’The socialist tendencies which are imputed to this Second Empire, the oath which it most imprudently imposes, its pretensions to form a dynasty and its assertion of the principle most abhorrent to them, elective monarchy, have thrown them back into disaffection.  And I believe their disaffection to be one of our great dangers—­a danger certainly increased by the Fusion.  The principal object of the Fusion is to influence the army.  The great terror of the army is division in itself.  It will accept anything, give up anything, dare anything, to avoid civil war.  Rather than be divided between the two branches, it would have adhered to the Empire.  Now it can throw off the Bonapartes without occasioning a disputed succession.’

‘When you say,’ I asked, ’that the Legitimists are not the successors of the old aristocracy in cultivation, intelligence, or energy, do you mean to ascribe to them positive or relative inferiority in these qualities?’

‘In energy,’ answered Tocqueville, ’their deficiency is positive.  They are ready to suffer for their cause, they are not ready to exert themselves for it.  In intelligence and cultivation they are superior to any other class in France; but they are inferior to the English aristocracy, and they are inferior, as I said before, to their ancestors of the eighteenth century.  There existed in the highest Parisian society towards the end of that century a comprehensiveness of curiosity and inquiry, a freedom of opinion, an independence, and soundness of judgment, never seen before or since.  Its pursuits, its pleasures, its admirations, its vanities, were all intellectual.  Look at the success of Hume.  His manners were awkward; he was a heavy, though an instructive, converser; he spoke bad French; he would pass now for an intelligent bore.  But such was the worship then paid to talents and knowledge—­especially to knowledge, and talents employed on the destruction of prejudices—­that Hume was, for years, the lion of all the salons of Paris.  The fashionable beauties quarrelled for the fat philosopher.  Nor was their admiration or affection put on, or even transitory.  He retained some of them as intimate friends for life.  If the brilliant talkers and writers of that time were to return to life, I do not believe that gas, or steam, or chloroform, or the electric telegraph, would so much astonish them as the dulness of modern society, and the mediocrity of modern books.’

In the evening we discussed the new scheme of throwing open the service of India and of the Government offices to public competition.

‘We have followed,’ said Tocqueville, ’that system to a great extent for many years.  Our object was twofold.  One was to depress the aristocracy of wealth, birth, and connexions.  In this we have succeeded.