undergoes great revolutions, they will
be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the
United States--that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the
equality, but to the inequality, of conditions.

When social conditions are equal, every man is apt to live apart,
centred in himself and forgetful of the public. If the rulers of
democratic nations were either to neglect to correct this fatal
tendency, or to encourage it from a notion that it weans men from
political passions and thus wards off revolutions, they might eventually
produce the evil they seek to avoid, and a time might come when the
inordinate passions of a few men, aided by the unintelligent selfishness
or the pusillanimity of the greater number, would ultimately compel
society to pass through strange vicissitudes. In democratic communities
revolutions are seldom desired except by a minority; but a minority
may sometimes effect them. I do not assert that democratic nations are
secure from revolutions; I merely say that the state of society in
those nations does not lead to revolutions, but rather wards them off.
A democratic people left to itself will not easily embark in great
hazards; it is only led to revolutions unawares; it may sometimes
undergo them, but it does not make them; and I will add that, when
such a people has been allowed to acquire sufficient knowledge and
experience, it will not suffer them to be made. I am well aware that
it this respect public institutions may themselves do much; they may
encourage or repress the tendencies which originate in the state of
society. I therefore do not maintain, I repeat, that a people is secure
from revolutions simply because conditions are equal in the community;
but I think that, whatever the institutions of such a people may be,
great revolutions will always be far less violent and less frequent than
is supposed; and I can easily discern a state of polity, which, when
combined with the principle of equality, would render society more
stationary than it has ever been in our western apart of the world.

The observations I have here made on events may also be applied in
part to opinions. Two things are surprising in the United States--the
mutability of the greater part of human actions, and the singular
stability of certain principles. Men are in constant motion; the mind
of man appears almost unmoved. When once an opinion has spread over the
country and struck root there, it