barism," from 1795 to 1799, were not more pernicious than what had gone before.
The passage asserting that the discovery had recently been made in America that a republic must have a president is not written in earnest. So eminent a student of politics knows that the Americans discovered no such thing, but adopted a president, being used to a governor in the several States, and that "Oranje boven!" and "Down with the pensionary!" was not the formula of a new philosophy. Republics since then have prospered without presidents, and have perished by them. Any reader impervious to irony whom the authority of a great name might tempt to take the remark for an axiom, may profitably meditate Félix Pyat's speech of 5th October 1848, comparing it with Tocqueville's reply in defence of the presidential theory. If I may quote a demagogue against an imperialist, here is the sort of thing he would find : "Qu'est-ce que la republique des Etats-Unis ? Le mot l'indique ; une république federale, girondine, passez-moi le mot, une agregation d'etats ou corps divers, une nation d'alluvions et d'atterissement, composee successivement des parties hétérogènes, insolidaires. Le danger, en France, est en sens inverse des Etats-Unis. Aux Etats-Unis il est dans la dispersion des provinces, et il fallait un président : en France, il est dans la concentration ; il ne faut qu'une assemblée."
The philosopher of national greatness, when he celebrates the triumph of British arms, has a manifest peril to shun. It would be congenial to him to adopt Pitt's last speech, proudly graven on the medal commemorating the peace : "Se ipsam virtute, Europam exemplo." But he is guarded not to inflate the glory and the spoil of England, not to remind us of the time when an Englishman scorned to fight less than three Frenchmen starving on their diet of frogs. He yields no countenance to Wellington's gratifying contention, that Napoleon was driven out of Germany by his own movement on Vittoria. The familiar names, Vittoria, Salamanca, Toulouse, do not occur on his pages. In one or two places, the American,
