'Of course,' I said, 'the corruption that infects the civil service must in time extend to the army, and make it less fit for service.
'Of course it must,' answered Tocqueville. 'It will extend still sooner to the navy? The _matériel_ of a force is more easily injured by jobbing than the _personnel_. And in the navy the _matériel_ is the principal.
'Our naval strength has never been in proportion to our naval expenditure, and is likely to be less and less so every year, at least during every year of the _règne des fripons_.'
_Tuesday, May_ 24.--I breakfasted with Sir Henry Ellis and then went to Tocqueville's.
I found there an elderly man, who did not remain long.
When he went, Tocqueville said, 'That is one of our provincial prefects. He has been describing to us the state of public feeling in the South. Contempt for the present Government, he tells us, is spreading there from its headquarters, Paris.
'If the Corps Législatif is dissolved, he expects the Opposition to obtain a majority in the new House.
'This,' continued Tocqueville, 'is a state of things with which Louis Napoleon is not fit to cope. Opposition makes him furious, particularly Parliamentary opposition. His first impulse will be to go a step further in imitation of his uncle, and abolish the Corps Législatif, as Napoleon did the Tribunat.
'But nearly half a century of Parliamentary life has made the French of 1853 as different from those of 1803 as the nephew is from his uncle.
'He will scarcely risk another _coup d'état_; and the only legal mode of abolishing, or even modifying, the Corps Législatif is by a plébiscite submitted by ballot to universal suffrage.
'Will he venture on this? And if he do venture, will he succeed? If he fail, will he not sink into a constitutional sovereign, controlled by an Assembly far more unmanageable than we deputies were, as the Ministers are excluded from it?'
'Will he not rather,' I said, 'sink into an exile?'
'That is my hope,' said Tocqueville, 'but I do not expect it quite so soon as Thiers does,'
I am not going to talk to you, my dear Senior, about the Emperor, or the Empress, or any of the august members of the Imperial Family; nor of the Ministers, nor of any other public functionaries, because I am a well-disposed subject who does not wish that the perusal of his letters should give pain to his Government. I shall write to you upon an historical problem, and discuss with you events which happened five hundred years ago. There could not be a more innocent subject.