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TO MRS. GROTE. - 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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Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


TO MRS. GROTE.

Tocqueville, July 24, 1850.

If I were ill-disposed, Madame, I might complain that, knowing me to be one of the most professed admirers of your genius, you did not yourself think of sending to me your pamphlet on pauperism, so that I was forced to ask for it through our friend Mr. Senior. But rather than quarrelling with you, I prefer thanking you for the pleasure which this little work has afforded to me. I received it as I was leaving Paris, and I read it on my arrival. I could not have spent the leisure imposed upon me by illness in a more profitable manner. In your pamphlet I find the good sense of the English economist rendered more acute and more brilliant by feminine wit and imagination; an improvement which it often greatly needs. You defend the conservative principles on which our ancient system of society in Europe is founded, and the liberty and the individual responsibility attendant upon it; you defend especially the institution of property. You are quite right; you can hardly conceive life without these primary laws, no more can I.

Yet I own, that this old world, beyond which we neither of us can see, appears to me to be almost worn out; the vast and venerable machine seems more out of gear every day; and though I cannot look forward, my faith in the continuance of the present is shaken. I learn from history, that not one of the men who witnessed the downfall of the religious and social organizations that have passed away, was able to guess or even to imagine what would ensue. Yet this did not prevent Christianity from succeeding to idolatry; servitude to slavery; the barbarians from taking the place of Roman civilization, and feudalism in turn ejecting the barbarians. Each of these changes occurred without having been anticipated by any of the writers in the times immediately preceding these total revolutions. Who, then, can affirm that any one social system is essential, and that another is impossible? But it is no less the duty of honest people to stand up for the only system which they understand, and even to die for it if a better be not shown to them.

Mr. Grote continues to send me his excellent and most interesting “History of Greece;” I should regret not having yet thanked him for the latter volumes if I had not now the opportunity of conveying my thanks through you. I have just finished his eighth volume (the last that I have received); it is as full as the earlier volumes of facts that were unknown, and views that were new to me, giving me a different and often an opposite impression of the Greeks. Till now I never thoroughly understood Socrates or the ancient Sophists. I am amazed by the erudition, and astonished by the power of abstraction, which such a work must have required, those two qualities being seldom found in conjuction. Remember me very kindly to him. Madame de Tocqueville sends her affectionate regards. We are neither of us in very good health, though we are not exactly ill. . . .