opy the means which it has employed to attain its ends; for I
am well aware of the influence which the nature of a country and its
political precedents exercise upon a constitution; and I should regard
it as a great misfortune for mankind if liberty were to exist all over
the world under the same forms.

But I am of opinion that if we do not succeed in gradually introducing
democratic institutions into France, and if we despair of imparting to
the citizens those ideas and sentiments which first prepare them
for freedom, and afterwards allow them to enjoy it, there will be no
independence at all, either for the middling classes or the nobility,
for the poor or for the rich, but an equal tyranny over all; and I
foresee that if the peaceable empire of the majority be not founded
amongst us in time, we shall sooner or later arrive at the unlimited
authority of a single despot.

Chapter XVIII: Future Condition Of Three Races In The United States--Part I

The Present And Probable Future Condition Of The Three Races Which
Inhabit The Territory Of The United States

The principal part of the task which I had imposed upon myself is now
performed. I have shown, as far as I was able, the laws and the manners
of the American democracy. Here I might stop; but the reader would
perhaps feel that I had not satisfied his expectations.

The absolute supremacy of democracy is not all that we meet with in
America; the inhabitants of the New World may be considered from more
than one point of view. In the course of this work my subject has often
led me to speak of the Indians and the Negroes; but I have never been
able to stop in order to show what place these two races occupy in the
midst of the democratic people whom I was engaged in describing. I have
mentioned in what spirit, and according to what laws, the Anglo-American
Union was formed; but I could only glance at the dangers which menace
that confederation, whilst it was equally impossible for me to give a
detailed account of its chances of duration, independently of its laws
and manners. When speaking of the united republican States, I hazarded
no conjectures upon the permanence of republican forms in the New World,
and when making frequent allusion to the commercial activity which
reigns in the Union, I was unable to inquire into the future condition
of the Americans as a commercial people.

These topics are collaterally connected with my subject without forming
a part