The Cold Water Army

The National Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Fund for Adult Education presents Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. The ideas of progress and of the indefinite perfectibility of the human race belong to democratic ages.

The America of 1831 is devoted to equality, and equality suggests several ideas that would not have originated from any other source, and it modifies almost all those previously entertained. I take as an example the idea of human perfectibility and progress because it is a great philosophical theory everywhere to be traced by its consequence in the conduct of human affairs.

The Cold Water Army. A study in American progress. Item 7 in the series Democracy in America prepared by the division of general education of New York University Under the direction of George Prost, American historian, a series designed to bring to life the America of 1831, as recorded by Alexis de Tocqueville, and so to illuminate the image of

democracy itself. A study in American progress, the Cold Water Army. Although man has many points of resemblance with the brutes, one tre is peculiar to himself. He and Prost, they are incapable of improvement. The idea of perfectibility is as old as the world. Equality did not give birth to it, but equality has imparted to it a new character. An aristocratic society can

conceive improvement but not change. An aristocratic society can imagine the future condition of the world maybe better but not essentially different. But in a democracy, The image of an ideal, the always fugitive perfection, presents itself to the human mind.

Thus it was that when my friend Bumor and I set foot in the United States in 1831, we were stunned by the tumult. On every side, a thousand simultaneous voices demand the satisfaction of their social wants, not a reading man, but as a draft of a new community in his face pocket.