_Sunday, April_ 12.--Tocqueville drank tea with us. I asked him if he had seen the Due de Nemours' letter.
'I have not seen it,' he answered. 'In fact, I have not wished to see it. I disapprove of the Fusionists, and the anti-Fusionists, and the Legitimists, and the Orleanists-in short, of all the parties who are forming plans of action in events which may not happen, or may not happen in my time, or may be accompanied by circumstances rendering those plans absurd, or mischievous, or impracticable,'
'But though you have not read the letter,' I said, 'you know generally what are its contents.'
'Of course I do,' he replied. 'And I cannot blame the Comte de Chambord for doing what I do myself--for refusing to bind himself in contingencies, and to disgust his friends in the hope of conciliating his enemies.'
'Do you believe,' I asked, 'that the mere promise of a Constitution would offend the Legitimists?'
'I do not think,' he answered, 'that they would object to a Constitution giving them what they would consider their fair share of power and influence.
'Under Louis Philippe they had neither, but it was in a great measure their own fault.
'They have neither under this Government, for its principle is to rest on the army and on the people, and to ignore the existence of the educated classes.
'You see _that_ in its management of the press. 'Montalembert, or Guizot, or Falloux, or I may publish what we like. We are not read by the soldier or by the _proletaire_.[1] But the newspaper press is subject to a slavery to which it was never reduced before. The system was first elaborated in Austria, and I daresay will be copied by all the Continental autocrats, for no inventions travel so quickly as despotic ones.
'The public _avertissements_ are comparatively unimportant. Before a journal gets one of those its suppression has probably been decided on. Every day there are communications between the literary police and the different editors. Such or such a line of argument is altogether forbidden, another is allowed to be used to a certain extent. Some subjects are tabooed, others are to be treated partially.
'As the mental food of the lower orders is supplied by the newspapers, this paternal Government takes care that it shall not be too exciting.'