tate of
a country upon manners is therefore deserving of serious examination.
Manners are, generally, the product of the very basis of the character
of a people, but they are also sometimes the result of an arbitrary
convention between certain men; thus they are at once natural and
acquired. When certain men perceive that they are the foremost persons
in society, without contestation and without effort--when they are
constantly engaged on large objects, leaving the more minute details to
others--and when they live in the enjoyment of wealth which they did not
amass and which they do not fear to lose, it may be supposed that they
feel a kind of haughty disdain of the petty interests and practical
cares of life, and that their thoughts assume a natural greatness, which
their language and their manners denote. In democratic countries manners
are generally devoid of dignity, because private life is there extremely
petty in its character; and they are frequently low, because the mind
has few opportunities of rising above the engrossing cares of domestic
interests. True dignity in manners consists in always taking one's
proper station, neither too high nor too low; and this is as much within
the reach of a peasant as of a prince. In democracies all stations
appear doubtful; hence it is that the manners of democracies, though
often full of arrogance, are commonly wanting in dignity, and, moreover,
they are never either well disciplined or accomplished.

The men who live in democracies are too fluctuating for a certain number
of them ever to succeed in laying down a code of good breeding, and in
forcing people to follow it. Every man therefore behaves after his own
fashion, and there is always a certain incoherence in the manners of
such times, because they are moulded upon the feelings and notions of
each individual, rather than upon an ideal model proposed for general
imitation. This, however, is much more perceptible at the time when
an aristocracy has just been overthrown than after it has long been
destroyed. New political institutions and new social elements then bring
to the same places of resort, and frequently compel to live in common,
men whose education and habits are still amazingly dissimilar, and
this renders the motley composition of society peculiarly visible. The
existence of a former strict code of good breeding is still remembered,
but what it contained or where it is to be found is already forgotten.
Men hav