CHAPTER XVII: Principal Causes Maintaining The Democratic Republic--Part IV.
The Laws Contribute More To The Maintenance Of The Democratic Republic In The United States Than The Physical Circumstances Of The Country, And The Manners More Than The Laws All the nations of America have a democratic state of society--Yet democratic institutions only subsist amongst the Anglo-Americans--The Spaniards of South America, equally favored by physical causes as the Anglo-Americans, unable to maintain a democratic republic--Mexico, which has adopted the Constitution of the United States, in the same predicament--The Anglo-Americans of the West less able to maintain it than those of the East--Reason of these different results.
I have remarked that the maintenance of democratic institutions in the United States is attributable to the circumstances, the laws, and the manners of that country.

*l Most Europeans are only acquainted with the first of these three causes, and they are apt to give it a preponderating importance which it does not really possess.
[Footnote l: I remind the reader of the general signification which I give to the word "manners," namely, the moral and intellectual characteristics of social man taken collectively.] It is true that the Anglo-Saxons settled in the New World in a state of social equality; the low-born and the noble were not to be found amongst them; and professional prejudices were always as entirely unknown as the prejudices of birth.

Thus, as the condition of society was democratic, the empire of democracy was established without difficulty.

But this circumstance is by no means peculiar to the United States; almost all the trans-Atlantic colonies were founded by men equal amongst themselves, or who became so by inhabiting them.

In no one part of the New World have Europeans been able to create an aristocracy.
Nevertheless, democratic institutions prosper nowhere but in the United States.
The American Union has no enemies to contend with; it stands in the wilds like an island in the ocean.