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There was no mention of mother, aunt, governess, or maid throughout. Bijou had gone away from home with friends who had let her amuse herself in her own fashion; and at home she was what De Tocqueville has pronounced "the freest thing in the world, an American girl in her father's house." Yet it was a liberty that was worlds removed from license.
It is not to be wondered at that foreigners fail to find our country interesting, and that the only good book of American travels is that of De Tocqueville, who deals chiefly with abstract ideas. It is possible to conceive minds so constituted that they may reach before long the end of their interest in the number of shoes, yards of cotton, and the like, which we produce in a year.
There has been an occasional great Frenchman of modern times who has raised the cry of Duty; but his voice has been as that of one crying in the wilderness. De Tocqueville was one of such; but, like all men of his stamp, he was proscribed, imprisoned, and driven from public life.
Among more recent French statesmen with whom, however, literature has been their profession as much as politics may be mentioned De Tocqueville, Thiers, Guizot, and Lamartine, while Napoleon III. challenged a place in the Academy by his 'Life of Caesar. Literature has also been the chief solace of our greatest English statesmen.
Tocqueville, thus anticipating the Revolution, was more afflicted and disappointed than surprised, when it overthrew the monarchy in February. He had comprehended beforehand that its character was to be rather social than simply political. He had determined to accept it as a necessary evil.
Simpson also knew the great French statesmen of her day, i.e., the middle period of the century, 1840 to 1870. He was the friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, and of Thiers and Guizot, and of most of the statesmen and men of letters who were their contemporaries. The leading Italian statesmen, such as Cavour, were also his friends.
All of you, Christians, protestant and orthodox, neo-revelators, charlatans and dupes, listen to the first verse of the humanitarian hymn upon God's mercy: "In proportion as the principle of division of labor receives complete application, the worker becomes weaker, narrower, and more dependent. Art advances: the artisan recedes!" Tocqueville, "Democracy in America."
When Marianne was eighteen, they tell me, she was the prettiest girl in Pont du Sable, that is to say, she was prettier than Emilienne Dagèt at Bar la Rose, or than Berthe Pavoisiér, the daughter of the miller at Tocqueville, who is now in Paris. At eighteen, Marianne was slim and blonde; moreover, she was as bold as a hawk, and smiled as easily as she lied.
"I know no country," says Tocqueville, who was here in 1831, "in which there is so little independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America." Tocqueville recurs to the point again and again. He cannot disguise his surprise at it, and it tinged his whole philosophy and his book. The timidity of the Americans of this era was a thing which intelligent foreigners could not understand.
It is the men with whom the love of liberty is founded upon intellectual and moral convictions, not those with whom it is a hot and reckless passion, that are the most to be feared by a ruler whose power is based on the ignorance, the fears, the selfish ambitions, and the material interests of the people whom he flatters and corrupts. Tocqueville was born a thinker.
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