ò»µã¡£
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China appears to me to present the most perfect instance
of that species of well-being which a highly centralized
administration may furnish to its subjects. Travelers assure us
that the Chinese have tranquillity without happiness, industry
without improvement, stability without strength, and public order
without public morality. The condition of society there is always
tolerable, never excellent. I imagine that when China is opened
to European observation, it will be found to contain the most
perfect model of a centralized administration that exists in the
universe.
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But epochs sometimes occur in the life of a nation when the old customs of a people are changed, public morality is destroyed, religious belief shaken, and the spell of tradition broken, while the diffusion of knowledge is yet imperfect and the civil rights of the community are ill secured or confined within narrow limits. The country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the eyes of the citizens; they no longer behold it in the soil which they inhabit, for that soil is to them an inanimate clod; nor in the usages of their forefathers, which they have learned to regard as a debasing yoke; nor in religion, for of that they doubt; nor in the laws, which do not originate in their own authority; nor in the legislator, whom they fear and despise. The country is lost to their senses; they can discover it neither under its own nor under borrowed features, and they retire into a narrow and unenlightened selfishness. They are emancipated from prejudice without having acknowledged the empire of reason; they have neither the instinctive patriotism of a monarchy nor the reflecting patriotism of a republic; but they have stopped between the two in the midst of confusion and distress.
In this predicament to retreat is impossible, for a people cannot recover the sentiments of their youth any more than a man can return to the innocent tastes of childhood; such things may be regretted, but they cannot be renewed. They must go forward and accelerate the union of private with public interests, since the period of disinterested patriotism is gone by forever.