Essay 40: The Main Causes Which Tend To Maintain A Democratic Republic In The United States (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 9, Subch. 7)
In 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln addressed a young men’s lyceum debating society in Springfield, Illinois, on the topic of “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” Lincoln stated that mob rule and demagoguery were great threats to American self-government. He asserted that the way to preserve American political institutions was to restore reason and reverence for the laws as a “political religion” over the shifting and dangerous passions of human nature.
Publishing his masterpiece, Democracy in America, at the same time Lincoln spoke, De Tocqueville offered his own reflections on “the influence exerted by the enlightenment and the habits of the Americans on the maintenance of their political institutions.” In both cases—education and political habits—were formed primarily through experience rather than theory. The American people, he observed, were eminently a very practical people.
De Tocqueville thought that American education did not produce great literature or scientific inventions. Instead, Americans adapted the technology, “marvelously to the needs of the country.” They also sought education to learn “the doctrines and the proofs of [their] religion.” Finally, they gained familiarity with “the principal features of the constitution that governs” their country.
