ave more of this quality than veterans. The
Maison du Roi, whose charge at Steenkirk Macaulay has so well described,
consisted of boys of eighteen.'

'I am re-editing,' I said, 'my old articles. Among them is one written in
1841 on the National Character of France, England, and America,[1] as
displayed towards foreign nations. I have not much to change in what I
have said of England or of America. As they have increased in strength
they have both become still more arrogant, unjust, and shameless.

'England has perhaps become a little more prudent America a little less
so. But France seems to me to be altered. I described her as a soldier
with all the faults of that unsocial character. As ambitious, rapacious,
eager for nothing but military glory and territorial aggrandisement. She
seems now to have become moderate and pacific, and to be devoted rather
to the arts of peace than to those of war.'

'France _is_ changed,' answered Tocqueville, 'and when compared with the
France of Louis XIV., or of Napoleon, was already changed when you wrote,
though the war-cry raised for political purposes in 1840 deceived
you. At the same time, I will not deny that military glory would, more
than any other merit, even _now_ strengthen a Government, and that
military humiliation would inevitably destroy one. Nor must you overrate
the unpopularity of the last war. Only a few even of the higher classes
understood its motives. "Que diable veut cette guerre?" said my country
neighbour to me; "si c'etait contre les Anglais--mais _avec_ les Anglais,
et pour le Grand Turc, qu'est-ce que cela peut signifier?" But when they
saw that it cost only men, that they were not invaded or overtaxed, and
that prices rose, they got reconciled to it.

'It was only the speculators of Paris that were tired of it. And if,
instead of the Crimea, we had fought near our own frontiers, or for some
visible purpose, all our military passions, bad and good, would have
broken out.'

[Footnote 1: This article is republished in the _Historical and
Philosophical Essays_. Longmans: 1865.--ED.]

_Wednesday, May_ 13.--Tocqueville came in after breakfast, and I walked
with him in the shade of the green walls or arcades of the Tuileries
chestnuts.

We talked of the Montijos, which led our conversation to Merimee and V.

'Both of them,' said Tocqueville, 'were the friends of
Countess Montijo, the mother.

'V. was among the last persons who knew Eugenie as Countess Th