e lost the common law of manners, and they have not yet made up
their minds to do without it; but everyone endeavors to make to himself
some sort of arbitrary and variable rule, from the remnant of former
usages; so that manners have neither the regularity and the dignity
which they often display amongst aristocratic nations, nor the
simplicity and freedom which they sometimes assume in democracies; they
are at once constrained and without constraint.

This, however, is not the normal state of things. When the equality of
conditions is long established and complete, as all men entertain nearly
the same notions and do nearly the same things, they do not require to
agree or to copy from one another in order to speak or act in the same
manner: their manners are constantly characterized by a number of lesser
diversities, but not by any great differences. They are never perfectly
alike, because they do not copy from the same pattern; they are never
very unlike, because their social condition is the same. At first sight
a traveller would observe that the manners of all the Americans
are exactly similar; it is only upon close examination that the
peculiarities in which they differ may be detected.

The English make game of the manners of the Americans; but it is
singular that most of the writers who have drawn these ludicrous
delineations belonged themselves to the middle classes in England, to
whom the same delineations are exceedingly applicable: so that these
pitiless censors for the most part furnish an example of the very thing
they blame in the United States; they do not perceive that they are
deriding themselves, to the great amusement of the aristocracy of their
own country.

Nothing is more prejudicial to democracy than its outward forms of
behavior: many men would willingly endure its vices, who cannot support
its manners. I cannot, however, admit that there is nothing commendable
in the manners of a democratic people. Amongst aristocratic nations, all
who live within reach of the first class in society commonly strain to
be like it, which gives rise to ridiculous and insipid imitations. As a
democratic people does not possess any models of high breeding, at least
it escapes the daily necessity of seeing wretched copies of them.
In democracies manners are never so refined as amongst aristocratic
nations, but on the other hand they are never so coarse. Neither the
coarse oaths of the populace, nor the elegant and ch