My prophecies may not be accomplished in our time; but I should not be sorry to deposit this letter with a notary, to be opened, and their truth or falsehood proved, fifty years hence.

Compiegne, February 23, 1855.

...  My object in my last letter was not by any means, as you seem to think, to accuse your aristocracy of having mismanaged the Crimean war.  It has certainly been mismanaged, but who has been in fault?

Indeed I know not, and if I did I should think at the same time that it would not be becoming in a foreigner to set himself up as a judge of the blunders of any other Government than his own.

I thought that I had expressed myself clearly.  At any rate what I wanted to say, if I did not say it, is, that the present events created in my opinion a new and great danger for your aristocracy, and that it will suffer severely from the rebound, if it does not make enormous efforts to show itself capable of repairing the past; and that it would be wrong to suppose that by fighting bravely on the field of battle it could retain the direction of the Government.

I did not intend to say more than this.

I will now add that if it persuades itself that it will easily get out of the difficulty by making peace, I think that it will find itself mistaken.

Peace, after what has happened, may be a good thing for England in general, and useful to us, but I doubt whether it will be a gain for your aristocracy.  I think that if Chatham could return to life he would agree with me, and would say that under the circumstances the remedy would not be peace but a more successful war.

Kind regards, &c.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

[Footnote 1:  An article in the North British Review, see p. 107.—­ED.]

CONVERSATIONS.

Paris, Hotel Bedford.—­Friday, March 2, 1855.—­We slept on the 27th at Calais, on the 28th at Amiens, and reached this place last night.

Tocqueville called on us this morning.  We talked of the probability of Louis Napoleon’s going to the Crimea.

I said, ’that the report made by Lord John Russell, who talked the matter over with him, was, that he certainly had once intended to go, and had not given it up.’

‘I do not value,’ said Tocqueville, ’Lord John’s inferences from anything that he heard or saw in his audiences.  All Louis Napoleon’s words and looks, are, whether intentionally or not, misleading.  Now that his having direct issue seems out of the question, and that the deeper and deeper discredit into which the heir presumptive is falling, seems to put him out of the question too, we are looking to this journey with great alarm.  We feel that, for the present, his life is necessary to us, and we feel that it would be exposed to many hazards.  He ought to incur some military risks, if he is present at a battle or an assault, and his courage and his fatalism, will lead him to many which he ought to avoid.  But it is disease rather than bullets that we fear.  He will have to travel hard, and to be exposed, under exciting circumstances, to a climate which is not a safe one even to the strong.’