How long this form will continue in France remains to be
seen. But it is certain that European Democrats or Red Republicans, with
their ideas--or rather lack of ideas--will never comprehend the
constitutional system, and will never rehabilitate or reanimate those
intermediary municipal institutions, the monuments of which De
Tocqueville was surprised to find scattered so generally through
continental Europe, as well as in England and in New England.
Turning, now, to the United States, it is plainly evident that the whole
tendency of our politics, intensely accelerated by the influence of
Jefferson's French views, has been, first, to lose out of mind the true
significance of those intermediary institutions embodied in the common
law of England, and inherited by us from the mother country; and,
secondly, to depreciate them as standing in the way of the people's
will, or popular sovereignty; and, lastly, to break them down entirely,
and substitute for them the tyranny of an irresponsible majority, or
democratic absolutism. The persistent efforts to get rid of grand juries
and trial by jury, to popularize the judiciary, to make senatorial terms
dependent on changing party majorities, to reduce the representative to
a mere deputy, and other similar schemes to bring about the direct
_unmediatized_ operation of the popular will upon the subject, are all
illustrations of this direful tendency.
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