When Alexis de Tocqueville stepped ashore in the United States, in May of 1831, his native France was again hearing demands for democracy. Tocqueville, scion of a noble Norman family buffeted by the revolution of 1789, worried about the wilder instincts, vices, and caprices unleashed by a renewed French populism. In coming to America, Tocqueville hoped to assess whether a workable, stable democracy might be possible. Of his nine months in the New World, Tocqueville later confessed, "in America I saw more than America; I sought there the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or hope from its progress" ( 1990: vol. 1 , 14). The young Frenchman traveled widely and learned much. Critics charge that he was too quick to generalize about the United States, too willing to interpret rather than report; Tocqueville, it was said, would "formulate an abstract principle upon the scantiest substantive evidence" (Heffner 1956: 14). Yet Tocqueville sought something his reviewers might overlook: not mere description, but the secret of a democracy, that intimate relationship between institutions and beliefs that allows a people to govern themselves. By comparing the familiar political systems of Europe with the novel ways of America, Tocqueville could ask how a nation conceived in liberty might endure.