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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.

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TO N. W. SENIOR, ESQ.

I am somewhat angry with you, my dear Senior, for not having yet given us your news.* It is treating our friendship unfairly. I have not written to you because I doubted your following exactly your intended route, but I write to you at Athens, as I think that you must now be there. Your travels will be curious and instructive.

What say you of our friends the Turks? Was it worth while to spend so much money and to shed so much blood in order to retain in Europe savages who are ill disguised as civilized men? I am impatient to talk to you, and almost equally so to read you.

I shall have little to tell you; I have not stirred from home since I left England, and am leading the life of a gentleman farmer—a life which pleases me more and more every day, and would really make me happy, if my wife were not suffering from an obstinate neuralgic affection in the face. I fear that she may have to go to some mineral waters, which she would be sorry to do, for, as you know, she hates travelling, and does no justice to the reputation for wandering possessed by the English race.

I can tell you nothing on politics which you will not find in the newspapers.

As for India, you are out, not perhaps of your difficulties, but of your greatest dangers. This affair, and that of the Crimea, show how little sympathy there is for England abroad. There was everything to interest us in your success—similarity of race, of religion, and of civilization. Your loss of India would have served no cause but that of barbarism. Yet I venture to affirm that the whole Continent, though it detested the cruelties of your enemies, did not wish you to triumph.

Much of this is, without doubt, to be attributed to the evil passions which make men always desire the fall of the prosperous and the strong. But much belongs to a less dishonourable cause—to the conviction of all nations that England considers them only with reference to her own greatness; that she has less sympathy than any other modern nation; that she never notices what passes among foreigners, what they think, feel, suffer, or do, but with relation to the use which England can make of their actions, their sufferings, their feelings, or their thoughts; and that when she seems most to care for them she really cares only for herself. All this is exaggerated, but not without truth.

Kindest regards from us both to you and to Mrs. Senior.

[*]Mr. Senior was at this time in the East.—Tr.