1 DEMOCEACY IN AMEEICA ' 41 



temptations and conditions that prove the ruin of 9/10ths of 

 the rising statesmen of a lower class of life. Your ' Origin' has 

 done more to enhance the value of an aristocracy in my eyes 

 than any social, political or other argument. Now I never 

 allude to politics in writing to Gray — it is useless I know, 

 and furthermore wherever we did agree, it would perhaps 

 most often be on totally different grounds, and this leads to 

 endless misunderstandings. 



What folly he talks of 2 such nations as England and 

 America ever being on the best of terms. What is there in 

 the whole history of the human race to quote for such a state 

 of things as ' best of terms ' between two nations of the 

 same blood and bone, and with the same aims and prospects ? 

 Nothing but the power of despising us, or we them, ever can 

 or ever will bring one of us to look amicably, on the other. 

 It is not in the bounds of possibility that two nations so 

 powerful, so ambitious, so like should love one another, and 

 it will be a bad day for one or both when they do. A. Gray 

 knows no more of the philosophy of the ' struggle for life ' 

 than the Bishop of Oxford does. You might as well talk 

 of High Church loving Low Church, God knows they are each 

 powerful enough and like enough to form one body religious 

 with a common aim and object, if they would sink differences 

 and agree each to be nothing, or one to be everything and the 

 other nothing. 



Kew, Sunday (Dec. 1862). 



I am actually reading de Tocqueville's Democracy in 

 America ; it appears to me a most able book, though I do not 

 at all agree with it (bigger fool you, you may say, and double 

 big fool I am to say so), but I cannot help it. He assumes 

 that D. in America was a success. Now I never regarded 

 America as having cohesion enough to be pronounced either 

 a success or a failure : there has been hitherto far too much 

 freedom of motion there, too little ' struggle for existence ' 

 to develop any settled Govt, at all, and it is impossible 

 to predict what shape the existing (introduced) form of Govt, 

 would take in 100 years, even if this war had not stepped in 

 to confound all calculations. Democracy has persisted in 

 America, because there has been no cause for its overthrow, 

 just as Monarchies might persist indefinitely (though they 

 persist under much greater disadvantages). Specialisation 



