Econlib

The Library

Other Sites

 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow TO N. W. SENIOR, ESQ. - 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 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.

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 N. W. SENIOR, ESQ.

Tocqueville, March 8, 1857.

I shall write to you, my dear Senior, from hence. We cannot tear ourselves away from the charm of our retreat, or from a thousand little employments.

The papers tell us that your ministry has been beaten on the Chinese war. It seems to me to have been an ill-chosen battle-field. The war was, perhaps, somewhat wantonly begun, and very roughly managed; but the fault lay with distant and subordinate agents. Now that it has begun, no cabinet can avoid carrying it on vigorously. The existing ministry will do as well for this as any other. As there is no line of policy to be changed, the upsetting it is merely to put in the people who are now out.

If the ministry fall, the man least to be pitied will be our friend Lewis. He will go out after having obtained a brilliant triumph on his own ground, and he will enjoy the good fortune, rare to public men, of quitting power, greater than he was when he took it, and with the enviable reputation of owing his greatness, not merely to his talents, but also to the respect and the confidence which he has universally inspired.

All this delights me; for I feel towards him and towards all his family a true friendship.

To return to China.

It seems to me that the relations between that country and Europe are changed, and dangerously changed.

Till now Europe has had to deal only with a Chinese government—the most wretched of governments. Now you will find opposed to you a people, and a people, however miserable and corrupt, is invincible on its own territory, if it be supported and impelled by common and violent passions.

Yet I should be sorry to die before I have seen China open to the eyes as well as to the arms of Europe.

Do you believe in a dissolution? If so, when?

A thousand regards to Mrs. Grote, to the great historian, to the Reeves, and generally to all who are kind enough to remember my existence.

I delight in the prospect of meeting you in Paris; yet I fear that you will find it dull. All that I hear from the great town shows me that never, at least during the last two hundred years, has intellectual life been less active.

If there be talent in the official circles, it is not the talent of conversation, and among those who formerly possessed that talent, there is so much torpidity, such want of interest on public affairs, such ignorance as to what is passing, and so little wish to hear about it, that no one, I am told, knows on what subject to talk, nor how to make that subject amusing. Your conversation, perhaps, may put souls into these dead bodies. Come and try to work this miracle.