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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.


At this moment, when we are anxiously scrutinizing every indication of
European feeling with respect to the American question, the advent of a
book, bearing the stamp of a close philosophical, political, and
practical study of the subject, and written, withal, in so hopeful a
spirit as to make us feel with the writer that whatever may result from
the present crisis must be for good, cannot fail to be of public
interest and utility. So truly prophetic is this work in its essence,
that we can hardly believe that it was written in great part amid the
mists that preceded the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln. All probabilities
appear to have been foreseen, and the unerring exactness with which
events have taken place hitherto precisely in the direction indicated by
the author, encourages us to believe that this will continue until his
predictions will have been fulfilled to the end. Clear-sighted,
philosophical, appreciative of American genius and accomplishment,
critical, yet charitable to tenderness, stigmatizing the fault, yet
forgiving the offender, cheering our nation onward by words of
encouragement, bravely spoken at the needed-moment, menacing Europe with
the scorn of posterity, if, forgetting her oft-repeated professions, she
dare forsake the side of liberty to traffic in principles; such is the
scope of what a late reviewer calls "the wisest book which has been
written upon America since De Tocqueville."

Few men are better qualified to judge American affairs than Count de