its object the mediation of France and England between Austria and Sardinia.  The next year, having just been elected a member of the Legislative Assembly, he was invited by the President of the Republic to take the portfolio of Foreign Affairs in the ministry of M. Barrot.  He did not hold office long.  The ministry was too honest and too firm to suit the designs of the President, and on the 31st of October Louis Napoleon announced, in a message which took the Assembly by surprise, that it had been dismissed, and a new set of ministers appointed.  The President endeavored to retain Tocqueville, and to win him over to his party; but Tocqueville already presaged the fall of the Republic, and witnessed with anxiety and discouragement the approach of the Empire.  He remained a member of the Assembly to the last.  He was one of the deputies arrested on the 2d of December, 1851, and was confined for a time at Vincennes.  “Here ended his political life.  It ended with liberty in France.”

The remaining years of Tocqueville’s life were spent in a retirement which might have been happy, had he not felt too deeply for happiness the despotism which weighed upon France.  He engaged in the studies that resulted in his masterly work on “The Old Regime and the Revolution”; but these studies, instead of diverting him from the contemplation of what France had lost, gave poignancy to the sorrow excited by her present condition.  All his hopes for the prevalence of the principles which he had sought during life to confirm and establish, all his personal ambitions as a public man, were completely broken down.  But, though thus defeated in hope and in desire, he was not overcome in spirit.  And the record of the closing years of his life shows, more than that of any other portion of it, the firmness, the strength, and the sweetness of his character.

His health, which had never been vigorous, became from year to year more and more uncertain, and the labor which he gave to the historical work to which he now devoted himself was frequently followed by exhaustion.  He passed some time in England, where be had many warm friends, in examining the collections in the British Museum concerning the French Revolution; and in 1855 he made a visit of considerable length to Germany for the purpose of studying the social institutions of the country, so far as they might illustrate the condition of France under the old regime.  At the beginning of 1856 the first part of his great work was published.  The impression produced by it was extraordinary.  It was, as it were, a key that opened to men the secrets of a history with the events of which they were so familiar that it had seemed to them nothing more was to be learned concerning it.  The book is one which, though unfinished, is, so far as it advances, complete.  It will retain its place as an historical essay of the highest value; for it is a study of the past, undertaken not merely with the intention of elucidating the facts of a particular period of history, but also with the design of investigating and establishing the general principles in politics and government of which facts and events are but the external indications.  Tocqueville was too honest to write according to any predetermined theory; but he also penetrated too deeply into the causes of things not to arrive, at length, at definite conclusions as to the meaning and teachings of history.