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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications
amongst such a people has grown more rapidly than their education
and their experience of free institutions, the time will come
when men are carried away, and lose all self-restraint, at the
sight of the new possessions they are about to lay hold upon. In
their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune, they lose
sight of the close connection which exists between the private
fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all. It is not
necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them
of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their
hold. The discharge of political duties appears to them to be a
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