The importance of manners is a common truth to which study and experience incessantly direct our attention.

It may be regarded as a central point in the range of human observation, and the common termination of all inquiry.

So seriously do I insist upon this head, that if I have hitherto failed in making the reader feel the important influence which I attribute to the practical experience, the habits, the opinions, in short, to the manners of the Americans, upon the maintenance of their institutions, I have failed in the principal object of my work.
Whether Laws And Manners Are Sufficient To Maintain Democratic Institutions In Other Countries Besides America The Anglo-Americans, if transported into Europe, would be obliged to modify their laws--Distinction to be made between democratic institutions and American institutions--Democratic laws may be conceived better than, or at least different from, those which the American democracy has adopted--The example of America only proves that it is possible to regulate democracy by the assistance of manners and legislation.
I have asserted that the success of democratic institutions in the United States is more intimately connected with the laws themselves, and the manners of the people, than with the nature of the country.

But does it follow that the same causes would of themselves produce the same results, if they were put into operation elsewhere; and if the country is no adequate substitute for laws and manners, can laws and manners in their turn prove a substitute for the country?
It will readily be understood that the necessary elements of a reply to this question are wanting: other peoples are to be found in the New World besides the Anglo-Americans, and as these people are affected by the same physical circumstances as the latter, they may fairly be compared together.

But there are no nations out of America which have adopted the same laws and manners, being destitute of the physical advantages peculiar to the Anglo-Americans.