of liberty.  He gave his adhesion to the new government without hesitation, but without enthusiasm; and having little hope of advancement in his career as magistrate, he applied to the Ministry of the Interior early in 1831 for an official mission to America to examine the system of our prisons, which at that time was exciting attention in France.  But the real motive which led him to desire to visit America was his wish to study the democratic institutions of the United States with reference to their bearing upon the political and social questions which underlay the violent changes and revolutions of government in France, and of which a correct appreciation was of continually increasing importance.  It was plain that the dominating principle in the modern development of society was that of democratic equality; and this being the case, the question of prime importance presenting itself for solution was, How is liberty to be reconciled with equality and saved from the inevitable dangers to which it is exposed? or in other words, Can equality, which, by dividing men and reducing the mass to a common level, smooths the way for the establishment of a despotism, either of an individual or of the mob, be made to promote and secure liberty?  For the study of this question, and of others naturally connected with it, the United States afforded opportunities nowhere else to be found.

Accompanied by M. de Beaumont, Tocqueville passed a year in this country, and the chief results of his visit appeared in the first two volumes of his “Democracy in America,” which were published in January, 1835.  The success of the book was instant and extraordinary.  His publisher, who had undertaken it with reluctance, had ventured on a first edition of but five hundred copies; and in one of his letters, shortly after its publication, Tocqueville tells pleasantly of the bookseller’s ingenuous surprise at the interest which the work had excited.  “I went yesterday morning to Gosselin’s [the publisher]; he received me with the most beaming face in the world, saying to me, ‘Well, now, so it seems you have made a chef-d’oeuvre.’  Does not that expression paint the complete man of business?  I sat down, and we talked of our second edition.”

From this time Tocqueville was famous.  In the autumn of the same year, 1835, he married an English lady, Miss Mottley, who had long resided in France, and the happiness of his private life was secured at the very moment when he was entering upon the cares and anxieties of a public career.  In 1836 the French Academy decreed for his book an extraordinary prize; in 1838 he was elected a member of the Institute; and in 1841, a year after the publication of the last volumes of his work, he was chosen member of the Academy.  From 1839 to 1848, Tocqueville, elected and reelected from Valognes, sat without interruption in the Chamber of Deputies, where he constantly voted with the constitutional opposition.  His nature was too sensitive and