life as a counterweight to acquisitive individualism. In a commercial society, "men cannot be cured of the love of riches," he observed, but religion might persuade them "to enrich themselves by none but honest means," to value the "natural bonds and legitimate pleasures of home," and thus to discover that an "orderly life is the surest path to happiness." These views were not Tocqueville's alone; they were shared by the prison reformers, educators, and humanitarians on whom Tocqueville relied for many of his impressions of America. In describing himself as a "new kind of liberal," Tocqueville described all those who believed that economic individualism could be safely liberated from mercantilist constraints only if it was disciplined by the inner constraints associated with organized "benevolence" and above all by new modes of "family governance."

Horace Mann, frightened by the Chartist agitation in England and by the possibility that European social extremes were re-creating themselves in America, voiced a pervasive concern when he argued that any system of "political economy ... which busies itself about capital and labor, supply and demand, interest and rents, favorable and unfavorable balances of trade; but leaves out of account the element of a wide-spread mental development, is nought but stupendous folly." Progress and civilization had "increased temptations a thousand-fold" while doing away with the "fiery penal codes" and the "blind reverence for authority" that had formerly kept them in check. The "race for wealth, luxury, ambition, and pride" had been thrown "open to all" and the most depraved impulses given "full liberty and wide compass." Mann predicted that unless "internal and moral restraints" replaced the "external and arbitrary ones" now ineffective, "the people, instead of being conquerors and sovereigns over their passions," would become "their victims and their slaves."

For liberals like Mann, it was the rapid development of "benevolent" institutions, even more than material improvements, that distinguished progressive societies from backward societies like the American South. In the northern United States, in contrast to the South, progress proclaimed itself, according to Theodore Parker, in the spread of "societies for the reform of prisons, the prevention of crime, pauperism, intemperance, licentiousness and ignorance, ... educational societies, Bible societies, peace societies, societies for teaching Christianity in foreign and barbarous lands, ... learned and philosophic societies for the study of science, letters and art." The free states alone, Parker insisted, concerned them

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