The Online Library of Liberty

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• The Predictions of Hamilton and De Tocqueville.
• I.: The Ideas and Predictions of 1788.
• II.: De Tocqueville and His Book.
• III.: De Tocqueville’s View of the United States.
• IV.: De Tocqueville’s Impressions.
• V.: Examination of De Tocqueville’s Views and Predictions.

THE PREDICTIONS OF HAMILTON AND DE TOCQUEVILLE.

A student of American institutions who desires to discover what have been the main tendencies ruling and guiding their development, may find that the most dramatic and not the least instructive method of conducting his inquiry is to examine what were the views held, and the predictions delivered, at different points in the growth of the Republic, by acute and well-informed observers. The contemporary views of such men as to the tendencies which prevailed in their own day and the results to be expected from such tendencies have a value that no analysis made by us now, with our present lights, our knowledge of what has actually followed, could possess, because we cannot help reading into the records of the past the results of all subsequent experience.

To do this with any approach to completeness would be a laborious undertaking, for one would have to search through a large number of writings, some of them fugitive writings, in order to gather and present adequate materials for determining the theories and beliefs generally prevalent at any given period. I attempt nothing so ambitious. I desire merely to indicate, by a comparatively simple example, how such a method may be profitably followed, disclaiming any pretensions to have sought to exhaust even the obvious and familiar materials which all students of American history possess.

For this purpose, then, I will take two famous books—the one written at the very birth of the Union by those who watched its cradle, and recording incidentally, and therefore all the more faithfully, the impressions and anticipations of the friends and enemies of the infant Constitution; the other a careful study of its provisions and practical working by a singularly fair and penetrating European philosopher. I choose these books not only because both are specially representative and of rare literary merit, but because they are easily accessible to European readers, who may, by referring to their pages, supply the omissions which want of space will compel me to make, and may thereby obtain a more complete and graphic transcript of contemporary opinion. One of these books is the Federalist—a series of letters recommending the new Constitution for adoption to the people of New York, written in 1788 by Hamilton, Madison and Jay. The other, which falls almost exactly half-way between 1788 and our own time, is the Democracy in America of Alexis de Tocqueville.