I will now add that if it persuades itself that it will easily get out of the difficulty by making peace, I think that it will find itself mistaken.
Peace, after what has happened, may be a good thing for England in general, and useful to us, but I doubt whether it will be a gain for your aristocracy. I think that if Chatham could return to life he would agree with me, and would say that under the circumstances the remedy would not be peace but a more successful war.
Kind regards, &c.
A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.
[Footnote 1: An article in the North British Review, see p. 107.—ED.]
CONVERSATIONS.
Paris, Hôtel Bedford.—Friday, March 2, 1855.—We slept on the 27th at Calais, on the 28th at Amiens, and reached this place last night.
Tocqueville called on us this morning. We talked of the probability of
Louis Napoleon's going to the Crimea.
I said, 'that the report made by Lord John Russell, who talked the matter over with him, was, that he certainly had once intended to go, and had not given it up.'
'I do not value,' said Tocqueville, 'Lord John's inferences from anything that he heard or saw in his audiences. All Louis Napoleon's words and looks, are, whether intentionally or not, misleading. Now that his having direct issue seems out of the question, and that the deeper and deeper discredit into which the heir presumptive is falling, seems to put him out of the question too, we are looking to this journey with great alarm. We feel that, for the present, his life is necessary to us, and we feel that it would be exposed to many hazards. He ought to incur some military risks, if he is present at a battle or an assault, and his courage and his fatalism, will lead him to many which he ought to avoid. But it is disease rather than bullets that we fear. He will have to travel hard, and to be exposed, under exciting circumstances, to a climate which is not a safe one even to the strong.'