Page:Americanisation - a letter to John Stuart Mill.djvu/15

 have them corrected." What more fatal sentence could be passed on the working of unlimited democracy than this melancholy confession?" You tell the House of Commons, on the authority of De Tocqueville, that, "though the various American legislatures are perpetually making mistakes, they are perpetually correcting them." Where is the proof of this? In the same speech, you say, "the general tendency of their legislation is maintained, in a degree unknown elsewhere, in the direction of the interests of the people." But this is flatly contradicted by the incontrovertible facts I have given, and which furnish so complete an illustration of what you had stated so well, (before you were returned for Westminster,) in the following passage of your "Considerations on Representative Government":—

It would be unreasonable to look for wise measures from a Legislature composed of men without sufficient moral courage or honesty to assert their own convictions; and it would be no less unreasonable to look for brilliant examples of national progress and civilization among a people whose institutions are founded on so debasing a principle. As for the vast sums expended in educating the people of the United States, how utterly worthless must all that expenditure be rendered, so far as regards the diffusion of political wisdom, which implies political honesty, when it is found that those "highly-cultivated members of the community" who wish to enter Congress can do so only by "sacrificing their own opinions and modes