W-DBQ-2-Document+D

Source: Harriet Martineau, a British author, reporting on her 1834 visit to the United States in //Society in America// (New York, 1837) I had been less then three weeks in the country and was in a state of something like awe at the prevalence of not only external competence but intellectual ability. The striking effect upon a stranger of witnessing, for the first time, the absence of poverty of gross ignorance, of all servility, of all insolence of manner cannot be exaggerated in description. I had seen every man in the towns an independent citizen; every man in the country a landowner. I had seen that villages had their newspapers, the factory girls their libraries. I had witnessed the controversies between candidates for office on some difficult subjects, of which the **people were to be the judges.** With all these things in my mind, and with evidence of prosperity about me in the comfortable homesteads which every turn in the road and every reach of the lake brought into view, I was thrown into painful amazement by being told that the grand question of the time was “whether the people should be encouraged to govern themselves, or whether the wise should save them from themselves.”

Harriet martineau is impressed by the political democracy in the U.S.