almost unlimited authority; but they scarcely ever availed themselves of it. I do not speak of the prerogatives of the nobility, of the authority of supreme courts of justice, of corporations and their chartered right, or of provincial privileges, which served to break the blows of the sovereign authority, and to maintain a spirit of resistance in the nation. Independently of these political institutions, which, however opposed they might be to personal liberty, served to keep alive the love of freedom in the mind of the public, and which may be esteemed to have been useful in this respectthe manners and opinions of the nation confined the royal authority within barriers which were not less powerful, although they were less conspicuous. Religion, the affections of the people, the benevolence of the prince, the sense of honour, family pride, provincial prejudices, custom, and public opinion limited the power of kings, and restrained their authority within an invisible circle. The constitution of nations was despotic at that time, but their manners were free. Princes had the right, but they had neither the means nor the desire, of doing whatever they pleased.

"But what now remains of those barriers which formerly arrested the aggressions of tyranny? Since religion has lost its empire over the souls of men, the most prominent boundary which divided good from evil is overthrown; the very elements of the moral world are indeterminate; the princes and the people of the earth are guided by chance, and none can define the natural limits of despotism and the bounds of license. Long revolutions have for ever destroyed the respect which surrounded the rulers of the State; and since they have been relieved from the burden of public esteem, princes may henceforward surrender themselves without fear to the seductions of arbitrary power.

"When kings find that the hearts of their subjects are turned towards them, they are clement, because they are conscious of their strength; and they are chary of the affections of their people, because the affection of their people is the bulwark of the throne. A mutual interchange of goodwill then takes place between the prince and the people, which resembles the gracious intercourse of domestic society. The subjects may murmur at the sovereign's decree, but they are grieved to displease him; and the sovereign chastises his subjects with the light hand of parental affection.

"But when once the spell of loyalty is broken in the tumult of revolution; when successive monarchs have crossed the throne, so as alternately to display to the people the weakness of their right and the harshness of their power, the sovereign is no longer regarded by any as the Father of the State, and he is feared by all as its master. If he be weak, he is despised; if he be strong, he is detested. He is himself full of animosity and alarm; he finds that he is a stranger in his own country, and he treats his subjects like conquered enemies.

"When the provinces and the towns formed so many different nations in the midst of their common country, each of them had a will of his own, which was opposed to the general spirit of subjection: but now that all the parts of the same empire, after having lost their immunities, their customs, their prejudices, their traditions, and their names, are subjected and accustomed to the same laws, it is not more difficult to oppress them collectively than it was formerly to oppress them singly.

"Whilst the nobles enjoyed their power, and, indeed, long after that power was lost, the honour of aristocracy conferred an extraordinary degree of force upon their personal opposition. They afforded instances of men who, notwithstanding their weakness, still entertained a high opinion of their personal value, and dared to cope single-handed with the efforts of the public authority. But at the present day, when all ranks are more and more confounded, when the individual disappears in the throng, and is easily lost in the midst of a common obscurity, when the honour of monarchy has almost lost its empire without being succeeded by public virtue, and when

nothing can enable man to rise above himself, who shall say at what point the exigencies of power and the servility of weakness will stop?

"As long as family feeling was kept alive, the antagonist of oppression was never alone; he looked about him, and found his clients, his hereditary friends and his kinsfolk. If this support was wanting, he was sustained by his ancestors, and animated by his posterity. But when patrimonial estates are divided, and when a few years suffice to confound the distinctions of a race, where can family feeling be found? What force can there be in the customs of a country which has changed, and is still perpetually changing, its aspect; in which every act of tyranny has a precedent, and every crime an example; in which there is nothing so old that its antiquity can save it from destruction, and nothing so unparalleled that its novelty can prevent it from being done? What resistance can be offered by manners of so pliant a make, that they have already often yielded? What strength can even public opinion have retained, when no twenty persons are connected by a common tie; when not a man, nor a family, nor chartered corporation, nor class, nor free institution, has the power of representing or exerting that opinion; and when every citizen-being equally weak, equally poor, and equally dependent-has only his personal impotence to oppose to the organised force of the Government?

"The annals of France furnish nothing analogous to the condition in which that country might then be thrown. But it may be more aptly assimilated to the times of old, and to those hideous eras of Roman oppression, when the manners of the people were corrupted, their traditions obliterated, their habits destroyed, their opinions shaken, and freedom, expelled from the laws, could find no refuge in the land; when nothing protected the citizens, and the citizens no longer protected themselves; when human nature was the sport of man, and princes wearied out the clemency of Heaven before they exhausted the patience of their subjects. Those who hope to revive the monarchy of Henry IV. or of Louis XIV., appear to me to be afflicted with mental blindness; and when I consider the present condition of several European nations-a condition to which all the others tend-I am led to believe that they will soon be left with no other alternative than democratic liberty, or the tyranny of the Cæsars."-TOCQUEVILLE, ii. 247.

We shall not stop to show how precisely these views of Tocqueville coincide with what we have invariably advanced, or to express the gratification we experience at finding these principles now embraced by the ablest of the French Democratic party, after the most enlightened view of American institutions. We hasten, therefore, to show that these results of the French Revolution, melancholy and depressing as they are, are nothing more than the accomplishment of what, forty-five years ago, Mr Burke prophesied of its ultimate effects.

"The policy of such barbarous victors," says Mr Burke, "who contemn a subdued people, and insult their inhabitants, ever has been to destroy all vestiges of the ancient country in religion, policy, laws, and manners, to confound all territorial limits, produce a general poverty, crush their nobles, princes, and pontiffs, to lay low everything which lifted its head above the level, or which could serve to combine or rally, in their distresses, the disbanded people under the standard of old opinion. They have made France free in the manner in which their ancient friends to the rights of mankind VOL. III. 2 A

freed Greece, Macedon, Gaul, and other nations. If their present project of a Republic should fail, all securities to a moderate freedom fail along with it; they have levelled and crushed together all the orders which they found under the monarchy: all the indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed, insomuch that if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendency in France, under this or any other dynasty, it will probably be, if not voluntarily tempered at setting out by the wise and virtuous counsels of the prince, the most completely arbitrary power that ever appeared on earth."-BURKE, v. 328, 333.

If we examine the history of the world with attention, we shall find that, amidst great occasional variations produced by secondary and inferior causes, two great powers have been at work from the earliest times; and, like the antagonist expansive and compressing force in physical nature, have, by their mutual and counteracting influence, produced the greatest revolutions and settlements in human affairs. These opposing forces are NORTHERN CONQUEST and CIVILISED DEMOCRACY. Their agency appears clear and forcible at the present times, and the spheres of their action are different; but mighty ultimate results are to attend their irresistible operation in the theatres destined by nature for their respective operation.

We

We, who have invariably and resolutely opposed the advances of democracy, and that equally when it raised its voice aloft on the seat of Government, as when it lurked under the specious guise of free trade or liberality, will not be accused of being blinded in favour of its effects. claim, therefore, full credit for sincerity, and deem some weight due to our opinion, when we assert that it is the great moving power in human affairs-the source of the greatest efforts of human genius--and, when duly restrained from running into excess, the grand instrument of human advancement. It is not from ignorance of, or insensibility to, its prodigious effects, that we have proved ourselves so resolute in resisting its undue expansion it is, on the contrary, from a full appreciation of them, from a thorough knowledge of the vast results, whether for good or evil, which it invariably produces.

It is the nature of the democratic passion to produce an inextinguishable degree of vigour and activity among the middle classes of society-to develop an unknown energy among their widespread ranks-to fill their bosoms with insatiable and often visionary projects of advancement and

amelioration, and inspire them with an ardent desire to raise themselves individually and collectively in the world. Thence the astonishing results-sometimes for good, sometimes for evil-which it produces. Its grand characteristic is energy, and energy not rousing the exertions merely of a portion of society, but awakening the dormant strength of millions; not producing merely the chivalrous valour of the highbred cavalier, but drawing forth "the might that slumbers in a peasant's arm." The greatest achievements of genius, the noblest efforts of heroism, that have illustrated the history of the species, have arisen from the efforts of this principle. Thence the fight of Marathon and the glories of Salamis-the genius of Greece and the conquests of Rome-the heroism of Sempach and the devotion of Haarlem-the paintings of Raphael and the poetry of Tassothe energy which covered with a velvet carpet the slopes of the Alps, and the industry which bridled the stormy seas of the German Ocean-the burning passions which carried the French legions to Cadiz and the Kremlin, and the sustained fortitude which gave to Britain the dominion of the waves. Thence, too, in its wilder and unrestrained excesses, the greatest crimes which have disfigured the dark annals of human wickedness-the massacres of Athens and the banishments of Florence- the carnage of Marius and the proscriptions of the Triumvirate the violence of Cromwell and the bloodshed of Robespierre.

As the democratic passion is thus a principle of such vital and searching energy, so it is from it, when acting under due regulation and control, that the greatest and most durable advances in social existence have sprung. Why are the shores of the Mediterranean the scene to which the pilgrim, from every quarter of the globe, journeys to visit at once the cradles of civilisation, the birthplace of arts, of arms, of philosophy, of poetry, and the scenes of their highest and most glorious achievements? Because freedom spread along its smiling shores; because the ruins of Athens and Sparta, of Rome and Carthage, of Tyre and Syracuse, lie on its margin; because civilisation, advancing with the white sails which glittered on its blue expanse, pierced, as if impelled by central heat, through the dark and barbarous regions of the Celtic race who peopled its shores.

What gave Rome the empire of the world, and brought the venerable ensigns bearing the words "Senatu populoque Romano" to the wall of Antoninus and the foot of Mount Atlas, the waters of the Euphrates and the Atlantic Ocean? Democratic vigour. Democratic vigour, be it observed, duly coerced by Patrician power; the insatiable ambition of successive consuls, guided by the wisdom of the senate; the unconquerable and inexhaustible bands which for centuries issued from the Roman Forum. What has spread the British dominion over the habitable globe, and converted the ocean into a peaceful lake for its internal carriage, and made the winds the instruments of its blessings to mankind, and spread its race in vast and inextinguishable multitudes through the New World? Democratic ambition. Democratic ambition, restrained and regulated at home by an adequate weight of aristocratic power; a government which, guided by the stability of the patrician, but invigorated by the activity of the plebeian race, steadily advanced in conquest, renown, and moral ascendency, till its fleets overspread the sea, and it has become a matter of certainty that half the globe must be peopled by its descendants.

The continued operation of this undying vigour and energy is still more clearly evinced in the Anglo-American race, which originally sprung from the stern Puritans of Charles I.'s age, which have developed all the peculiarities of the democratic character in unrestrained profusion amidst the boundless wastes which lie open to their enterprise. M. Tocqueville has described, with equal justice and eloquence, the extraordinary activity of these principles in the United States.

"The inhabitants of the United States are never fettered by the axioms of their profession; they escape from all the prejudices of their present station; they are not more attached to one line of operation than to another; they are not more prone to employ an old method than a new one; they have no rooted habits, and they easily shake off the influence which the habits of other nations might exercise upon their minds, from a conviction that their country is unlike any other, and that its situation is without a precedent in the world. America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion, and every movement seems an improvement. The idea of novelty is there indissolubly connected with the idea of amelioration. No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do.

"This perpetual change which goes on in the United States, these frequent vicissitudes of fortune, accompanied by such unforeseen fluctuations in private and in public wealth, serve to keep the minds of the citizens in a