If the public pleasures are concerned, an association is formed to provide for the splendor and the regularity of the entertainment.

Societies are formed to resist enemies which are exclusively of a moral nature, and to diminish the vice of intemperance: in the United States associations are established to promote public order, commerce, industry, morality, and religion; for there is no end which the human will, seconded by the collective exertions of individuals, despairs of attaining.
I shall hereafter have occasion to show the effects of association upon the course of society, and I must confine myself for the present to the political world.

When once the right of association is recognized, the citizens may employ it in several different ways.
An association consists simply in the public assent which a number of individuals give to certain doctrines, and in the engagement which they contract to promote the spread of those doctrines by their exertions.
The right of association with these views is very analogous to the liberty of unlicensed writing; but societies thus formed possess more authority than the press.

When an opinion is represented by a society, it necessarily assumes a more exact and explicit form.

It numbers its partisans, and compromises their welfare in its cause: they, on the other hand, become acquainted with each other, and their zeal is increased by their number.