and the millionaire cannot occupy precisely the station to which they conceive themselves entitled? Much to them, doubtless; they naturally bewail their insulation in very touching language, and get a number of congenial spirits to condole with them: and to chorus the common saying, that America is not the country for gentlemen. One is half tempted to wish that she might never become So. But I am not one of those who undervalue the character of the gentleman, or rejoice in its ostracism, if such is its real lot under democracies. I should be glad to see the most cultivated intellects at the head of affairs. Only, if this is incompatible, at least at present, with the possession of self-government by the uncultivated, I would rather lose the first advantage than the second. I believe it to be far better that the million should arise every day to the assured enjoyment of competency and freedom, and the consciousness of assured improvement in their own condition and that of their children, than that the ablest and loftiest minds of the country should have the barren satisfaction of ruling that million as hopeless and grovelling proletaries. You love France, Monsieur De Maistre, and hold her people, political changes notwithstanding, for the leading nation of Europe at all times: in your bold hyperbole, 'The kingdom of France ranks next to the kingdom of Heaven.' I loved her dearly also, under that 'ancien régime' with which I was familiar; partly, because she was the friend of my struggling country (and, for this reason in great measure, I scarcely wished as strongly as a true democrat should for the success of that Revolution of which I saw the commencement); but more for her intrinsic qualities, for the ineffable charm of her high society in which I, an obscure stranger, was received as a guest of honour: for the extraordinary brilliancy of those leading spirits of hers which then gave the step to all the

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civilised world. If a community were happy in proportion to the comparative eminence of those who were recognised as its chiefs, assuredly France was at the height of social prosperity. Such men as Quesnay, Turgot, Necker, not only counselled, but controlled more or less, her economical policy. The impulse to the abolition of abuses, the improvement of institutions, was given by the great school of whom Voltaire passes as the nominal head, though not then the most influential among them. And if their tendencies were too precipitate, these were held in check by a Church which, after all that could be said against it, was pure in the main in conduct and elevated in sentiment; by a noblesse whose polish could not be overrated, whose substantial good qualities, the honour, temperance, and philanthropy which distinguished great numbers among them, have hardly received due justice. All this I saw, and admired. But what lay beneath it? The

effect of this kind of society' (as I said at the time) appears to be the depressing multitudes below the savage state, in order that a few may be raised above it.' The France of that day probably held some fifteen millions of human beings, out of her twenty-five millions, whose condition was abject to such a degree that if the wellmeaning courtiers and philosophers who argued daily about it had actually realised it by personal knowledge, their very blood would have been chilled within them. These wretches existed on the merest pittance which could keep body and soul together, and maintain that amount of physical strength which could furnish the requisite surplus wealth to the owners of their soil. Their very appearance read an awful lesson to the serious observer. They were dull, suspicious, sullen of aspect. Their occasional gaiety, of which so much was said, was almost a more melancholy spectacle than their misery. Their religion

was a trifling superstition. Their law was the scourge, the torture, and the wheel. The few among them who possessed abilities sufficient to emerge in any degree from under such a weight of evil, used their wit only to grasp together, and conceal from the eye of the tax-gatherer,† any wretched store which they might contrive to accumulate, and cherished at the bottom of their hearts an unappeasable hatred towards those whose superfluity mocked their nakedness. Their women-as richly endowed at birth with the capacity to charm, as the loveliest sylphs who fluttered at Versailles-were turned, in a few years of their young lives, into mere haglike drudges, from whom the eye of the passer-by turned away. Their children... But I need not pursue so repulsive a subject. You know, and Heaven knows, that I do not exaggerate. We are told that the Revolution of which we have spoken has in some degree permanently raised the condition of these

It is commonly supposed that torture was abolished by Louis XVI. : but this is a mistake. The 'question préparatoire' was got rid of; but the 'question préalable,' the more cruel of the two (to extort the names of accomplices), remained until the Revolution; not indeed with the goodwill of the king, but in consequence of the opposition of the lawyers to reform. As late as 1788, two councillors of the Parliament at Rouen assisted at the torture of a woman, which seems to have lasted several hours. See Berriat Saint Prix' remarkable essay 'Des Tribunaux et de la Procédure au grand Criminel,' 1859. It has been the fashion of late among English writers to represent our criminal jurisprudence of the last century as peculiarly barbarous. Those who read the hideous details contained in this essay, however they may be prejudiced against the memory of the Georges, will acknowledge that our usages were humanity itself compared with what then prevailed in great part of the continent.

† 'Un élu (an official) est venu dans le village où est ma maison de campagne, et m'a dit que cette paroisse devait être fort augmentée à la taille cette année qu'il y avait remarqué le paysan plus gras qu'ailleurs, qu'il y avait vu sur le pas des portes des plumages de volaille; qu'on y faisait done bonne chère, qu'on y était bien. ... Voilà ce qui décourage le paysan: voilà ce qui cause les malheurs de la nation: voilà sur quoi pleurerait bien Henri Quatre, s'il vivait encore.'-Journal du Marq. d'Argenson, vol. ii. p. 256 (in 1750).

children of the soil: and if so, that is its justification in the eyes of reason and humanity. But much, apparently, still remains to be done; and until these millions are blest with enjoyment for their present, and [what I regard as still more important] hope for the future, does it really avail a single atom that the political writers of France are the clearest of logicians, her statesmen unrivalled in wit and resources, her upper ten thousand,' or upper million if you please, the cream of the world? Give me instead the Pennsylvania of my youth, with her people luxuriating in present affluence and in the anticipation of greater, though their election 'tickets' had no better names to show than those of the merest Jonathan and Ezekiel who ever figured on a stump; or give me (if you please) the herdsmen of Lucerne and Uri, or the burghers of a Dutch province; who have succeeded for centuries in conducting their own affairs tolerably well, though they never produced a statesman of whom I have heard, and suffered under a lamentable deficiency of laced coats. To this day, when the French nation, or even the English nation, is spoken of, the mind of the speaker is really fixed, in nine cases out of ten, only on the higher and more cultivated class in each community. When men speak of the American nation, they mean the whole people.

De Maistre. You forget, or you leave out of sight, the two main circumstances which distinguished your position in America from that of the older communities of the world, and have up to this time enabled you to enjoy great material progress, without its being necessary for you to check in any way the development of your equalising institutions. I mean your abundance of fertile land, which rendered political discontent free from danger; and the existence of slavery, which furnished you with a supply of labourers without political claims or rights.

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Franklin. As to your first circumstance, I need only point to the condition of eastern Europe in reply. There are vast unoccupied regions there, under the government of Austria and Russia, possessed of great fertility of soil, and a climate substantially as good as that of our Northern States: and whose rulers have been for a century or so enlightened enough to desire immigration, and encourage it by privileges. And yet they cannot succeed. Of the vast overflow which annually takes place from the overpeopled parts of Europe, scarcely a few driblets filter eastward and these driblets only stagnate in consumptive, unsuccessful colonies, in the forest or the steppe. The rest finds its way chiefly to our shores; and why? Simply, however your politicians may dislike it, from the invincible attraction of freedom: from their preference of a state of things in which every one helps to govern himself in a rough and ready way, to one in which he is governed, and cared for, by princes, nobles, Chambers, doctrinaires, officials, and professors. The remainder of these dumb seekers, who can scarcely name what they want, but the real object of whose inarticulate desires is liberty, proceed to establish themselves under British colonial government. England-monarchical and aristocratic as she vaunts herself-with that thorough practical good sense, which in her seems to accompany a thorough deficiency in logic—while at home she listens with complacency to those who vituperate democracy, allows it to establish itself, absolutely without control, in all the regions under her sway to which her children resort. The first thing an English colonist does is to set up a newspaper, in which he boasts that he is the member of a great empire, the inheritor of an ancient constitution, and not a mere anarchist, nor even as these Americans; and then he proceeds to establish his commonwealth on the