Hence it is that the same men who live on a small scale in narrow dwellings, frequently aspire to gigantic splendor in the erection of their public monuments.
The Americans traced out the circuit of an immense city on the site which they intended to make their capital, but which, up to the present time, is hardly more densely peopled than Pontoise, though, according to them, it will one day contain a million of inhabitants.

They have already rooted up trees for ten miles round, lest they should interfere with the future citizens of this imaginary metropolis.

They have erected a magnificent palace for Congress in the centre of the city, and have given it the pompous name of the Capitol.

The several States of the Union are every day planning and erecting for themselves prodigious undertakings, which would astonish the engineers of the great European nations.

Thus democracy not only leads men to a vast number of inconsiderable productions; it also leads them to raise some monuments on the largest scale: but between these two extremes there is a blank.
A few scattered remains of enormous buildings can therefore teach us nothing of the social condition and the institutions of the people by whom they were raised.