ave not closed his eyes
to the numerous evils which they brought in their train. Modern times,
with their general activity, vast achievements, and boundless
anticipations, have produced their full effect on his thoughtful mind;
but they have not rendered him insensible to the perils with which they
are fraught. He is a Burke without his imagination--a Machiavelli
without his crimes.

M. De Tocqueville, it is well known, is a firm believer in the progress
of society to a general system of equality and popular government. He
thinks that, for better or for worse, this tendency is inevitable; that
all efforts to resist it are vain, and that true wisdom consists in
accommodating ourselves to the new order of things, and making the
transition with as little confusion and individual distress as may be.
America he considers as the type of what Europe is to become; though he
has grievous misgivings as to the final result of such a prostration of
the great interests of society as has there taken place, and is too
well-read a scholar not to know that it was in the institutions of the
Byzantine empire that a similar levelling resulted in ancient times. But
being thus a devout believer, if not in the doctrine of perfectibility,
at least in that of ceaseless progress towards democracy, his opinions
are of the highest value when he portrays the perils with which the new
order of things is attended. Alone of all the moderns, he has fixed the
public attention upon the real danger of purely republican institutions;
he first has discerned in their working in America, where it is that the
lasting peril is to be apprehended. Passing by the bloodshed, suffering,
and confiscations with which the transition from aristocratic ascendency
to democratic power is necessarily attended, he has examined with a
scrutinising eye the practical working of the latter system in the
United States, where it had been long established and was in pacific
undisputed sovereignty. He has demonstrated that in such circumstances,
it is not the _weakness_ but the _strength_ of the ruling power in the
state which is the great danger, and that the many-headed despot, acting
by means of a subservient press and servile juries, speedily becomes as
formidable to real freedom as ever Eastern sultaun with his despotic
power and armed guards has proved.

The works of this very eminent writer, however, are by no means of equal
merit. The last two volumes of his "Democratie en