No doubt this great
regularity of American morals originates partly in the country, in the
race of the people, and in their religion: but all these causes, which
operate elsewhere, do not suffice to account for it; recourse must
be had to some special reason. This reason appears to me to be the
principle of equality and the institutions derived from it. Equality
of conditions does not of itself engender regularity of morals, but
it unquestionably facilitates and increases it. *a [Footnote a: See
Appendix T.]

Amongst aristocratic nations birth and fortune frequently make two such
different beings of man and woman, that they can never be united to each
other. Their passions draw them together, but the condition of society,
and the notions suggested by it, prevent them from contracting a
permanent and ostensible tie. The necessary consequence is a great
number of transient and clandestine connections. Nature secretly avenges
herself for the constraint imposed upon her by the laws of man. This is
not so much the case when the equality of conditions has swept away all
the imaginary, or the real, barriers which separated man from woman. No
girl then believes that she cannot become the wife of the man who loves
her; and this renders all breaches of morality before marriage very
uncommon: for, whatever be the credulity of the passions, a woman will
hardly be able to persuade herself that she is beloved, when her lover
is perfectly free to marry her and does not.

The same cause operates, though more indirectly, on married life.
Nothing better serves to justify an illicit passion, either to the minds
of those who have conceived it or to the world which looks on, than
compulsory or accidental marriages. *b In a country in which a woman is
always free to exercise her power of choosing, and in which education
has prepared her to choose rightly, public opinion is inexorable to her
faults. The rigor of the Americans arises in part from this cause.
They consider marriages as a covenant which is often onerous, but every
condition of which the parties are strictly bound to fulfil, because
they knew all those conditions beforehand, and were perfectly free not
to have contracted them.

[Footnote b: The literature of Europe sufficiently corroborates this
remark. When a European author wishes to depict in a work of imagination
any of these great catastrophes in matrimony which so frequently occur
amongst us, he takes care to bespeak th