United States or South Korea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Moreover, for a long time the vision remained sufficiently true. The typical American democrat described by De Tocqueville corresponded very well with the vision of the pioneer; and he did not disappear during the succeeding generation. For many years millions of Americans of much the same pattern were rewarded for their democratic virtue in an approximately similar manner.
From this time Tocqueville was famous. In the autumn of the same year, 1835, he married an English lady, Miss Mottley, who had long resided in France, and the happiness of his private life was secured at the very moment when he was entering upon the cares and anxieties of a public career.
On this, the opposite party delivered himself of a lengthy harangue, in which arguments were quoted from Adam Smith, De Tocqueville, and others, with considerable fluency; all intended, apparently, to convict me of flagrant error, and prognosticate 'consequences. I had not at that time read the works of these writers, and had only very youthful experience to oppose to such a weight of authority; and being, besides, one of those unfortunate individuals who cannot think of the right thing to say until twenty-four hours after the occasion has passed, I remained silent.
De Tocqueville was there, the great writer on America; General Oudinot, and several other generals; the Duc de Broglie, great-grandson of Madame de Staël; Eugène Sue, the novelist; Coquerel, the French Protestant preacher; and M. de Rémusat, the son of that lady who has given us her experiences of the court of the First Napoleon.
The French people says M. de Tocqueville made, in 1789, the greatest effort which was ever made by any nation to cut, so to speak, their destiny in halves, and to separate by an abyss that which they had heretofore been, from that which they sought to become hereafter.
Would I give them his address? they asked: they must have a visit from him. I said he would be glad to visit them, I was sure, for when I told him I was coming here he said he envied me. He was at present engaged in a round of dinners expected to go to France in August to stay with De Tocqueville, but would be again in England in the autumn.
"If great writers have not at present existed in America, the reason is very simply given in the fact that there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in America," wrote Tocqueville. There were no amusements, neither music nor sport nor pastime, indoors or out of doors.
De Tocqueville also observed that the Negroes were more detested in the free States than in those where they were held as slaves. There had been such a reaction since 1800 that no positions of consequence were open to Negroes, however well educated they might be, and the education of the blacks which was once vigorously prosecuted there became unpopular.
Weak and prejudiced minds receive the doctrines of a philosopher like Tocqueville as dictations: he pronounced ex cathedra his doctrines, and it is heresy to gainsay them. Yet, as an able writer in that universal book, "The Times," says, reason and history read a different sermon.
There are passages where we almost hear the drone of a dowager in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was said of Tocqueville that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat. Sir Henry Maine in politics is a bureaucrat who cannot bear to think that democracy will win.
Word Of The Day