ons upon the
tendencies and consequences, the prospects and passions, the strength
and weakness of democracy, could well be more valuable than those which
the painter of Democracy in America--after the experience of many years
in the public life of France, in the Representative Chamber of the
Orleans Monarchy, and in the Legislature of the Republic,--delivered for
the benefit of readers far removed by time and distance, during the
latter months of the rickety infancy of that ill-starred Government and
the first period of the Second Empire. Tocqueville spoke from a point of
vantage, such as few other men have attained, upon a theme which he had
studied profoundly in youth, and upon which Fate had ever since been
writing elaborate commentaries. He spoke with a mind naturally calm,
candid, and judicial, enriched by a deeper knowledge than any other
Continental writer enjoyed of the working of popular institutions in
England and America, matured by the experience of a lifetime; spoke
while the most critical experiments in democratic Constitutionalism and
democratic Caesarism were being worked out before his eyes.

Founding a so-called Constitutional Monarchy upon a corruption as gross
as that of Walpole, Louis Phillippe had rendered his power absolute at
the price of sapping its foundation; and Tocqueville had predicted the
Revolution long before accident precipitated it--predicted it as an
inevitable result of the corruption he denounced, and indicated the
forces of silent discontent which were sure to overthrow it. In 1848,
and still more in 1871, the people of France at large turned
instinctively to those natural leaders whom at all other times they had
so persistently ostracized. Alarmed in the first case by an unexpected
and undesired triumph of the Parisian populace--in the second, chastened
by a great national disaster, without definite views or objects of their
own--they deliberately trusted their interests to the larger landowners,
whose interests must coincide with theirs; to the men of hereditary
culture, of thoughtful habits, and wider experience, in whom they
recognized a natural capacity to deal with problems that bewildered
themselves, with events that had taken them utterly unawares. But, save
at such times, and under the sobering influence of such lessons,
equality, and not liberty, is the root of French Democracy. To equality,
liberty is readily and unhesitatingly sacrificed.

_'"Egalite,"_ said Tocq