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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. An association unites the efforts of minds
which have a tendency to diverge in one single channel, and urges them
vigorously towards one single end which it points out.

The second degree in the right of association is the power of meeting.
When an association is allowed to establish centres of action at certain
important points in the country, its activity is increased and its
influence extended. Men have the opportunity of seeing each other; means
of execution are more readily combined, and opinions are maintained with
a degree of warmth and energy which written language cannot approach.

Lastly, in the exercise of the right of political association, there
is a third degree: the partisans of an opinion may unite in electoral
bodies, and choose delegates to represent them in a central assembly.
This is, properly speaking, the application of the representative system
to a party.

Thus, in the first instance, a society is formed between individuals
professing the same opinion, and the tie which keeps it together is of
a purely intellectual nature; in the second case, small assemblies are
formed which onl