’Will he venture on this?  And if he do venture, will he succeed?  If he fail, will he not sink into a constitutional sovereign, controlled by an Assembly far more unmanageable than we deputies were, as the Ministers are excluded from it?’

‘Will he not rather,’ I said, ‘sink into an exile?’

‘That is my hope,’ said Tocqueville, ’but I do not expect it quite so soon as Thiers does,’

CORRESPONDENCE.

St. Cyr, July 2, 1853.

I am not going to talk to you, my dear Senior, about the Emperor, or the Empress, or any of the august members of the Imperial Family; nor of the Ministers, nor of any other public functionaries, because I am a well-disposed subject who does not wish that the perusal of his letters should give pain to his Government.  I shall write to you upon an historical problem, and discuss with you events which happened five hundred years ago.  There could not be a more innocent subject.

I have followed your advice, and I have read, or rather re-read, Blackstone.  I studied him twenty years ago.  Each time he has made upon me the same impression.  Now, as then, I have ventured to consider him (if one may say so without blasphemy) an inferior writer, without liberality of mind or depth of judgment; in short, a commentator and a lawyer, not what we understand by the words jurisconsulte and publiciste.  He has, too, in a degree which is sometimes amusing, a mania for admiring all that was done in ancient times, and for attributing to them all that is good in his own.  I am inclined to think that, if he had had to write, not on the institutions, but on the products of England, he would have discovered that beer was first made from grapes, and that the hop is a fruit of the vine—­rather a degenerate product, it is true, of the wisdom of our ancestors, but as such worthy of respect.  It is impossible to imagine an excess more opposite to that of his contemporaries in France, for whom it was enough that a thing was old for it to be bad.  But enough of Blackstone; he must make way for what I really want to say to you.

In comparing the feudal institutions in England in the period immediately after the conquest with those of France, you find between them, not only an analogy, but a perfect resemblance, much greater than Blackstone seems to think, or, at any rate, chooses to say.  In reality, the system in the two countries is identical.  In France, and over the whole Continent, this system produced a caste; in England, an aristocracy.  How is it that the word gentleman, which in our language denotes a mere superiority of blood, with you is now used to express a certain social position, and amount of education, independent of birth; so that in two countries the same word, though the sound remains the same, has entirely changed its meaning?  When did this revolution take place?  How, and through what transitions?  Have no books ever treated of this subject in England?  Have none of your great writers, philosophers, politicians, or historians, ever noticed this characteristic and pregnant fact, tried to account for it, and to explain it?