Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/836

824 tions were addressing themselves to groups and classes in their native lands rather than to the experimenters on this side of the water. Every chapter of de Tocqueville's democracy in America mirrored his own political moods and bore a relation to the political currents in which he floated in France. The same was true of Harriet Martineau's volume on American society written in the midst of Jackson's triumphant career as President. Bringing to her travels in the United States a liberal and humanitarian mind, she saw clearest those phases of American life most directly tangent to the matters she was interested in at home. "Not by aggression," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but by the naked fact of existence we are an eternal danger and an unsleeping threat to every government that founds itself on anything but the will of the governed." As Maitland long afterward exclaimed in another connection: "Such is the unity of all history."