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TO N. W. SENIOR, ESQ. - Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 2 [1861]

Edition used:

Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated from the French by the translator of Napoleon’s Correspondence with King Joseph. With large Additions. In Two Volumes (London: Macamillan, 1861). 2 vols.

Part of: Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, 2 vols.

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TO N. W. SENIOR, ESQ.

Many thanks for your route; not that I hope to fall in with you in Italy, but because I hope to be able to meet you in Paris. I shall be delighted to see you again after so long an absence, and to talk over with you all that has been going on, and is going on in the world.

You will find France calm, and not unprosperous, but anxious; men’s minds have been subject for some time to a strange uneasiness. In the midst of a tranquillity more profound than any that we have enjoyed for a very long time, the idea that our present position is unstable besets them. As for myself, though not without alarm, I am less anxious. I believe that our social edifice will continue to rest on its present basis, because no one, even if he wish to change its foundation, can point out another. But yet the state of public feeling disturbs me.

The middle classes, constantly exposed to the solicitations of the government, have gradually assumed towards the rest of the nation the position of a little aristocracy, with all the corruption of the ancient aristocracy, and without its higher feelings. I feel ashamed of obeying such a vulgar aristocracy, and if this feeling should prevail among the lower classes it may produce great calamities.

And yet how can a government be prevented from using corruption when the nature of our constituencies makes corruption so convenient, and our centralization makes it so easy? The fact is, that we are trying an experiment of which I cannot foresee the result. We are trying to employ at the same time two instruments which, I believe, have never been combined before; an elected assembly and a highly centralized executive. It is the greatest problem of modern times. We have proposed it to the world, but it has not yet been solved.

I am anxious for your inferences from what you have seen in Germany, and are now seeing in Italy. Kind and affectionate regards.