al possibility,
will not give the sceptre of France. It will be seized by no one who
cannot pretend to an hereditary claim.

'What I fear,' continued Tocqueville, 'is that when this man feels the
ground crumbling under him, he will try the resource of war. It will be a
most dangerous experiment. Defeat, or even the alternation of success and
failure, which is the ordinary course of war, would be fatal to him; but
brilliant success might, as I have said before, establish him. It would
be playing double or quits. He is by nature a gambler. His
self-confidence, his reliance, not only on himself, but on his fortune,
exceeds even that of his uncle. He believes himself to have a great
military genius. He certainly planned war a year ago. I do not believe
that he has abandoned it now, though the general feeling of the country
forces him to suspend it. That feeling, however, he might overcome; he
might so contrive as to appear to be forced into hostilities; and such is
the intoxicating effect of military glory, that the Government which
would give us _that_ would be pardoned, whatever were its defects or its
crimes.

'It is your business, and that of Belgium, to put yourselves into such a
state of defence as to force him to make his spring on Italy. There he
can do you little harm. But to us Frenchmen the consequences of war
_must_ be calamitous. If we fail, they are national loss and humiliation.
If we succeed, they are slavery.'

'Of course,' I said, 'the corruption that infects the civil service must
in time extend to the army, and make it less fit for service.

'Of course it must,' answered Tocqueville. 'It will extend still sooner
to the navy? The _materiel_ of a force is more easily injured by jobbing
than the _personnel_. And in the navy the _materiel_ is the principal.

'Our naval strength has never been in proportion to our naval
expenditure, and is likely to be less and less so every year, at least
during every year of the _regne des fripons_.'

_Tuesday, May_ 24.--I breakfasted with Sir Henry Ellis and then went to
Tocqueville's.

I found there an elderly man, who did not remain long.

When he went, Tocqueville said, 'That is one of our provincial prefects.
He has been describing to us the state of public feeling in the South.
Contempt for the present Government, he tells us, is spreading there from
its headquarters, Paris.

'If the Corps Legislatif is dissolved, he expects the Opposition to
obtain a major