submit to a court-martial.'

'I thought,' I said, 'that he was really ill.'

'That is not the general opinion,' said Tocqueville. 'He showed himself
at a ball directly after his return, with no outward symptoms of ill
health.'

The conversation turned on English politics.

'So many of my friendships,' said Tocqueville, 'and so many of my
sympathies, are English, that what is passing _in_ your country, and
_respecting_ your country, gives me great pain, and greater anxiety. To
us, whom unhappily experience has rendered sensitive of approaching
storms, your last six months have a frightfully revolutionary appearance.

'There is with you, as there was with us in 1847, a general _malaise_ in
the midst of general prosperity. Your people seem, as was the case with
ours, to have become tired of their public men, and to be losing faith in
their institutions. What else do these complaints of what is called "the
system" mean? When you complain that the Government patronage is bartered
for political support, that the dunces of a family are selected for the
public service, and selected expressly because they could not get on in
an open profession; that as their places are a sort of property, they are
promoted only by seniority, and never dismissed for any, except for some
moral, delinquency; that therefore the seniors in all your departments
are old men, whose original dulness has been cherished by a life without
the stimulus of hope or fear, you describe a vessel which seems to have
become too crazy to endure anything but the calmest sea and the most
favourable winds. You have tried its sea-worthiness in one department,
your military organisation, and you find that it literally falls to
pieces. You are incapable of managing a line of operations extending only
seven miles from its base. The next storm may attack your Colonial
Administration. Will that stand any better? Altogether your machinery
seems throughout out of gear. If you set to work actively and fearlessly,
without reference to private interests, or to private expectations, or to
private feelings, to repair, remove and replace, you may escape our
misfortunes; but I see no proofs that you are sufficiently bold, or
indeed that you are sufficiently alarmed. Then as to what is passing
here. A year ago we probably overrated your military power. I believe
that now we most mischievously underrate it. A year ago nothing alarmed
us more than a whisper of the chance of a war wi