iastic
democrats; while the specific dangers which beset democracy, considered
as the government of the numerical majority, were brought into equally
strong light, and subjected to a masterly analysis, not as reasons for
resisting what the author considered as an inevitable result of human
progress, but as indications of the weak points of popular government,
the defences by which it needs to be guarded, and the correctives which
must be added to it in order that while full play is given to its
beneficial tendencies, those which are of a different nature may be
neutralized or mitigated. I was now well prepared for speculations of
this character, and from this time onward my own thoughts moved more and
more in the same channel, though the consequent modifications in my
practical political creed were spread over many years, as would be shown
by comparing my first review of _Democracy in America_, written and
published in 1835, with the one in 1840 (reprinted in the _Dissertations_),
and this last, with the _Considerations on Representative Government_.

A collateral subject on which also I derived great benefit from the
study of Tocqueville, was the fundamental question of centralization.
The powerful philosophic analysis which he applied to American and to
French experience, led him to attach the utmost importance to the
performance of as much of the collective business of society, as can
safely be so performed, by the people themselves, without any
intervention of the executive government, either to supersede their
agency, or to dictate the manner of its exercise. He viewed this
practical political activity of the individual citizen, not only as one
of the most effectual means of training the social feelings and
practical intelligence of the people, so important in themselves and so
indispensable to good government, but also as the specific counteractive
to some of the characteristic infirmities of democracy, and a necessary
protection against its degenerating into the only despotism of which, in
the modern world, there is real danger--the absolute rule of the head
of the executive over a congregation of isolated individuals, all equals
but all slaves. There was, indeed, no immediate peril from this source
on the British side of the channel, where nine-tenths of the internal
business which elsewhere devolves on the government, was transacted by
agencies independent of it; where centralization was, and is, the
subject no