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physical force, or his eloquence, or his genius. But this faith, which arose in them spontaneously, was
communicated by their remarks to others who had faith in their turn. It is by talking of a man’s acts
that we make him notorious, celebrated, illustrious, or glorious; and once he has achieved power via
glory, it is in discussions of his campaign plans or his decrees, his battles or his governmental
actions, that we make his power grow or decrease.
In economic life especially, conversation has a fundamental importance that the economists do not
seem to have noticed. Is not conversation, the exchange of ideas—or rather a reciprocal or unilateral
gift of ideas—the preamble to the exchange of services? It is by words at first, by talking, that men of
the same society communicate to each other their needs and desires concerning consumption or
production. It is extremely rare that the desire to buy a new object arises simply by our seeing it,
without its having been suggested in conversation. . . .
. . . The first mails began as a university and ecclesiastical privilege, or, to go back even farther, a
royal privilege.
Of this important institution I shall say only a word to note that its development conforms to the law
of propagation of examples from top to bottom. First the kings and popes, then the princes and
prelates, had their own mail, before the ordinary lords, then their vassals, then successively all the
layers of the nation all the way down to the last also yielded to the temptation to write. . . .
[The number of letters] increased from two and one-half million in 1700 to ten million in 1777: it
quadrupled. At present postal statistics enable us to measure the rapid and continuous increase in the
number of letters in various countries, 6 and to measure the unequal but still regular rise in the general
need to which it responds. It is able to instruct us on the unequal degrees and the progress of
sociability.
But this very statistic is also a good specimen of the fact that there are always qualities hidden
beneath social quantities of which statistics in general are the approximate measure. 7 In fact, from the
outside there is nothing more similar than letters of one period and one country, and it would seem
that the condition of homogeneous units necessary for the statisticians’ calculations could not be better
fulfilled. Letters have just about the same format, the same type of envelope and seal, the same type of
address. They are now covered with identical stamps. Criminal and civil statistics are far from
counting units as similar as these. But open the letters, and what characteristic differences, profound
and substantial, you find, despite the constant element of the ritual formulas at the beginning and the
end! Adding up such heterogeneous things is therefore not doing very much. We know their number,
but not even their length. It would be interesting to find out, at least, if as they become more numerous
they become shorter, which seems likely, and more prosaic as well. And if statistics existed for
conversations, 8 which would be just as legitimate, one would wish, likewise, to know their length,
which in our busy century could be in inverse relationship to their frequency. The cities in which it
rains the most, in which the most water falls from the sky—please excuse the analogy—are quite
often those where it rains the least often. It would be especially interesting to know the innermost
substantive transformations of letters as well as of conversations, and here statistics give us no
information at all.
In this regard, there is no doubt that the coming of journalism gave a decided stimulus to epistolary
transformation. The press, which activated and nourished conversation with so many new stimulants
and foods, exhausted, on the other hand, many of the sources of correspondence, which it used for its
own benefit. . . .
Will it be said that the press, by liberating and freeing private correspondence from the burden of
reporting the news, did epistolary literature the service of pushing it into its true path, narrow but