Econlib

The Library

Other Sites

Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow TO M. GUSTAVE DE BEAUMONT. - Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 2

Return to Title Page for Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 2

Search this Title:

Also in the Library:

Subject Area: Political Theory

TO M. GUSTAVE DE BEAUMONT. - 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.

About Liberty Fund:

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 M. GUSTAVE DE BEAUMONT.

. . . What is now going on in the East is a new and, perhaps, one of the last phases of the Turkish Empire. . . . This affair and many others bring into relief the gradual change which has come over the English temperament, which is daily becoming more pacific, less irritable and less proud, than at any previous period in modern history. This I believe to be only the result of the great revolution which has been at work there—slowly indeed, but as irresistibly as everywhere else—the predominance of the middle classes over the aristocracy, and of the commercial and manufacturing element over the agricultural and real property one. Will this be a good or an evil? Your grandchildren will discuss this question. A society calmer and duller, more tranquil and less heroic; such, no doubt, will be the spectacle presented to our successors, who probably will not see anything new in it. For one must stand as we do, at the point where the two roads branch off, to be able to see both distinctly.

My health is becoming gradually re-established; I am again hard at work, but as yet I have produced nothing definite. I am lost in an ocean of research, in the middle of which I am sometimes worn out and disheartened. It is not only that I am out of heart about myself, but with mankind in general; with the limits and uncertainty of our knowledge, with its incessant repetition in different words for the last three thousand years; in fact, with the insignificance of our race, of our world, of our fate, of what we call our great revolutions and our great public affairs. . . Still, one must work; for it is our sole resource for forgetting the misery of surviving the empire of one’s own opinions, and of becoming more of a stranger in one’s own country than abroad.