action. I like vivid emotions, but I
seek them in real life, in society, in travelling, in business, but above
all in political business. There is no happiness comparable to political
success, when your own excitement is justified by the magnitude of the
questions at issue, and is doubled and redoubled by the sympathy of your
supporters. Having enjoyed that, I am ashamed of being excited by the
visionary sorrows of heroes and heroines.

'I had a friend,' he continued, 'a Benedictine, who is now ninety-seven.
He was, therefore, about thirteen when Louis XVI. began to reign. He is a
man of talents and knowledge, has always lived in the world, has attended
to all that he has seen and heard, and is still unimpaired in mind, and
so strong in body that when I leave him he goes down to embrace me, after
the fashion of the eighteenth century, at the bottom of his staircase.'

'And what effect,' I asked, 'has the contemplation of seventy years of
revolution produced in him? Does he look back, like Talleyrand, to the
_ancien regime_ as a golden age?'

'He admits,' said Tocqueville, 'the material superiority of our own age,
but he believes that, intellectually and morally, we are far inferior to
our grandfathers. And I agree with him. Those seventy years of revolution
have destroyed our courage, our hopefulness, our self-reliance, our
public spirit, and, as respects by far the majority of the higher
classes, our passions, except the vulgarest and most selfish ones--vanity
and covetousness. Even ambition seems extinct. The men who seek power,
seek it not for itself, not as the means of doing good to their country,
but as a means of getting money and flatterers.

'It is remarkable,' he continued, 'that women whose influence is
generally greatest under despotisms, have none now. They have lost it,
partly in consequence of the gross vulgarity of our dominant passions,
and partly from their own nullity. They are like London houses, all built
and furnished on exactly the same model, and that a most uninteresting
one. Whether a girl is bred up at home or in a convent, she has the same
masters, gets a smattering of the same accomplishments, reads the same
dull books, and contributes to society the same little contingent of
superficial information.

'When a young lady comes out I know beforehand how her mother and her
aunts will describe her. "Elle a les gouts simples. Elle est pieuse. Elle
aime la campagne. Elle aime la lecture. Elle