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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.

You have made to me, my dear friend, an undeserved reproach. I compared England to the Continent, not Catholicism to Protestantism.

Read over my letter, and you will find that I talk of Christians of all denominations. This must include Catholics. In fact, I never met with an English Catholic who did not value, as much as any Protestant, the free institutions of his country, or who divided morality into two sections, one consisting of public virtues, which might be safely neglected, and the other of private duties, which alone need be observed. No Catholic, lay or clerical, thought this. I did not compare the religions, but the countries. I said only that I breathed freely in a country in which liberty and religion were united. And I said truly, for, from my youth, the spectacle of their disunion has oppressed my soul. I said this more than twenty years ago, in the introduction to my “Democratie.” I feel this now as I did in youth. It is the thought most constantly in my mind.

The feeling which I am going to mention is common, and seems to me symptomatic. “We have, indeed, lost political liberty, but we keep an unlimited liberty of anti-Catholic philosophy. That is enough; it supplies the place of all others. It is the highest development of man.”

What do our clergy, who delight in political neutrality and apathy, say to this? I venture to predict that in our days it will not be found safe to withdraw the human mind from political action. As soon as it ceases to act, it theorises most dangerously. The German school, pretending not to care for politics—indeed, to utterly despise them—so undermined the foundations of society, that all the German Governments, unsupported by principles or habits capable of resistance, fell at one moment, and under one blow.

A thousand kind regards to you and yours.