‘What I fear,’ continued Tocqueville, ’is that when this man feels the ground crumbling under him, he will try the resource of war.  It will be a most dangerous experiment.  Defeat, or even the alternation of success and failure, which is the ordinary course of war, would be fatal to him; but brilliant success might, as I have said before, establish him.  It would be playing double or quits.  He is by nature a gambler.  His self-confidence, his reliance, not only on himself, but on his fortune, exceeds even that of his uncle.  He believes himself to have a great military genius.  He certainly planned war a year ago.  I do not believe that he has abandoned it now, though the general feeling of the country forces him to suspend it.  That feeling, however, he might overcome; he might so contrive as to appear to be forced into hostilities; and such is the intoxicating effect of military glory, that the Government which would give us that would be pardoned, whatever were its defects or its crimes.

’It is your business, and that of Belgium, to put yourselves into such a state of defence as to force him to make his spring on Italy.  There he can do you little harm.  But to us Frenchmen the consequences of war must be calamitous.  If we fail, they are national loss and humiliation.  If we succeed, they are slavery.’

‘Of course,’ I said, ’the corruption that infects the civil service must in time extend to the army, and make it less fit for service.

‘Of course it must,’ answered Tocqueville.  ’It will extend still sooner to the navy?  The materiel of a force is more easily injured by jobbing than the personnel.  And in the navy the materiel is the principal.

’Our naval strength has never been in proportion to our naval expenditure, and is likely to be less and less so every year, at least during every year of the regne des fripons.’

Tuesday, May 24.—­I breakfasted with Sir Henry Ellis and then went to Tocqueville’s.

I found there an elderly man, who did not remain long.

When he went, Tocqueville said, ’That is one of our provincial prefects.  He has been describing to us the state of public feeling in the South.  Contempt for the present Government, he tells us, is spreading there from its headquarters, Paris.

’If the Corps Legislatif is dissolved, he expects the Opposition to obtain a majority in the new House.

‘This,’ continued Tocqueville, ’is a state of things with which Louis Napoleon is not fit to cope.  Opposition makes him furious, particularly Parliamentary opposition.  His first impulse will be to go a step further in imitation of his uncle, and abolish the Corps Legislatif, as Napoleon did the Tribunat.

’But nearly half a century of Parliamentary life has made the French of 1853 as different from those of 1803 as the nephew is from his uncle.

’He will scarcely risk another coup d’etat; and the only legal mode of abolishing, or even modifying, the Corps Legislatif is by a plebiscite submitted by ballot to universal suffrage.