be forced not merely to accept defeat, but to cry '_peccavi_.' The maxim
'_securus judicat orbis terrarum_' has no place in historical
criticism; and if it had, one nation is not the world, nor the next
generation a posterity on whose experience and impartiality reliance
might be placed.

M. de Tocqueville is known to the world chiefly by two great works. His
'Democracy in America' was the production of his early manhood. In New
England he saw democracy at its best and brightest; saw nothing of that
deterioration which the decay of the old Puritan severity, the infusion
of a strong foreign element, the corruption and the passions of the
Civil War, have confessedly caused. The colonial traditions and
principles were still in modified force; simple habits of life, a
general prevalence of competence, the absence of ostentatious wealth and
luxury, left women content to be mothers and housekeepers; a position of
which, as trustworthy witnesses allege, modern luxury, culture, and love
of leisure, have rendered them impatient; while the impossibility of
devolving their domestic duties upon servants makes the family a burden,
and maternity no longer the deepest instinct and strongest hope of
womanhood. He saw no beginning of that manifold change of morals and
manners which the survivors of an elder generation now regard with deep
dismay. His portrait of Democracy, as seen in New England, is decidedly
rose-coloured. He saw enough in the Middle and Southern States of the
working of democracy under different social conditions, to tinge that
picture with the hues of doubt, if not yet with the sombre colours of
deep apprehension.

How apt to be partial is the widest and closest political observation is
shown by the very partial lessons derived from the experience of the New
World. Few observe how signally the history of Central and South America
contradicts the inferences so confidently drawn from the United
States--or rather from the New England of yesterday, and the present
condition of California and the States bounded by the Lakes and the
Ohio, the Mississippi and the Alleghanies. Among the States of Spanish
and Portuguese speech and civilization--it would be too much to say
blood--the failure of democracy has been complete, glaring, and ruinous.
Social and political anarchy, utter insecurity of life and property,
incessant revolution and murderous war, have been its only fruits. The
happy accident of hereditary princes, except