often found necessary of repressing or destroying their enemy,
when he was found in the person of a single despot.

When, in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville came to study Democracy in America,
the trial of nearly a half-century of the working of our system had been
made, and it had been proved, by many crucial tests, to be a government
of "liberty regulated by law," with such results in the development of
strength, in population, wealth, and military and commercial power, as
no age had ever witnessed.

[See Alexis De Tocqueville]

De Tocqueville had a special inquiry to prosecute, in his visit to
America, in which his generous and faithful soul and the powers of his
great intellect were engaged in the patriotic effort to secure to the
people of France the blessings that Democracy in America had ordained
and established throughout nearly the entire Western Hemisphere. He had
read the story of the French Revolution, much of which had been recently
written in the blood of men and women of great distinction who were
his progenitors; and had witnessed the agitations and terrors of the
Restoration and of the Second Republic, fruitful in crime and sacrifice,
and barren of any good to mankind.

He had just witnessed the spread of republican government through all
the vast continental possessions of Spain in America, and the loss of
her great colonies. He had seen that these revolutions were accomplished
almost without the shedding of blood, and he was filled with anxiety to
learn the causes that had placed republican government, in France, in
such contrast with Democracy in America.

De Tocqueville was scarcely thirty years old when he began his studies
of Democracy in America. It was a bold effort for one who had no special
training in government, or in the study of political economy, but he
had the example of Lafayette in establishing the military foundation of
these liberties, and of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton,
all of whom were young men, in building upon the Independence of the
United States that wisest and best plan of general government that was
ever devised for a free people.

He found that the American people, through their chosen representatives
who were instructed by their wisdom and experience and were supported
by their virtues--cultivated, purified and ennobled by self-reliance and
the love of God--had matured, in the excellent wisdom of their counsels,
a new plan of government, which embraced e