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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.

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TO M. GUSTAVE DE BEAUMONT.

. . . I authorized you beforehand to keep “Haxthausen” long enough to read him carefully. The book deserves attention from everybody, and especially from you; for though it will weary you to death, it is full of instruction, and especially as to the Selavonic races. In the manners which he describes, there are some curious characteristics of that race which you ought to know.

——— has just sent me a thick book, full of research and talent, in which he endeavours to prove that all that takes place in the world may be explained by the differences of race. I do not believe a word of it; and yet I think that there is in every nation, whether in consequence of race or of an education which has lasted for centuries, some peculiarity, tenacious if not permanent, which combines with all the events that befall it, and is seen both in good and in bad fortune, in every period of its history. This is especially true of the half-civilized nations which have long lived apart. To speak of them properly, it is necessary to thoroughly discern the features which distinguish them from the other members of the human family.

There is also in “Haxthausen” a picture which would alone be enough to make up for the nuisance of reading his book—that of a people still in the leading-strings of serfdom and of property in common, and yet enjoying, to a certain extent, the institutions, and even in some respects sharing the spirit, of the democratic and highly civilized times in which we live. You see them ascripti glebœ, as ours were in the sixteenth century, and yet they suffer from the perpetual restlessness of the Americans. The real reason why this author is so tiresome, is not so much his prolix, diffuse, and fatiguing style, as his subject. Among these Russian lower classes everything is absolutely uniform—opinions, laws, customs, and even the smallest external details. It is an America without liberty or intelligence, a frightful species of democracy.