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

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TO M. DE CORCELLE. - 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. DE CORCELLE.

I have so much to say on England, which I have revisited after a lapse of twenty years, and with a larger experience of men, that it would take many letters to describe the impressions and the ideas produced by the scenes which I witnessed.

The spectacle is the greatest that the world affords, though every portion of it is not great. It contains indeed things unknown in the rest of Europe—things which consoled me.

I have no doubt that there exist among the lower orders some feelings hostile to their superiors; but they do not show themselves. What does show itself is the union of all the educated classes, from the humblest tradesman to the highest noble, to defend society, and to use freely their joint efforts to manage as well as possible its affairs. I do not envy the wealth or the power of England, but I envy this union. For the first time, after many years, I breathed freely, undisturbed by the hatreds and the jealousies between different classes, which, after destroying our happiness, have destroyed our liberty.

I enjoyed, too, in England what I have long been deprived of—a union between the religious and the political world, between public and private virtue, between Christianity and liberty. I heard the members of every denomination advocate free institutions, as necessary not only to the welfare but to the morality of society. Never, on any occasion, did I see what prevails on the Continent, the moral monstrosity of pious men applauding despotism, leaving to infidels the cause of liberty.