in reply he proposes that where Voluntary effort ends, State compulsion should begin.* That is to say, that a system entirely opposed to the present system should be tacked on to it. And to solder the two together, he can see no expedient but more machinery, more expense, more inspection. Inspectors are to be sent, with despotic and inquisitorial powers, to form districts at their pleasure, to ascertain the number of children requiring instruction, to report on the extent of the present school accommodation, and the nature of the instruction, and to inquire the proportion borne by the incomes of the higher and middle classes to the number of persons belonging to the poorer class, in order to ascertain whether the deficiencies arise from poverty or from apathy, or from both, to fix the amount of the rate' (p. 58), and then again, to sink an enormous sum in buildings; and having thus taxed the district at their pleasure, they are to establish 'undenominational schools,' in which none of the subscribers will take any interest; for, as a matter of fact, it is positively laid down by the Report that it is from religious feelings almost exclusively the public interest in schools arises. When a man of Mr. Senior's ability and experience can propose no better means than this, it is a proof that there is something wrong in the original conception of the end. The two things cannot co-exist. Why should charitable people exert themselves to subscribe for education, when, by turning 'apathetic,' they may compel their less liberal neighbours to bear their share of the burden, and they themselves can reserve their own resources for other objects?

Mr. Senior dismisses Sir J. K. Shuttleworth's proposal that the Privy Council should relax its requirements, with the simple assertion that children brought from wretched homes must have the best masters and the best schools. But the most highly paid 'certificated teachers' are not always in the true sense the best; and by many ingenious contrivances which are easily hit on when people are not spending public money, good ventilation may be secured in mean rooms. The ancients are sneered at by many of our modern tourists for supposing that to carry water from one height to another it is necessary to span the intermediate valley with gigantic masses of masonry; and do the Privy Council really think that ventilation cannot be obtained in a room less than eighteen or twenty feet high? Mr. Senior mentions a very poor London parish in which, by intrepid begging and by the aid of enormous grants from the Privy Council, the incumbent contrived to spend first 80007., and then 10,0007., in the erection of schools. We do not mean to express any opinion on this

particular case, of the details of which we know nothing; but, taking the fact as we find it in Mr. Senior's pages, we think the sums thus spent a prodigious waste of public and private funds. The first intention of the Privy Council was by liberal public grants to induce individuals to spend as much as possible in school-buildings and in education. On the former object not less than 3,000,000l. have been spent, of which a large portion has been, we will not say wasted, though it has certainly been spent without absolute necessity. But in dealing with the poor and apathetic districts' the direction first given to the Privy Council's efforts must be changed; the object is then to ascertain at how small an expense the substantial objects of education can be attained; and if an earnest desire on the part of the Privy Council were shown to disregard appearances and aim only at realitiesto forbear making onerous requisitions, and to give an useful education at little cost, we will venture to say that much of the apathy of which they complain would disappear. We wish it were possible for the promoters of education to understand how much of the passive resistance, the vis inertiæ, which obstructs their progress, is to be attributed to a strong disapprobation of their proceedings; a disapprobation which, though perhaps not very precisely defined nor carefully considered, is nevertheless, as we have shown, far from unreasonable.

We are unable to pursue further this important subject at present; we can only indicate the direction which we believe improvement must take. In treating these subjects of combined charity and political economy, it is impossible to satisfy the aspirations of the benevolent on the one hand, or to silence all the objections of the prudent on the other.

pauper

Want of space, and our desire to spare the reader the fatigue of minute details, have obliged us to omit many suggestions for obviating difficulties or improving the efficiency of schools which we had marked for notice. We refer the reader to the evidence collected by the Commissioners on this subject, as the most interesting part of their Report. Their recommendation to establish district and separate schools is one which can raise little difference of opinion among the friends of education, and we trust it will engage the attention of the Legislature before other more doubtful matters are brought into discussion. We venture confidently to point it out as the next stage in advance, which, when gained, will open to our view a clearer prospect of the course of our further labours.

ART. VIII.

ART. VIII.-Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, Translated from the French by the Translator of Napoleon's Correspondence with King Joseph. London. 1861.

IN

Ere

N the winter of 1858-9 there were residing in one salubrious spot on the shores of the Mediterranean three remarkable representatives of the intelligence of the great nations of Europe. There was Lord Brougham, the chief citizen and host of the pleasant town of Cannes, and the two visitors seeking for renewed health under that genial sky were Baron de Bunsen and Alexis de Tocqueville. Of these, our countryman alone retains his vitality of thought and action in a wonderful old age. many months had gone by, the abundant heart and unsatiated spirit of the German scholar and diplomatist whom we knew so well, and, amid many differences, so justly esteemed, had ceased to beat and to aspire. A few weeks of struggle and of suffering were sufficient to exhaust what yet remained of the physical energies of the French philosopher and statesman, who, of all his notable contemporaries, perhaps best deserves the interest and admiration of Englishmen. It is to this aspect of the character of M. de Tocqueville that we would mainly direct the attention of our readers, deriving from the work of M. de Beaumont and other accessible materials whatever may seem conducive to this object.

A word as to M. de Beaumont's original work: it consists of a short memoir, of three fragments of travels, of two chapters of the unfinished second volume of the 'Ancien Régime et la Révolution,' and of selected letters. To these the translator has added Mr. John Mill's accurate version of a remarkable article in the London and Westminster Review' on 'France before the Revolution,' which may be regarded as the foundation of the later edifice—many letters and parts of letters omitted by M. de Beaumont, either as uninteresting to French readers in their references to English politics or as touching too immediately on the present condition of affairs in France-and several reports of conversations between M. de Tocqueville and Mr. Senior. It is now no secret that the ex-Master in Chancery has taken advantage of the many opportunities he has had of intimate acquaintance with French statesmen and men of letters, to record the most interesting and definite portions of what has fallen from them in the social interchange of thoughts and feelings. In this there has been no breach of confidence, for the dialogues have in most cases been submitted to the criticisms and corrections of the interlocutors, who have gladly availed themselves of an occasion through which they might offer to the world, in a form of auto-biography,

the

the frank vindication of past events, and an open expression, otherwise denied to them, of present opinions. Such a facility of communication is no doubt peculiar to a nation which loves, and knows how, to talk, and Mr. Senior might wait long before an English minister, even in obscurity or disgrace, would thus reveal himself to his best-trusted companion; but the documents themselves are none the less valuable, and when varied, as are the conversations before us, with much wisdom and pleasantry on social and historical topics, they afford an illustration of character hardly equalled in importance by the most familiar correspondence. The translation itself, at once faithful and free, is the last act of a long friendship, and betokens a true womanly insight into the spirit of the writer, which no mere scholarship could supply, but which this book especially demands, for it is the story not of a Life, but of a Mind.

There is, indeed, an entire disproportion between the circumstances of this existence and the void occasioned by its loss. Of gentle but not illustrious birth, of independent but moderate means, a traveller in countries already well known, the author of one completed work and one other commenced, an interesting but not effective speaker during some years of indefinite parliamentary opposition to a Government which he generally approved, and a minister for some months of a Republic that he neither assisted nor desired to establish, M. de Tocqueville passes away in the meridian of life, and the event is regarded not only as a national disaster, but as a calamity to the dearest interests of mankind. His name is held up to reverence and his character to admiration, not only by the friends whom his personal fascination and delightful qualities had won and retained, or by the small band of comrades who had shared his doctrines and his fortunes, but by statesmen, whose principles he had condemned, by philosophers, whose authority he had disputed, and by priests, in whose religion he but coldly acquiesced.

We believe the main cause of this result is to be found in the singular unity of purpose which pervaded his whole moral and intellectual being. If a clear and lofty theory of life, to which a man can adapt his duties and his actions, is a comfort and a strength to any one in his march through the world, it is no less desirable for a thinker to possess an object of mental contemplation, around which new experiences and fresh inferences can continually cluster, which will grow with his knowledge and expand with his observation, and which, without disturbing his judgment, may fill him with the powers of a prophet and the ardour of an apostle. Such was to M. de Tocqueville the consciousness of the facts and influences of Democracy in the present

and

and future generations of civilised Man, and the effect of this permanent study, discreetly used and sanely regulated, stood out in strange contrast to the diffuse fancies and distracted notions of the political sciolists of our age. France had abounded in men who had been mastered by ideas, but the spectacle was new of a mind replete with a great thought yet entirely free from any concomitant delusion, at once passionately absorbed and absolutely judicial,—without prejudice either on one side from partiality or on another from fear of its imputation,-labouring for the strictest evidence of truths instinctively apprehended, and seeking for every corroboration of certainties already known.

The phenomenon was all the more surprising, because there was nothing in the early life and associations of De Tocqueville by which this strong impression could naturally have been induced. Although his youth had not, like that of M. Guizot, been impressed with the terrors of flight in the light of burning châteaux, still it was passed amidst the near remembrances of the atrocities and passions of the Revolution. He well knew how, six months after the union of his own house with that of the Lamoignons, his parents had been cast into the Conciergerie, and had only escaped death by the fall of Robespierre. His childhood had listened to the anecdotes of his grandsire, M. de Malesherbes, the veteran of liberty, who died in defence of the sovereign who had banished him from his presence, and whose scaffold, including three generations of victims, touched the hardened conscience of a sanguinary mob, so that no more executions could be ventured upon in that place. Such reflections were assuredly not favourable to an appreciation of freedom or to the perception of political truth; but even these tragic phantoms were less hostile to the development of liberal ideas than the condition into which good society in France had fallen after the violent tension and anxiety of recent years. Hopeless of escape from evil government, men only tried to put it out of sight as much as possible, and pleasure, so long foregone, became the sole occupation of existence. Seria ludo was the motto of the wisest and the best: among the most refined of the upper classes the art of conversation was the main criterion of superiority; and the highest faculties found their exercise in private theatricals, family mystifications, and every kind of elaborate amusement. Then the tact and beauty of Madame Récamier sufficed to rule over Parisian life; then no one asked for poetry deeper than Delille's, or for piety more earnest than that of Chateaubriand. In this atmosphere, and with no graver education, grew up young Clérel de Tocqueville. He was free from care as to his future destination, for his father had purchased him a Magistracy,

according