that the world has ever seen.

The tendency of Democracy to naked despotism is obvious enough in the
recent history of France; but sanguine democrats ascribe the special
experience of France to the intense centralization inherited, as
Tocqueville shows, by the Republic, the Constitutional Monarchy and the
Empire from the _Ancien Regime_; the absence of any local school of
practical discussion, mutual tolerance, and co-operation; the bitterness
of factions fighting not for administrative or legislative control, but
for fundamentally incompatible forms of Government,--to anything rather
than the unfitness of the French nation for Teutonic liberties.
Conservative pessimists and democratic optimists can only find a common
ground, a test which both will accept, in the experience of the United
States. Whatever vices are found in American democracy must be inherent
in democracy itself; and it must be granted that, looking on the surface
of public life, the larger facts of national history, and the material
condition of the people, there is no evidence, obvious to the hasty
observer, of interference with personal freedom, of any demoralizing or
weakening influence on individual character exercised by political or
social equality. It is outside of the proper field of politics, in facts
invisible to distant observers, and not visible at a glance to
thoughtful travellers, that we must seek for proof of the bearing of
democratic institutions and ideas upon personal and social liberty, upon
the maintenance of individual and collective rights.

Upon such a point the remarks of a leisurely, thoughtful, cultivated
writer, like Richard Grant White, a man who had enjoyed exceptional
opportunities of comparing the effect upon daily life of English
aristocracy and American democracy, are more instructive than the
elaborate treatises of political theorists or the generalizations of
historians. The testimony of such writers bears out the inference which
careful students might draw from English history, that the influence of
a local and landed aristocracy is far more favourable, than that even of
a landed democracy, to the jealous and resolute assertion of legal
rights, to a strenuous and successful resistance to the encroachments of
power, social or political, upon the property, the comfort, the liberty,
and the privileges, of individuals or communities. The moral of Mr.
Grant White's sketches of English and American life is, that the Englis