AND DISCUSSIONS POLITICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND HISTORICAL REPRINTED CHIEFLY FROM THE EDINBURGH AND BY JOHN STUART MILL. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. LONDON: JOHN W. PARKER AND SON, WEST STRAND. M.DCCC.LIX. [The Author reserves the right of Translation.] DISSERTATIONS, &c. M. DE TOCQUEVILLE ON DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA.* IT T has been the rare fortune of M. de Tocqueville's book to have achieved an easy triumph, both over the indifference of our at once busy and indolent public to profound speculation, and over the particular obstacles which oppose the reception of speculations from a foreign, and above all from a French source. There is some ground for the remark often made upon us by foreigners, that the character of our national intellect is insular. The general movement of the European mind sweeps past us without our being drawn into it, or even looking sufficiently at it to discover in what direction it is tending; and if we had not a tolerably rapid original movement of our own, we should long since have been left in the distance. The French language is almost universally cultivated on this side of the Channel; a flood of human beings perpetually ebbs and flows between London and Paris; national prejudices and animosities are becoming numbered among the things that were; yet the revo*Edinburgh Review, October 1840. |