Page:Americanisation - a letter to John Stuart Mill.djvu/11

 the selfish ambition of the country gravitates towards it, as it does in despotic countries towards the monarch: the people, like the despot, is pursued with adulation and sycophancy, and the corrupting effects of power fully keep pace with its improving and ennobling influences."

Now, if this be the inevitable tendency of Democracy in America, as it manifests itself at the present day, I cannot help thinking that it was rather disingenuous to make use of De Tocqueville's evidence in favour of those Democratic institutions, as you have done in the following portion of your first speech on the Reform Bill, seeing that De Tocqueville could speak only of what he saw thirty-two years ago, whereas we have the later and far more valuable accumulated experience of what has taken place in the "Model Republic" from that period down to the present day:—

This is certainly most complimentary to American Democracy on the part of M. De Tocqueville; but how will it bear the test of examination? You have told us in your essay "On Representative Government" that "a Government is to be judged by its action upon men, and by its action upon things." Apply this test to the sanitary legislation of Great Britain and the United States, and you will find that the limited aristocracy of this country, in its administrative action, has been much more successful in promoting "the actual, positive well-being of the living human creatures who compose the population" of Great Britain, than the unlimited Democracy