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The only criticism that can be made regarding the work is that the executive departments have not received sufficient attention as regards the details of their administration, nor the practical and scientific value of the work performed by their numerous bureaus. Interesting from an historical point of view is De Tocqueville's Democracy in America, now fifty years old.
Notwithstanding de Tocqueville's decided views as to the necessity of exercising individual energy and self-dependence, no one could be more ready than he was to recognise the value of that help and support for which all men are indebted to others in a greater or less degree.
Few men have the temper or the sentiment requisite for the support of intimate relations under such conditions. But his friendships occupied a very large place in Tocqueville's life. In them he found happiness and repose. To one of his friends he writes in 1844, "The remembrance of you is the more precious to me because it calms in me all those troubles of the soul that politics engender."
I have the highest respect for Tocqueville's opinion; but I do not happen to remember what he has written respecting secession. I well understand the difficulty for a confederation if any one state has a settled permanent determination to secede from it.
Guizot said of De Tocqueville, that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat. Mr. Mill was too penetrated by popular sympathies to be an aristocrat in De Tocqueville's sense, but he likewise was full of ideas and hopes which the unchecked or undirected course of democracy would defeat without chance of reparation. This fact he accepted, and from this he started. Mr.
Two years later, in 1858, a work began to appear which was less new and less polished than Tocqueville's, but is still more instructive for every student of politics. Duvergier de Hauranne had long experience of public life.
It is a manual alike for the political theorist and the practical statesman; and whatever changes our institutions may undergo, its value will remain undiminished. The volumes of Tocqueville's Inedited Works and Correspondence, with a Memoir by his friend M. Gustave de Beaumont, which have lately appeared in Paris, have, therefore, a special claim to the attention of American readers.
But, however great the value of his writings may be, a still greater value attaches to the character of the man himself, as it is displayed in these volumes. M. de Beaumont's brief and affectionate memoir of his friend, and Tocqueville's own letters, are not so much narratives of events as evidences of character. His life was, indeed, not marked with extraordinary incidents.
Flint very pertinently remarks: "One would think it had been discovered, that the population, the improvements, and the social happiness of our great political edifice, ought never to have been erected in the place of these habitations of cruelty." Geography, vol. i., p. 107. Idem. This is De Tocqueville's estimate. Democracy in America, vol. ii., chap. 10.
The system or rather anarchy according to which France was governed during this transitional period, may be read in that work of M. de Tocqueville's which I have already quoted, and which is accessible to all classes, through Mr. H. Reeve's excellent translation. Every student of history is, of course, well acquainted with that book.
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