‘France is changed,’ answered Tocqueville, ’and when compared with the France of Louis XIV., or of Napoleon, was already changed when you wrote, though the war-cry raised for political purposes in 1840 deceived you.  At the same time, I will not deny that military glory would, more than any other merit, even now strengthen a Government, and that military humiliation would inevitably destroy one.  Nor must you overrate the unpopularity of the last war.  Only a few even of the higher classes understood its motives.  “Que diable veut cette guerre?” said my country neighbour to me; “si c’etait contre les Anglais—­mais avec les Anglais, et pour le Grand Turc, qu’est-ce que cela peut signifier?” But when they saw that it cost only men, that they were not invaded or overtaxed, and that prices rose, they got reconciled to it.

’It was only the speculators of Paris that were tired of it.  And if, instead of the Crimea, we had fought near our own frontiers, or for some visible purpose, all our military passions, bad and good, would have broken out.’

[Footnote 1:  This article is republished in the Historical and Philosophical Essays.  Longmans:  1865.—­ED.]

Wednesday, May 13.—­Tocqueville came in after breakfast, and I walked with him in the shade of the green walls or arcades of the Tuileries chestnuts.

We talked of the Montijos, which led our conversation to Merimee and V.

‘Both of them,’ said Tocqueville, ’were the friends of Countess Montijo, the mother.

’V. was among the last persons who knew Eugenie as Countess Theba.  He escorted her to the Tuileries the very evening of her marriage.  There he took his leave of her.  “You are now,” he said, “placed so high that I can only admire you from below.”  And I do not believe that they have met since.

’Merimee took a less sentimental view of the change.  He acknowledged his Empress in his former plaything, subsided from a sort of stepfather into a courtier, and so rose to honour and wealth, while V. is satisfied to remain an ex-professor and un homme de lettres.’

* * * * *

We met Henri Martin, and I asked Tocqueville what he thought of his History.

‘It has the merit of selling,’ he said, ’which cannot be said of any other History of France.  Martin is laborious and conscientious, and does not tell a story ill; but he is a partisan and is always biassed by his own likings and dislikings.  He belongs to the class of theorists, unfortunately not a small one, whose political beau ideal is the absence of all control over the will of the people-who are opposed therefore to an hereditary monarchy-to a permanent President—­to a permanent magistracy-to an established Church—­in short, to all privileged classes, bodies, or institutions.  Equality, not liberty or security, is their object.  They are centralisers and absolutists.  A despotic