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• Democracy In America (1835), Volume II: Part Ii
• Chapter 1: How It Can Be Strictly Said That In the United States It Is the People Who Govern
• Chapter 2: Of Parties In the United States
• Of the Remnants of the Aristocratic Party In the United States
• Chapter 3: Of Freedom of the Press In the United States
• That the Opinions Established Under the Dominion of Freedom of the Press In the United States Are Often More Tenacious Than Those That Are Found Elsewhere Under the Dominion of Censorship. N
• Chapter 4: Of Political Association In the United States
• Different Ways In Which the Right of Association Is Understood In Europe and In the United States, and the Different Use That Is Made of That Right
• Chapter 5: Of the Government of Democracy In America
• Of Universal Suffrage
• Of the Choices of the People and of the Instincts of American Democracy In Its Choices
• Of the Causes That Can Partially Correct These Democratic Instincts
• Influence That American Democracy Has Exercised On Electoral Laws M
• Of Public Officials Under the Dominion of American Democracy
• Of the Arbitrariness of Magistrates 2 Under the Dominion of American Democracy X
• Administrative Instability In the United States
• Of Public Expenses Under the Dominion of American Democracy
• Of the Instincts of American Democracy In Determining the Salaries of Officials
• Difficulty of Discerning the Causes That Lead the American Government to Economy X
• [influence of the Government of Democracy On the Tax Base {and On the Use of the Tax Revenues}] a
• [influence of Democratic Government On the Use of Tax Revenues]
• Can the Public Expenditures of the United States Be Compared With Those of France J
• Of the Corruption and Vices of Those Who Govern In Democracy; of the Effects On Public Morality That Result From That Corruption and Those Vices
• Of What Efforts Democracy Is Capable
• Of the Power That American Democracy Generally Exercises Over Itself
• Of the Manner In Which American Democracy Conducts the Foreign Affairs of the State
• Chapter 6 A: What Are the Real Advantages That American Society Gains From the Government of Democracy?
• Of the General Tendency of Laws Under the Dominion of American Democracy, and of the Instinct of Those Who Apply Them
• Of Public Spirit In the United States O
• Of the Idea of Rights In the United States
• Of the Respect For the Law In the United States X
• Activity That Reigns In All Parts of the Political Body In the United States; Influence That It Exercises On Society
• Chapter 7: Of the Omnipotence of the Majority In the United States and Its Effects a
• How the Omnipotence of the Majority In America Increases the Legislative and Administrative Instability That Is Natural to Democracies
• Tyranny of the Majority M
• Effects of the Omnipotence of the Majority On the Arbitrariness of American Public Officials
• Of the Power Exercised By the Majority In America Over Thought
• Effect of Tyranny of the Majority On the National Character of the Americans; of the Courtier Spirit In the United States
• That the Greatest Danger to the American Republics Comes From the Omnipotence of the Majority
• Chapter 8: Of What Tempers Tyranny of the Majority In the United States
• Absence of Administrative Centralization
• Of the Spirit of the Jurist In the United States, and How It Serves As Counterweight to Democracy F
• Of the Jury In the United States Considered As a Political Institution W
• Chapter 9: Of the Principal Causes That Tend to Maintain the Democratic Republic In the United States a
• Of the Accidental Or Providential Causes That Contribute to Maintaining the Democratic Republic In the United States E
• Of the Influence of Laws On Maintaining the Democratic Republic In the United States
• Of the Influence of Mores On Maintaining the Democratic Republic In the United States
• Of Religion Considered As a Political Institution, How It Serves Powerfully to Maintain the Democratic Republic Among the Americans [*]
• Indirect Influence Exercised By Religious Beliefs On Political Society In the United States
• Of the Principal Causes That Make Religion Powerful In America P
• How the Enlightenment, Habits, and Practical Experience of the Americans Contribute to the Success of Democratic Institutions
• That Laws Serve More to Maintain the Democratic Republic In the United States Than Physical Causes, and Mores More Than Laws
• Would Laws and Mores Be Sufficient to Maintain Democratic Institutions Elsewhere Than In America?
• Importance of What Precedes In Relation to Europe T
• Chapter 10: Some Considerations On the Present State and Probable Future of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States a
• Present State and Probable Future of the Indian Tribes That Inhabit the Territory Possessed By the Union H
• Position That the Black Race Occupies In the United States; 30 Dangers to Which Its Presence Exposes the Whites C
• What Are the Chances For the American Union to Last? What Dangers Threaten It? M
• Of Republican Institutions In the United States, What Are Their Chances of Lasting?
• Some Considerations On the Causes of the Commercial Greatness of the United States
• Conclusion a
• Notes
• First Part
• (a) Page 36
• (b) Page 38
• (c) Page 40 On the American Languages
• (d) Page 42
• (e) Page 64
• (f) Page 70
• (g) Page 84
• (h) Page 97 Summary of Electoral Conditions In the United States
• (i) Page 161
• (k) Page 165
• (l) Page 170
• (m) Page 171
• (n) Page 185
• (o) Page 276
• Second Part

That Laws Serve More to Maintain the Democratic Republic in the United States than Physical Causes, and Mores More than Laws

I said that maintaining democratic institutions in the United States had to be attributed to circumstances, laws and mores.8

Most Europeans know only the first of these three causes, and they give it a preponderant importance that it does not have.

It is true that the Anglo-Americans brought equality of conditions to the New World. Never were either commoners or nobles found among them; prejudices of birth there have always been as unknown as prejudices of profession. Since the social state is therefore democratic, democracy had no difficulty establishing its dominion.

But this fact is not particular to the United States; nearly all the colonies of America were founded by men equal among themselves or who became equal by inhabiting the colonies. There is not a single part of the New World where Europeans were able to create an aristocracy.

Democratic institutions prosper only in the United States, however.

The American Union has no enemies to fight. It is alone in the middle of the wilderness like an island in the heart of the Ocean.

But nature had isolated in the same way the Spanish of [{Mexico, those of Peru}] South America [{the Portuguese of Brazil, the French of the Antilles, the Dutch of Guyana}], and this isolation did not prevent them from maintaining armies. They made war on each other when foreigners were lacking. Only the Anglo-American democracy, until now, has been able to remain at peace.

The territory of the Union presents a limitless field to human activity; it offers an inexhaustible sustenance to industry and to work. So love of wealth takes the place of ambition there, and well-being quells the fervor of parties.

But in what portion of the world do you meet more fertile wildernesses, larger rivers, more untouched and more inexhaustible riches than in South America? Yet South America cannot support democracy. If, for peoples to be happy, it was sufficient to have been placed in a corner of the universe and to be able to spread at will over uninhabited lands, the Spanish of South America would not have to complain about their lot. And when they would not enjoy the same happiness as the inhabitants of the United States, they would at least make the peoples of Europe envious. There are, however, no nations on the earth more miserable than those of South America.

Therefore, not only can physical causes not lead to analogous results among the Americans of the South and those of the North, but they cannot even produce among the first something that is not inferior to what is seen in Europe, where physical causes act in an opposite direction.

So physical causes do not influence the destiny of nations as much as is supposed.f

I met men of New England ready to abandon a country where they would have been able to find ease and comfort, in order to go to seek their fortune in the wilderness. Nearby, I saw the French population of Canada squeeze itself into a space too small for it, when the same wilderness was near; and while the emigrant of the United States acquired a great estate at the cost of a few days of work, the Canadian paid as much for land as if he still lived in France.

Thus nature, while delivering the uninhabited areas of the New World to Europeans, offers them assets that they do not always know how to use.

I notice among other peoples of America the same conditions of prosperity as among the Anglo-Americans, without their laws and their mores; and these peoples are miserable. So the laws and mores of the Anglo-Americans form the special reason for their grandeur and the predominant cause that I am seeking.

I am far from pretending that there is an absolute good in American laws; I do not believe that they are applicable to all democratic peoples; and, among those laws, there are several that, even in the United States, seem dangerous to me.

You cannot deny, however, that the legislation of the Americans, taken as a whole, is well adapted to the genius of the people that it must govern and to the nature of the country.g

So American laws are good, and a great part of the success that the government of democracy achieves in America must be attributed to them; but I do not think that they are the principal cause. And if the laws appear to me to have more influence on the social happiness of the Americans than the very nature of the country, from another perspective I see reasons to believe that they exercise less influence than mores.

The federal laws surely form the most important portion of the legislation of the United States.

Mexico, which is as happily situated as the Anglo-American Union, appropriated these same laws, and it is not able to get accustomed to the government of democracy.

So there is a reason independent of physical causes and laws that makes democracy able to govern the United States.h

But here is what proves it even more. Nearly all the men who inhabit the territory of the Union are born of the same blood. They speak the same language, pray to God in the same way, are subject to the same physical causes, obey the same laws.

So what produces the differences that must be observed among them?

Why, in the [{North}] East of the Union, does republican government appear strong and well-ordered, why does it proceed with maturity and deliberation? What cause marks all its acts with a character of wisdom and lasting existence?

Why, in contrast, do the powers of society in the West [{and in the South}] seem to move haphazardly?

Why, in the movement of affairs, does something disorderly, passionate, you could almost say feverish, reign that does not herald a long future?

I am no longer comparing the Anglo-Americans to foreign peoples; now I am contrasting the Anglo-Americans to each other, and I am seeking why they do not resemble each other. Here all arguments drawn from the nature of the country and from the difference of laws are missing at the same time. I must resort to some other cause; and where will I find this cause, if not in mores?

It is in the East [{North}] that the Anglo-Americans have contracted the longest use of the government of democracy, and that they have formed habits and conceived ideas most favorable to maintaining it. [In the North] Democracy there has little by little penetrated customs, opinions, forms; you find it in all the details of social life as in the laws. It is in the East [{North}] that the book learning and the practical education of the people have been most perfected and that religion has best intermingled with liberty. What are all these habits, these opinions, these customs, these beliefs, if not what I called mores?

In the West, in contrast, a part of these same advantages is still lacking. Many Americans of the states of the West are born in the woods, and they mix with the civilization of their fathers the ideas and customs of savage life. Among them, passions are more violent, religious morality less powerful, ideas less settled. Men there exercise no control over each other, for they scarcely know each other.j So the nations of the West show, to a certain extent, the inexperience and the unruly habits of emerging peoples. Societies in the West are formed from old elements; but the assembly is new.k

So mores, particularly, make the Americans of the United States, alone among all Americans, capable of supporting the dominion of democracy; and mores also make the various Anglo-American democracies more or less well-regulated and prosperous.

Therefore, in Europe, the influence that the geographic position of the country exercises on the continued existence of democratic institutions is exaggerated. Too much importance is attributed to laws, too little to mores. These three great causes undoubtedly serve to regulate and to direct American democracy; but if they had to be classified, I would say that physical causes contribute less than laws, and laws infinitely less than mores.

I am persuaded that the most fortunate situation and the best laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, while the latter still turn to good account the most unfavorable positions and the worst laws. The importance of mores is a common truth to which study and experience constantly lead. It seems to me that I find it placed in my mind like a central point; I see it at the end of all my ideas.m

I have only one more word to say on this subject.

If, in the course of this work, I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance that I attributed to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, to their opinions, in a word, to their mores, in maintaining their laws, I have missed the principal goal that I set for myself by writing it.

[8. ] Here I recall to the reader the general sense in which I take the word mores; I understand by this word the whole of the intellectual and moral dispositions that man brings to the state of society.

[f. ] In the margin: “≠So the original equality of conditions and the nature of the country do not explain in a sufficient way what is happening in the United States. Because elsewhere these same causes do not produce the same effects.≠”

[g. ] To the side: “And in certain cases, it would be more correct to say that the Americans prosper despite their laws rather than thanks to them.”

[h. ] “Mexico is not able to support the republic, however. The republic prospers only within the Anglo-American Union. From so many similar causes, the Union a different one. And this cause of prosperity which is special prevails over all the others together. The people of the Union are not only the most religious and most enlightened in the world, they are also the ones whose political education is the most advanced” (YTC, CVh, 4, p. 45).

[j. ] In a slip of paper inserted in the manuscript: