is of no virtue, being dependent on the will of any one recalcitrant State; consequently the Americans are constantly threatened with a return of the state of anarchy from which they were delivered by the Constitution.

We might go further; but we think our readers will by this time agree with us, that M. de Tocqueville's "religious terror" of social equality, imperceptibly to himself, warped his judgment. We propose to show presently some of the effects of his false conclusions.

With his hereditary prejudices, it is perhaps unfortunate that his visit to this country took place just at the moment when the great convulsion, whose heavings have not yet subsided, was beginning to stir the minds of men. Assailed on all sides by the clashing doctrines of contending parties; misled, or bewildered, by the specious fallacies of Calhoun and his adherents; alarmed at the growth of levelling ideas which had, not long before, rent his native country, he was but too ready to seek, in the probable preponderance of State rights, a last hope for the old conservative doctrines which were struggling at home against the two extremes of popular license and the despotism of a single ruler. He accordingly misunderstood the vacillation of the Executive when the State of South Carolina boldly put forward pretensions to a right to nullify the decrees of Congress, and asserted the sovereignty she claimed never to have parted with. He attributed the unwillingness of Congress to deal summarily with such a case to a consciousness of weakness, whereas it grew out of love of the Union, and the desire to stave off as long as possible, by temporizing and compromise, the dreaded moment when the question of nationality must be met. All men felt a dread of what many saw to be inevitable, and hoped to pass the bitter draught to another generation. The gifted author had hardly closed his eyes on earthly things, when the momentous problem he had pondered with such anxious solicitude was solved.

So long as there was hope of preserving the Constitution by mildness and forbearance, the people of the United States held back from the fated contest. Once convinced that the Union was seriously assailed, and the existence of the government

endangered, they sprang to their feet, and scattered to the winds the whole fabric of sophistries which had muddled the brains of political dreamers at home, and fed the hopes of the enemies of freedom the world over. Where are now the visions of Calhoun? Where the cobweb arguments of pragmatical lawyers, who, blinded by prejudice or slaves of literal construction, could not see the difference between a traitor with arms in his hands and a political partisan in ordinary times? Where is now the godlike institution which formed the corner-stone of Alexander Stephens's new empire? Where the nation which, according to high English authority, Jefferson Davis founded?

It is not a little remarkable, too, that an act, passed, it is true, since M. de Tocqueville's visit, in which the supremacy of the Federal government was pushed the farthest, was carried through Congress by the unanimous vote of the Southern members. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was called for by the slaveholders, as necessary for the protection of their Constitutional rights, and as the price of their continued loyalty to the Union. It is only necessary to cite the provisions of this bill to show the utter hollowness of the pretence that the States, as such, had a right to override the enactments of Congress. The old act of 1793 provided that the runaway slave should be arrested and brought before any judge of a court of record, whether national or State, or any simple justice of the peace, who were authorized to surrender him, with no testimony but that of the claimant or his agent, while the testimony of the person claimed was not received, nor a trial by jury allowed. This would seem to be a pretty summary mode of proceeding, but it was not enough. The judges of the State courts and the justices of the peace were not so tractable as could be wished, and the old law had nearly fallen into desuetude, when, in 1850, what was called the Compromise was got up, of which the new law formed a part. The penalty for resisting or impeding the execution of the law, which by the old act was a fine of $500, was by the new one a fine of $1,000, with imprisonment not exceeding six months, besides $1,000 to be recovered in a civil suit for each slave aided or harbored. But the clause which struck at the very heart of State rights and

nullification was that which substituted for the old courts of record and justices of the peace, who were mostly State officers, a set of commissioners, to be appointed by the government at Washington, and responsible to it only, thus disregarding or ignoring entirely the pretension of State sovereignty. Could such a clause have been passed in a body which considered itself as representing merely a confederation of independent States, without a word of remonstrance on that ground? Certainly not; yet ghastly as the act was, and abhorrent to the feelings of many Northern members, no such objection was made, for the very good reason that there was no authority for making it in the Constitution. What would Mr. James M. Mason of Virginia, the father of this act, and now the impersonation of Secession, have said, had it been pretended that any State could nullify and refuse to enforce his frightful enactment? No! the doctrine of the right of secession was brought forward as a convenient rallying-cry to help on a desperate cause and uphold a doomed institution.

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The fact that such an act was within the constitutional powers of Congress, coupled with a subsequent decision of the Supreme Court, roused the people of the Free States to the conviction that the institution of slavery was incompatible with the existing government; and that, unless put an end to, it would inevitably be extended over the whole Union. The question then was to devise some constitutional expedient by which it might, in time, be got rid of. The plan hit upon was to begin by prohibiting it in the Territories, which were the property of the whole nation. It was on this understanding that Mr. Lincoln was nominated. To use a cant phrase, this was the Republican platform. Mr. Lincoln being carried in on this ground, the Southern slaveholders saw at once the necessary consequence. It was for them to decide whether to allow their cherished institution gradually to dwindle, and themselves to be shorn of their political power, as the existing Territories successively took their places as Free States, or to resort to the desperate step of taking up arms and defying the government. They, in an evil hour for themselves, decided for the last, and we see the result.

On the subject of slavery M. de Tocqueville was more fortu

nate. He foretold that it must come to an end, but was mistaken as to the means by which its abolition was to be brought about. But let him speak for himself.

"Whatever, then, may be the efforts of the South to preserve slavery, they will eventually fail. Slavery, pent up in a single spot on the earth's surface, attacked by Christianity as unjust, by political economy as disastrous, slavery, in the midst of democratic liberty, and of the intelligence of our age, -is not an institution that can last. It must come to an end by the act of the slave himself or by that of his master. In either case great misery must be the consequence."

It has come to an end, and that by neither of the agencies predicted by M. de Tocqueville, unless it be in a very indirect manner, and there is reason to hope without any of the dismal results predicted by him.

We should not have taken the pains, after so great a lapse of time, to recur thus particularly to M. de Tocqueville's great work, had we nothing more in view than to show that he had. failed to foresee what was perhaps beyond the reach of mortal sight. We have already hinted our opinion, that the views therein expressed have had a great influence in Europe, and no inconsiderable share in the course taken by England and France, especially the former, in regard to our national affairs at a most delicate juncture.

Those whose memories go back to the first appearance of La Democratie en Amérique cannot have forgotten the almost rapturous applause with which it was received in England. It has ever since been the text-book of conservatism and the standing authority on America. The author was at once placed among the foremost writers of the age, and everywhere received as one of the lions of the day. Only a few months before his death he was returning from England to France, when orders came down from London for a national ship to take him across the Channel to Cherbourg, within a short distance of his residence. He was, in fact, the oracle in all that related to the institutions of the United States. On the strength of his opinion, our Union was looked upon, without the least question, as a mere partnership of States, which any one of the partners might dissolve at will, a fair-weather government, very well so long as all went smoothly, but which must yield to the slight

est strain. Up to the outbreak in 1861, nothing had occurred outwardly to weaken in the least the doctrine of M. de Tocqueville in regard to State rights; on the contrary, Europe was filled with emissaries from the South enforcing the same notion, and quoting M. de Tocqueville in its support; while there was nothing for it on our side but to await, with what patience we might, the great experimentum crucis which was impending. Is it, then, to be wondered at, that, when the crisis came, it found Europe prepared to hail the insurgents as already victorious? This will account for the exultant exclamation of one Sir John Ramsden, a Tory Yorkshire baronet, that the bubble had burst, as well as for the recognition of the Rebels, a few days afterwards, as belligerents by England and France; the Emperor Napoleon declaring as his reason for it that it was impossible for Mr. Lincoln's government to make head against the seceders. Lord Brougham, a few days later still, said in his seat in the House of Lords that they had a right to bring their prizes into British ports. It would have been happy for Lord Brougham if this had been his only blunder. In the second edition of a treatise on the English Constitution, he must needs go out of his way to have a fling at the United States. Speaking of the British government, he says:

"The participation of the people of the upper and middle classes in all the affairs of state, the complete publicity given to all the measures of government and of Parliament, and the full discussion out of doors which they undergo, knit the governors and the governed closely together, and enable the former to call forth all the resources of the country. See the vast armies at sea and on shore which our scanty population has at different times maintained! Mark the endless variety of our settlements in all the most remote quarters of the globe! Above all, reckon the hundreds of millions which have been levied within the last hundred and fifty years from the people, and levied with hardly a remonstrance! and then confess that for producing a strong government there is nothing like a popular constitution, that no despot, be he ever so absolute, has any engine of taxation that can match a Parliament ! If it be said that the American government can as well call forth the resources of the people, I have very great doubt if the national representatives, and especially the President towards the end of his first three years, would inflict a heavy excise or a grinding income-tax upon the people, as our Parliament has so often done; and I have no doubt at all