to a life and an influence that would continue while the liberties it
was intended to preserve should be valued by the human family. Those
liberties had been wrung from reluctant monarchs in many contests,
in many countries, and were grouped into creeds and established in
ordinances sealed with blood, in many great struggles of the people.
They were not new to the people. They were consecrated theories, but
no government had been previously established for the great purpose of
their preservation and enforcement. That which was experimental in our
plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so
organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and
result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the
power so often found necessary of repressing or destroying their enemy,
when he was found in the person of a single despot.

When, in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville came to study Democracy in America,
the trial of nearly a half-century of the working of our system had been
made, and it had been proved, by many crucial tests, to be a government
of "liberty regulated by law," with such results in the development of
strength, in population, wealth, and military and commercial power, as
no age had ever witnessed.

[See Alexis De Tocqueville]

De Tocqueville had a special inquiry to prosecute, in his visit to
America, in which his generous and faithful soul and the powers of his
great intellect were engaged in the patriotic effort to secure to the
people of France the blessings that Democracy in America had ordained
and established throughout nearly the entire Western Hemisphere. He had
read the story of the French Revolution, much of which had been recently
written in the blood of men and women of great distinction who were