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Tocqueville himself wrote to a friend "There is no time of life at which one can wholly cease from action, for effort without one's self, and still more effort within, is equally necessary, if not more so, when we grow old, as it is in youth. I compare man in this world to a traveller journeying without ceasing towards a colder and colder region; the higher he goes, the faster he ought to walk.
Take that commonness of mind and tone, which friendly foreign critics, from De Tocqueville to Bryce, have indicated as one of the dangers of our democracy. This commonness of mind and tone is often one of the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a levelling down instead of a levelling up. Take the tyranny of the majority, to which Mr. Bryce has devoted one of his most suggestive chapters.
General Rochambeau tapped his snuffbox meditatively, like a man in two minds. But he kept a sidelong eye upon Dorothea, as she turned to acknowledge a bow from the Vicomte de Tocqueville. The Vicomte, with an air of amused contempt, was choosing a steak for his dinner, using his gold-ferruled walking-stick to direct the butcher how to cut it out, while his servant stood ready with a plate.
From the 21st of December, 1620, there existed on the shores of the New World the beginning of a free people free through the powerful influence of the Gospel. All who have studied the United States with sincerity, will ratify the opinion of M. de Tocqueville: "America is the place, of all others, where the Christian religion has preserved the most power over souls."
We can hardly have a better authority on this point than Tocqueville. No one felt more profoundly or more bitterly the iniquity of what had been done; but he was under no illusion about the sentiments of the people. The Constitution, he says, was thoroughly unpopular.
Tocqueville, a sensible and somewhat impartial writer, is the only political foreign reasoner who has done justice to Canada; but it is par parenthèse only; and even his powers of mind and of reasoning, nurtured as they have been in republicanism, fail to convince fearless hearts that democracy is a human necessity.
The judicious Tocqueville long ago made the remark that the work of the consulate and the empire consisted more particularly in the clothing with new words of the greater part of the institutions of the past that is to say, in replacing words evoking disagreeable images in the imagination of the crowd by other words of which the novelty prevented such evocations.
M. de Beaumont's notice of the life of Tocqueville, and Tocqueville's own later correspondence, appear to a thoughtful reader as accusations against Imperial despotism, as protests against the wrongs from which freedom is now suffering in France.
The Scotchman describes and discusses the American commonwealth of to-day, the Frenchman that of sixty years ago. There is an instructive difference in the methods of the two writers, Tocqueville being inclined to draw deductions from ingenious generalizations and to explain as natural results of democracy sundry American characteristics that require a different explanation.
In the trial of the king adverse points are slurred over, as if a historian could hold a brief. A more powerful writer of conservative history appeared about the same time in Heinrich von Sybel. About the middle of the fifties, when Sybel's earlier volumes were coming out, the deeper studies began in France with Tocqueville.
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