monarchy. And many have held that the American Presidency 
has become very much more personal and monarchical than 
any European monarch ever could be.

     De Tocqueville’s contrast between England and America is 
clearly based on the fact of typography and of print culture 
creating uniformity and continuity. England, he says, has 
rejected this principle and clung to the dynamic or oral 
common-law tradition. Hence the discontinuity and 
unpredictable quality of English culture. The grammar of print 
cannot help to construe the message of oral and nonwritten 
culture and institutions. The English aristocracy was properly 
classified as barbarian by Matthew Arnold because its power 
and status had nothing to do with literacy or with the cultural 
forms of typography. Said the Duke of Gloucester to Edward 
Gibbon upon the publication of his Decline and Fall : “Another