ionally wise, able, and
forbearing, has barely saved Brazil. The one prosperous, solvent,
orderly State between the Rio Grande and Cape Horn is the aristocratic
republic of Chili. So large, striking, and impressive a fact can hardly
have escaped a thinker like Tocqueville, whose French birth and
experience protected him in great measure from the insular ignorance,
rather than arrogance, which leads the ablest English writers to base
their political philosophy exclusively upon Anglo-Saxon experience and
examples: yet it is strange to find so striking a lesson so lightly
touched by the wisest, widest, most reflective, and best-informed, among
the political teachers of his age.

In the _Ancien Regime_ we see the seeds of all that is worst and most
dangerous in the modern French polity: the hothouse which fostered into
a growth, unknown elsewhere, that passion of envy, which Tocqueville
regards as the radical vice, the paramount impulse, the fundamental
principle, of Democracy. The peculiar reasons for this dominant
sentiment of hatred and jealousy in the democracy of France will be
found in his own writings. Much as there was to admire in the old
nobility of France, the people saw it only in an aspect calculated to
excite unmingled hatred and contempt. It had ceased to govern, to render
any service in return for privileges, exemptions, and exactions so
odious, vexatious, and oppressive that no service could atone for them.
Even these were forgiven to the resident aristocracy of La Vendee. But
absentees supported by such exactions, an Order known to the people not
even by neglected duties and ill-directed interference, but solely by
demands and extortions unconnected with any remaining or remembered
functions, a class whose wealth and luxury were supported not by rents
or other returns paid by the tillers of the soil to its original owners,
holders, or 'lords,' but by rates, tithes, fines, heriots, monopolies
(to use the nearest English equivalents) levied for their benefit, and
levied in the worst possible way--what feelings could these excite among
a people consciously fainting beneath the load of taxes, _corvees_,
restrictions and imposts, fees and stamps, of which only a part ever
reached the empty Treasury of the State? Is it strange that so monstrous
a fabric, when those on whose living bodies it was built rose in revolt,
should have fallen with a great ruin, and have crushed all whom it had
sheltered? 'The guilt of a