of these exempted properties; the residence or non-residence of their owners; the amount of ecclesiastical or mortmain lands, &c. Not only this: the circular further ordered a calculation of the amount of taxation which would fall upon the privileged parties supposing there were no exemptions! As M. de Tocqueville remarks, c'était inflammer chaque homme en particulier par le récit de ses misères, lui en désigner du doigt les auteurs, • l'enhardir par la vue de leur petit nombre, et pénétrer jusqu'au fond de son cœur pour y allumer la cupidité, l'envie, et la ' haine.'

Louis XVI. paved the way for the Revolution, not only by his earnest benevolence and the reforms which that benevolence induced him to permit or to inaugurate, but as much perhaps by the despotic mode in which he endeavoured to carry his good designs into effect. In pursuing his objects, he never scrupled to infringe any civil right or any private property. His Government set the example, on a greater scale than any preceding one, of seizing whatever lands were needed for public improvements, and of postponing almost indefinitely the indemnification of the proprietors. This lesson of contempt for individual claims when the wants or interest of the state were concerned, was not lost upon the people, when they in their turn became despots. Ce qui accrut le mal' (observes M. de Tocqueville) fut précisément l'intention pure et désintéressée qui faisait agir le roi et ses ministres; car il n'y a pas de plus dangereux 'exemple que celui de la violence exercée pour le bien et par les gens de bien.' Thus everything contributed to bring about the grand and sad catastrophe:-the vices of the old régime; the tardy and imprudent, but most earnest endeavours to reform those vices; the intolerable past; the softened and ameliorated present; the intoxicating visions of the future; the abortive efforts of practical administrators; a universal and inextinguishable hatred of all special privileges, because those privileges had ceased to have any meaning, mitigation, or justification; oppression and injustice so complicated and inwoven with the social system as scarcely to be removeable by any skill without a shock that must convulse all existing things; and a centralised Government, which had left no political entity or power between the people and the crown.

The remarkable and constant preference manifested by the French people for equality rather than liberty,-the salient fact that whereas, since the first great convulsion of 1789, the desire for the former has been universal, unvarying, and unconquerable, the taste for the latter has been only occasional, partial,

superficial, and easily suppressed or suffered to fall into abeyance, the truth, in a word, that while the hatred of castes and privileges has always assumed and preserved the character of a passion, the love of free institutions has rarely got beyond a lukewarm and transient fancy,-constitutes a phenomenon which could not fail to occupy M. de Tocqueville's most earnest attention, and his observations upon it should be carefully studied. We have already traced the causes which gave birth to the love of equality and fostered it into a fanaticism so fierce that it would take no denial, would accept any contest, and would pay any price. We have seen that long previous to 1789 the nation had come to be not only ruled, but guided, fettered, tutored, assisted in its simplest actions, led by the hand in its most trivial movements, by a centralised and not ill-intentioned bureaucracy which penetrated every corner of the land, and pervaded every relation of civil life. We have seen, too, that the economists, the radical reformers, of France, not only never dreamed of regarding this bureaucracy as an enemy or an obstacle to the improvements they desired and planned, but actually cherished its radiating despotism as their greatest auxiliary, and the surest instrument of those improvements. We know now, and so do our neighbours,- for sixty years of convulsive struggles after the impossible have taught them - that such an administrative system, though no bar to the most searching and beneficent reforms, and quite compatible with the most remorseless and universal equality, can by no ingenuity be reconciled with institutions which embody and secure freedom, nor can it be forced into coexistence with them for more than a few brief and fleeting periods. But when the States General were summoned, this truth had not made its way into the minds of the innovators. The speculations and discussions which had been long afloat had familiarised the minds of men with ideas far beyond that of redress and reform the desire to be well-governed was mingled with another still more fascinating, which for awhile threw it into the background-the desire to govern and to guide themselves. Political observers confirmed the wish which political theorizers had created; and the example of England and America was enthusiastically held up for admiration by statesmen and writers, who forgot to mark that both in England and America centralisation was a thing alien and unknown. The great leaders of that time loved liberty heartily, and many of them loved it for itself and not for the blessings believed to follow in its train. They felt themselves and believed their countrymen sincere and magnanimous enough to deserve free

institutions, and to be able to wield them; but the result showed that centralisation was a plant of older growth and of deeper root than liberty, and that the habits of the inveterate past were more powerful over men's minds than even the influence of the new divinity. Constitution has succeeded constitution, government has supplanted government, revolution after revolution has swept over the surface of the soil and sometimes cut deep into its substance, but since 1789, the old administrative organisation, ready to the hand of each, has been scarcely touched or modified by any.

'Several times, from the commencement of the Revolution to the present day, the passion of liberty has been seen in France to expire, to revive-and then to expire again, again to revive. Thus will it long be with a passion so inexperienced and ill-directed, so easily discouraged, alarmed, and vanquished; a passion so superficial and so transient. During the whole of this period, the passion for equality has never ceased to occupy that deep-seated place in the hearts of the French people which it was the first to seize: it clings to the feelings they cherish most fondly. Whilst the love of freedom frequently changes its aspect, wanes and waxes, grows or declines with the course of events, that other passion is still the same, ever attracted to the same object with the same obstinate and indiscriminating ardour, ready to make any sacrifice to those who allow it to sate its desires, and to furnish to a government which will favour and will flatter it, the habits, the opinions, and the laws which Despotism requires to enable it to reign.' (P. 383.)

The truth is-and M. de Tocqueville has not shrunk from stating it with courageous distinctness-that the love of liberty was never felt in its purity and simplicity by any but the more enlightened and exceptional spirits of the French nation: with the mass of Frenchmen it was a derivative and not a primary passion: freedom was desired for its supposed results, not for its intrinsic value-for what it would bring, not for what it was;it was sought for as a means of ensuring the blessing of good and just government-not as a blessing in itself so precious as to be cheap at the price of many blunders and of much misgovernment -of some injustice, of unceasing vigilance, of occasional turmoil, agitation, and convulsion. The goddess was loved not for her beauty, but for her dower. The gospel was followed for the loaves and fishes. But, as our author expounds in a passage of remarkable and masculine eloquence, the love of independence and self-government, which has its origin merely in an angry sense of the evils of oppression, is never durable; because despotism may reform those evils, or remove their pressure from the masses, as well as freedom, and in some cases more promptly and more easily. The desire for liberty which

springs from the thirst for material well-being has an existence alike transient and precarious, because though freedom alone can permanently procure prosperity and wealth to a people, prosperity and wealth are by no means always the first fruits of freedom, and despotism may often be wise and vigorous enough to confer them for a time. If any large proportion of M. de Tocqueville's countrymen shared the noble and spirit-stirring sentiments we are about to quote, there could be little fear for France's future, and little likelihood of the long duration of her present.

'That which at all times has so strongly attached the affection of certain men is the attraction of freedom itself, its native charms independent of its gifts-the pleasure of speaking, acting, and breathing without restraint, under no master but God and the law. He who seeks in freedom aught but herself is fit only to serve.

'There are nations which have indefatigably pursued her through every sort of peril and hardship. They loved her not for her material gifts; they regard herself as a gift so precious and so necessary that no other could console them for the loss of that which con

soles them for the loss of everything else. Others grow weary of freedom in the midst of their prosperities; they allow her to be snatched without resistance from their hands, lest they should sacrifice by an effort that well-being which she had bestowed upon them. For them to remain free, nothing was wanting but a taste for freedom. I attempt no analysis of that lofty sentiment to those who feel it not. It enters of its own accord into the large hearts God has prepared to receive it; it fills them, it enraptures them; but to the meaner minds which have never felt it, it is past finding out.' (P. 309.)

It may seem ungracious, where so much has been given, to feel the want of more, but there is one omission in this volume which, we hope, M. de Tocqueville may be induced to supply in a subsequent edition. Nothing is said upon the intellectual and moral education of the upper classes of France under the old monarchy; yet few things could have exercised a more potent influence on the Revolution. Not only did that event indirectly take its rise and derive many of its peculiar features from the character of the higher classes, (including under that denomination all the noble and the cultivated,) but these classes took an active and a leading part in its earlier stages. Few popular assemblies have contained a greater number of men remarkable both for talents and acquirements, and the result which we call character, than the States General and the Constituent Assembly. They gave its special lustre and its lofty promise to the opening years of that great political experiment; they shed over it the halo of their genius; they stamped it with the

guarantee of their wide knowledge and sometimes of their strong sense; they redeemed its follies by their high-minded eloquence and wisdom; and when they fell, all that was noble, wise, or sober fell with them. Their views were often Utopian; their practical experience often imperfect or absolutely deficient; and their rashness often headstrong and unpardonable; but in all the higher qualities of intelligence and virtue they had no successors among those who followed them in the subsequent progress of that mighty movement. Mr. Macaulay somewhere makes the observation, that there is usually a wide difference between the men who make revolutions and the men whom revolutions make-between those who originate and those who spring out of them; - and this discrepancy was never more remarkably displayed than in the various phases of the Revolution of 1789. Its initiators were darkly wise' and irregularly, but still unquestionably, great: its products and continuators were for the most part insane or ferocious dwarfs. It would have been especially interesting to have known the early training of the men thus sharply distinguished from their successors in the same career. In all probability we should find that, amid much frivolity and dissipation, their youth had been nourished by the perennial sources of generous and humane lore, that they had drunk deep of the Greek and Roman springs, and had sat as reverent pupils at the feet of the immortal Past.

Perhaps, among all its excellences, the characteristic which gives to the work of M. de Tocqueville its especial charm, is the proof, perceptible in every page, that the writer, while studying thus profoundly the lessons of the past, had the actual France of the day ever before his eyes; and that his researches have been dictated less by the taste of the philosopher than by the enduring affections of the patriot. A certain tone of sadness-yet not of hopelessness-pervades the book; the grave, stern, melancholy of the statesman, who sees clearly the causes of the actual degradation of his countrymen, and is compelled to acknowledge how deeply they lie rooted in the moral wants and vices of the national character;-who reso¬ lutely refuses to despair of the advent of a better day, but recognises, without any attempt at self-delusion, how dreary and toilsome a tract of desert and of twilight has to be traversed before that better day shall dawn. Scarcely any passage is so affecting as that wherein he admits and ventures to depict without extenuation or periphrasis that degeneracy of courage and of nobleness, that lapse from high and gallant aspiration, that substitution of the love of ignominious ease and physical enjoyments for ambition, and loyalty, and thirst for glory, which