ville, naturally relying upon the readiness with which his own countrymen may apply his remarks to the known phænomena of their own social condition, which they are for ever discussing, has not thought it necessary to enlarge upon the facts which that social condition has engendered. There is hardly a page in the work in which France does not appear to be meant, or a page in which French society and opinions are specifically mentioned. Such is the profound ignorance of the mass even of the more enlightened minds in this country on the real state of our neighbours, and so difficult is it to surmount the barriers which divide the opposite peculiarities of the two nations, that many English readers will find themselves at a loss to trace the propositions and inferences of this work to their source in fact. Occasionally we think (labouring perhaps ourselves under the disadvantage of imperfect knowledge, to which we are adverting) that the author has allowed circumstances and opinions peculiar to France to intermingle with his considerations of American institutions, and to affect his conclusions on democracy in general. We shall point out one or more instances of this as we proceed.

But when this element of the work is duly taken into the account it tends very materially to increase the value and importance of the whole production. The opinions here put forth on the nature and effects of the democratic element, are not the speculative results of observations made several years ago in a remote country, but they spring directly from a close acquaintance with the state of men's minds in an old country, whose political and social condition is indissolubly bound to the political and social condition of Europe. In the political institutions, and in the great natural advantages of the United States, M. de Tocqueville found opportunities for remarking the means by which democracy might become the parent of flourishing and enlightened communities. France, the scene presented to the eye is of a sadder and less auspicious kind. Democracy is there the offspring not of the calm and virtuous spirit of freedom, but of a fierce revolution. Its progress has been attended by all the devastating passions which can agitate the human heart or divide human society. The spirit of strife, as he himself observes,

In

has survived the victory. The experiment is not to be tried upon a virgin soil, whose extent reaches far beyond the range of present enterprize, but upon a land still encumbered with the ruins of older institutions. There democracy does not find the wholesome restraint of earnest religion-the machinery of local institutions and combined enterprize-the protection of extensive public education-or the tradition of selfgovernment. It has been the object of enlightened statesmen to supply the French people with some at least of these necessary elements; but they are not the growth of a few feverish years. The purpose of this book is to convince the French people that these elements are not only necessary but indispensable. Hence the tone of earnest expostulation which pervades the work, hence the keen touches of sarcasm which probe the deep and grievous sores of that country,—hence the bold advocacy of fixed principles in religion, in morals and in politics, which is so eloquently maintained.

Nor is the lesson, though it be somewhat less applicable to England, less needed by our own countrymen. They will read in it the fate of those who would launch the vessel of the state, without due pilotage, on more tumultuous seas: they may trace the gradual infiltration of democracy into the minds of men and into the frame of society, till the former lose their noblest powers and impulses, the latter its security from oppression. For if we be destined to prolong the existence of British institutions based, certainly, on aristocratic principles, it must not be by a reaction arising from timorous prejudice against democratic innovation, but by a high and enlightened determination to vindicate the true application of those principles, to cast out their abuses, to repress their evil tendencies, and to confer upon them the power, without which all their dignity is adventitious-the power derived from the just fulfilment of the law of duty, directing all things to the public good. To borrow the striking language of one who had seen the fall of a king and the defeat of a nobility-of James Harrington"There is an evil which I have seen on the earth which pro"ceeds from the ruler: Folly is set in high dignity and the rich "(either in virtue and wisdom, in the goods of the mind or of "those of fortune upon that balance which gives them a sense "of the national interest) sit in low places. Sad complaints!

"that the principles of power and authority, the goods of the "mind and of fortune, do not meet and twine in the wreath " or crown of empire! wherefore, if we have anything of piety "or prudence, let us raise ourselves out of the mire of private "interest to the contemplation of virtue, and put a hand to "the removal of this evil from under the sun-this evil, against "which no government that is not secured, can be good ;"this evil from which no government that is secure but must "be perfect."

It would be no easy task to lay before the reader a close and accurate analysis of these volumes of M. de Tocqueville's work, in which we have already remarked the total absence of redundancy of expression or amplification of the subject. Nor can the remarks we may offer at all stand in the place of a careful perusal of the work itself. All we shall attempt is to point out the general principle on which the whole structure rests, in order to make those extracts understood, to which a few critical remarks may be directed.

M. de Tocqueville has not given in any part of his work a verbal definition of what he understands by Democracy. If the question were put to him, he would probably answer with Jean Baptiste Say,-" If you wish to know what I mean by political œconomy, you must read my treatise on the subject." It is however essential that the reader should be well aware of what he does not mean. The primary condition which M. de Tocqueville attaches to the existence of a democratic state of society is the equality of social conditions. He frequently alludes to democracy under a monarchical head: he more than once applies the term to a people living without any free political institutions at all under a democratic despotism; and he never confines its meaning to the Aristotelian definition, that "an oligarchy is when men of property are the "lords of polity; and a democracy on the contrary is when "those who do not possess much property, but are poor, have "the supreme authority."

"A kind of equality may even be established in the political world, though there should be no political freedom there. A man may be the equal of all his countrymen save one, who is the master of all without distinction, and who selects equally from among them all the agents of his power. Several other combinations might be easily imagined, by which very

great equality would be united to institutions more or less free, or even to institutions wholly without freedom.

"Although men cannot become absolutely equal unless they be entirely free, and consequently equality, pushed to its furthest extent, may be identified with freedom, yet there is good reason for distinguishing the one from the other. The taste which men have for liberty, and that which they feel for equality, are, in fact, two different things; and I am not afraid to add, that, amongst democratic nations, they are two unequal things.

"Freedom has appeared in the world at different times and under various forms; it has not been exclusively bound to any social condition, and it is not confined to democracies. Freedom cannot, therefore, form the distinguishing characteristic of democratic ages. The peculiar and prepondera ting fact which marks those ages as its own is the equality of conditions; the ruling passion of men in those periods is the love of this equality. Ask not what singular charm the men of democratic ages find in being equal, or what special reasons they may have for clinging so tenaciously to equality rather than to the other advantages which society holds out to them: equality is the distinguishing characteristic of the age they live in; that, of itself, is enough to explain that they prefer it to all the rest.

"I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery. They will endure poverty, servitude, barbarism,--but they will not endure aristocracy.

"This is true at all times, and especially true in our own. All men and all powers seeking to cope with this irresistible passion, will be overthrown and destroyed by it. In our age, freedom cannot be established without it, and despotism itself cannot reign without its support."

The inference is that democracy consists, according to M. de Tocqueville, in the absence of aristocratic privilege and in the reduction of all castes and classes to one level, either by the division of the supreme power amongst the whole population, or by its concentration in the hands of one lord paramount. Thus he denies that the republics of antiquity were democratic, because the mass of the population in Athens and Rome was in a servile condition, and the status of citizenship was an aristocratic privilege. In France political rights are enjoyed by a very small part of the nation, but he always speaks of France as an extremely democratic country, because civil rights are on a footing of perfect equality, and the manners of the people are repugnant to privilege under all its forms.

"It is easy to perceive that if the political legislation of the Americans

is much more democratic than that of the French, the civil legislation of the latter is infinitely more democratic than that of the former. This may easily be accounted for. The civil legislation of France was the work of a man who saw that it was his interest to satisfy the democratic passions of his contemporaries in all that was not directly and immediately hostile to his own power. He was willing to allow some popular principles to regulate the distribution of property and the government of families, provided they were not to be introduced into the administration of public affairs. Whilst the torrent of democracy overwhelmed the civil laws of the country, he hoped to find an easy shelter behind its political institutions. This policy was at the same time adroit and selfish: but a compromise of this kind could not last; for in the end political institutions never fail to become the image and expression of civil society; and in this sense it may be said that nothing is more political in a nation than its civil legislation.”

The United States are not styled a democracy merely because their form of government is republican, but they are republics because their whole social condition is democratic. The definition we elicit then is in fact a negative one-the absence of aristocratic privilege: equality of conditions is the first and necessary consequence; political power in the hands of the multitude a second, but not a necessary, result. The problem which this book is intended to solve will then stand thus: to determine the conditions under which men will live, when all the privileges of birth and fortune, with their concomitant traditions, have been abolished.

It will be observed that herein lies a very important difference between the treatment of the subject, and the terms used, by all previous writers on political science, and by M. de Tocqueville: their researches were exclusively directed to find out the political institutions best fitted to govern society, his tend to the investigation of those social conditions on which political institutions must be based: they inquire for those institutions which would be absolutely best, he, for those which are relatively possible.

If it be possible to condense into a single proposition the principle which is here followed into so many of the ramifications of private and social life, we think that principle might be thus expressed: multitude is substituted by the democratic change for magnitude; whatever existed with greater intensity for the few, is diluted for the many; and the standard dimension is changed from that of depth to that of extent. At the risk of being driven by extreme brevity into some ob