More significant, apparently, than the founding was the point of departure of the American people a century and a half earlier when the Puritans arrived. The American point of departure was the seed (germe) of America, not its form, so to speak the baby in its cradle (DA I 1.2). That seed, not the later, more deliberate founding, is the key, Tocqueville says, to almost the whole of his work. Americans did not make themselves democrats but came to America as democrats. America, to which the Puritans came for a reason, is the only nation whose point of departure is clear rather than shrouded in
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