THE Concluding volumes of this work have lately appeared. In the two preceding ones, duly noticed by us, M. de Tocqueville examined the positive institutions of America. He had then a solid body of facts on which to rest his observations; and the clearness with which he analysed and exposed to view the working and tendencies of the democratic state of society exhibited in the United States, carried all his readers with him. [Whether they liked or disliked the inferences to which his remarks seemed to point, they acknowledged, either promptly or reluctantly, that his state. ments, and his comments upon them, were fair, luminous, and most eminently instructive.

His treatment of the second part of his subject now under our review, is not, we conjecture, likely to meet with the same universal approbation and applause. These volumes are purely reflective; yet their author hardly commentates on any specific matter or matters whatsoever; but generalizes on wide and abstract systems and principles, which, from their very nature, reject those detailed investigations and solutions to which he would subject them. To give to generalization the preciseness and applicability of practical deductions, is quite impossible; and this is what M. de Tocqueville has attempted to do. Montesquieu, in his Esprit des Lois, generalizes all along, it is true; but he does so with a substratum of longstanding, indubitable, firmly established facts under him: he never moves for a moment from off this safe ground, except in one or two instances, to fall, as time has proved, into error; and besides, his generalizations occupy their proper place where they are good and profitable, high above and far removed from the movement and passions of the active world. The work on our table has reminded us of the chef-d'œuvre of Montesquieu. M. de Tocqueville seems to us to possess that patient thoughtful temper of mind, that masculine comprehensive ness of intelligence, that lucidity of perception and expression, which might

NO. CCC. VOL. XLVIII.

perhaps have enabled him, had he lived in earlier times propitious to great literary undertakings, to have written such a book as the Esprit des Lois.

We are not sensible of any exaggeration in this remark; at the same time we pronounce, though with some diffidence and hesitation, his last production to be a failure. Its failure consists in its conception and plan, not in its execution.]

The design of this production has been to take all the great questions which are actually agitating the civilized world, and to make of them (questions!!) postulates and premises from which to deduce certain consequences. Monsieur de Tocqueville classes these very complex questions under two heads-Aristocracy and Democracy; and of these two primary elements of society, separating them in their predominance carefully from each other, he describes and predicates the effects with the utmost assurance. Herein, then, is the great original vice of his work; viz. that it has no foundation of admitted truths, or, as his foregoing volumes had, of substantial indisputable facts to stand upon. It is a superstructure of theorizings without any base to support it, and these theorizings M. de Tocqueville strives, from his first page to his last, to reduce and to bring down into close immediate application to the present unsettled and stormy state of the public mind in Europe-to gather them, as it were, into a body or code of reflections, for the prudential guidance of the perplexed politicians of this age. But his theoretic generalizations will not, of course, bear this confinement to special views and preconceptions; they burst into shivers under the unnatural constraint, and leave their author in strange bewilderment. Another peculiarity of this distinguished person tends also to give a confused uncertainty, quite correspondent to the inherent character of his theme, to the opinions he expresses: it is thisthat he is a conscientious reasoner: and thus it happens that his strong overmastering love of truth, wrestles continually with the propositions he

2 G

would establish, and instead of contributing in any measure to their establishment, or to bring them even to a specious close, renders them more doubtful than previous to examination they might appear to be. His dissertations, in consequence, are a labyrinth of doubts; not a formation, but a suspension of judgment respecting every topic therein discussed, is the result in which they terminate. For our own parts, we think this may be as it should

be.

Decisions touching the transformation society is said to be undergoing, from the conflict of aristocratic and democratic principles, cannot be pronounced off-hand. In essaying to arrive at these decisions, however, with nothing but the distempered instabilities of recent and actual experience whereon to build them, M. de Tocqueville has broken down completely. His subject, contemplated through the medium through which he contemplates it-the troubled medium of a period described as one of transition is, so to speak, made up of refractions which will not submit to condensation, which refuse to converge towards the focus he would arbitrarily assign

them.

But from his work itself it is time we furnish an extract. Our first, somewhat abridged in our translation, will show the manner in which M. de Tocqueville discriminates equality from liberty, and an aristocratic from a democratic society. His two volumes are but an expansion of the two chapters from which we are about to quote the most striking passages

"The first," he says, "the most vivid passion that springs out of equality of condition, is the love of equality itself. I speak of it therefore first. Every one has remarked that at the present time, and especially in France, the passion for equaHity occupies with every new day a larger and larger place in the human heart. It has been said a hundred times that our contemporaries entertain a much more ⚫ardent and tenacious love of equality than of liberty; but the causes of this fact have not yet been clearly pointed out. This I shall now endeavour to do.

"An extreme point may be imagined in which liberty and equality meet and : mix. I take for a supposition that all the citizens of a state concur in its government, and that each citizen has an equal right so to do. In this case, no distinctions existing between man and man, the exer

cise of tyrannic power would be impossible; men would be perfectly free, because they would be perfectly equal; and they would all be perfectly equal, because they would be completely free. It is towards the realization of this ideal that a This ideal is

democratic people tend. the most perfect form that equality can possibly assume; but it may have other forms, which, without being so complete, may be hardly less dear to democracies.

66 Equality may be established in civil

society, and not prevail in the political

world. A species of equality may also be established in the political world without political liberty. Men may be equal indiscriminately among themselves, with the exception of one, who may be the master of all, and who may choose equally from among all the agents of his power. Other hypotheses may, too, be easily conceived, by which a very wide equality might consort with institutions more or less free, or

not free at all.

"The passion which men entertain for liberty, and that which they entertain for equality, are in fact two distinct things; and I hesitate not to say, that among democratic nations they are two unequal things.

in every age some dominant passion or

"A little reflection will show us, that

fact exists which sums up in itself all po pular sentiments and ideas. Now, the dominant passion which characterises the present age is the love of equality. Ask not what charm men in democratic epochs find in being equal, nor the particular reasons they may have for attaching themselves more obstinately to equality than to any of the other benefits they may derive from society. Equality forms the distinctive tendency of the period in which they live. This alone suffices to explain why they prefer it to every thing else. But, independent of this reason, there are others which dispose men habitually to prize equality above liberty.

"If a people could ever destroy or even diminish equality after it had struck firm root among them, they could accomplish this only by long and painful efforts; by modifying their social state, by abolishing their laws, by remodelling all their thoughts, by changing their habits and revolutionizing their manners. To lose political liberty, however, it suffices not to grasp it firmly. The hold on it once loosened, and it is gone. Equality, therefore, is cherished, not solely on its own account, but because it seems as if naturally it would last for ever. The blessings, too, which liberty procures, are of slow growth, and it is not always easy to trace them to their source; whilst the advantages of

equality are felt instantly, and their origin cannot be for a moment mistaken. Political liberty gives from time to time sublime pleasures to a certain number of citizens. Equality furnishes every day a multitude of small gratifications to every individual. Men can only enjoy political liberty at the cost of some sacrifices, and it is to be attained only by vigorous exertions. But the pleasures of equality are spontaneous. All the little incidents of private life give occasion to them every day, and to enjoy them it is only necessary to live.

"I am of opinion that all democratic

nations have a natural taste for liberty Left to themselves they love it, they culti vate it, and it is with grief they see it escape them. But for equality their passion is ardent, insatiable, invincible, eternal; they covet equality in liberty; but if they cannot so obtain it, they will hug it to their bosoms even in slavery. Poverty, subjection, barbarism they will endure, but not aristocracy.

"These observations are true at all times, but more especially so in ours. All who struggle against the irresistible power of equality, will by it be destroyed. In our days, liberty cannot be established without its support, and despotism itself can rest on no other foundation.

"Aristocratic institutions connect every man very straitly with many of his contemporaries. When classes are very distinct and kept separate, each of these classes becomes to those who belong to it a little country, more visible and more dear to him than the nation at large; and as in aristocratic societies all the citizens have their

fixed stations, and rise in due gradations according to their ranks, the one above the other, it results that each individual among them has always some one above him whose protection is needful to him, and some one below him whose assistance he may claim.

"Men, then, who live in aristocratic ages, have nearly always social affinities beyond themselves, and are often disposed to forget their personal interests. In democratic ages, on the contrary, when the duties of each man towards the human race are more clear, disinterested devotion to particular persons becomes more rare: the bond of the affections is at the same time widened and loosened.

"Among democratic people new families spring up incessantly from obscurity, into which others fall. The course of time is - interrupted every moment, the vestige of generations is effaced. Oblivion falls upon preceding periods, and of those which are to come no idea can be formed. Things

close at hand alone interest.

"Aristocracy has made a long chain of

all the citizens of a state which has reached from the peasant to the king. Democracy is breaking this chain, and putting each iink of it apart. Thus democracy not only makes every man forget his ancestors, but hides from him his descendants, and separates him from his contemporaries; it shuts him up in himself, imprisons him in the solitude of his own heart."

Now, in the above extract, equality nated from each other. and liberty are very finely discrimiHitherto we

felt convinced the two things have in the popular apprehension, they been confounded together; and that, continue to be so.

Such

The mistake has thus arisen. Every beneficial advance society, in every age, has made, has been owing to a large measure of spontaneous energy being left to the people. This, when legalized, is called civil liberty; and by this liberty, wherever it has been most effectually carried out, so ample a scope is given to individual volitions and exertions, that, by a natural association of ideas, its extension to its utmost bounds is suggested, of which equality to a loose thinker may seem to be the logical consequence. ity to contain the first germ of liberty, a one will also confusedly deem equalas well as to be liberty's ultimate consummation, and will reason that, if its intermediate effects are so good, its full realization must be most excellent. In this manner, liberty and equality have come to be considered as but different degrees and states of the same principle. It is presupposed by great numbers that the two objects are so radically identic that they cannot be disjoined and as liberty certainly does tend towards as real an equalization of men as their social relations will admit of, the assumption receives thereby countenance which greatly embarrasses those who have an internal conviction of its falsehood.

To draw, then, a strong line between the two principles, we would remark that equality resembles and differs from liberty precisely in the same way that despotism resembles and differs from government. Equality and despotism are both, in their purity, impracticable abstract conceptions. In exercise, they lose necessarily their ideal perfection, yet their abstract standard is for ever before them, and gives a tension to their working, which must needs be oppressive in the extreme. Liberty and government, on

the contrary, are compound complex things. They contain no abstruse ideal; they have no reference to any abstract standard of right. In prac tice and experience alone, they have their existence. They have no philosophic or metaphysic prototype to which they are constantly striving to conform. They are, in their own nature, compromises, accommodations, temperaments. They are thus plastic to all the varying conditions of humanity. They have no absoluteness, no seminal absolute theory to be developed and carried out within them. They have consequently freedom large spaces to move in; whilst equality and despotism are both for ever under the direct constraint and inflicting the most rigorous tyranny, being continually strained up to attain a point of completeness which is perfectly unattainable.

M. de Tocqueville, then, has done good service in distinguishing so broadly, equality from liberty with respect to the practical effects of each; but we regret he has not discerned the still broader distinction that exists between their essential properties. Equality, as he has indeed cursorily admitted, contains an ideal; liberty contains none. This consideration alone shows them not only to be different from, but incompatible with each other.

We have at present to request the attention of our readers to the signification M. de Tocqueville affixes to the terms democratic and aristocratic ages. It might be thought that the title of a democratic age could only apply to a period or a country wherein democratic institutions and forms of government had exclusively or predominantly prevailed, or did so now; and as, in one part of the work before us, all allusion to the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, and to the Swiss and Italian republics, is expressly omitted, it might be inferred that the denomination could only be applicable to the United States of America during the greater part of one unelapsed century. And that, on the other hand, the title of an aristocratic age could be applied solely to nations and epochs, wherein aristocratic forms and institutions had absorbed or domineered over all others, or continued to have the precedency. But by this supposition it would seem that the mixed form of government, which,

especially in modern times, has obtained so extensive an establishment, is left totally out of consideration ; and, in truth, totally out of consideration M. de Tocqueville leaves it. Yet does he not give the obvious signification we have mentioned to the words aristocratic and democratic ages.

By the phrase, aristocratic age, he means any age in which the aristocratic spirit has ascendantly pervaded society, which spirit has ever had a body of positive organs whereby to act. By a democratic age, he means any age in which a democratic spirit of that peculiar sort that embraces equality as its sine quâ non, has been ascendant, though this spirit has been without any legally organized means of action. By understanding his words in this sense, can one alone conceive how nations the plural noun being always used) are spoken of as democratic, seeing there is only one nation to whom the epithet, in its strict acceptation, can be appropriate; and even in this vaguer sense, the word ages (in the plural) manifests a wonderful intrepidity of assumption; for one century has not yet gone by since the American declaration of independence; and it was subsequent to that event-at the outbreaking of the French Revolution in the year 1789that the democratic spirit, which M. de Tocqueville has exclusively in his thoughts, was first fairly developed in France, and acquired here and there more or less favour throughout Europe. It is certain, nevertheless, that it is this very spirit, so newly exhibited, which, even granting for a moment (a concession we cannot seriously make) that it has displayed itself in America, has there but an experiment unproved to appeal to in its support, and is every where else but a wild fermentation of society, that M. de Tocqueville denominates emphatically, and very absurdly to our thinking, "democratic nations, democratic ages." Aristocratic times, in which he seems to include the mixed times of aristocracy and democracy, are held up by him as passed or passing. The pure democratic future occupies his whole attention; and this inevitable future, according to him, is strangely spoken of as having already existed for centuries.

This observation leads us to note another fundamental vice in the plan of M. de Tocqueville's work; it is