7
the selfish ambition of the country gravitates towards it, as it does in despotic countries towards the monarch: the people, like the despot, is pursued with adulation and sycophancy, and the corrupting effects of power fully keep pace with its improving and ennobling influences."
Now, if this be the inevitable tendency of Democracy in America, as it manifests itself at the present day, I cannot help thinking that it was rather disingenuous to make use of De Tocqueville's evidence in favour of those Democratic institutions, as you have done in the following portion of your first speech on the Reform Bill, seeing that De Tocqueville could speak only of what he saw thirty-two years ago, whereas we have the later and far more valuable accumulated experience of what has taken place in the "Model Republic" from that period down to the present day:—
"Let me refer hon. gentlemen to Tocqueville, who is so continually quoted when he says anything uncomplimentary to Democracy, that those who have not read him might mistake him for an enemy of it, instead of its discriminating but sincere friend, Tocqueville says that though the various legislatures are perpetually making mistakes, they are perpetually correcting them too, and that the evil, such as it is, is far outweighed by the salutary effects of the general tendency of their legislation, which is maintained, in a degree unknown elsewhere, in the direction of the interests of the people. Not that vague abstraction, the good of the country, but the actual, positive, well-being of the living human creatures who compose the population."
This is certainly most complimentary to American Democracy on the part of M. De Tocqueville; but how will it bear the test of examination? You have told us in your essay "On Representative Government" that "a Government is to be judged by its action upon men, and by its action upon things." Apply this test to the sanitary legislation of Great Britain and the United States, and you will find that the limited aristocracy of this country, in its administrative action, has been much more successful in promoting "the actual, positive well-being of the living human creatures who compose the population" of Great Britain, than the unlimited Democracy
