The conservatism of Lewis was that of a profoundly sceptical instinct, of practical cautious incredulity. Bagehot's was the conservatism of middle-class English thought and experience. Tocqueville's was that of wide observation and bitter disappointment. Mill was a Conservative only so far as conservatism was forced upon a mind essentially radical and even revolutionary, imbued with a profound faith in abstract principles leading far beyond universal suffrage to, if not across the verge of communism, by the danger which he foresaw to individual liberty and unfettered intellectual freedom from the ascendency of mere numbers. Upon this point he agreed closely with Tocqueville, though upon nearly every other their views were as opposite as their character and experience; and their teaching has been fully confirmed by the actual working of the most successful, the most tolerant, and the most fortunately situated democracy that the world has ever seen. The tendency of Democracy to naked despotism is obvious enough in the recent history of France; but sanguine democrats ascribe the special experience of France to the intense centralization inherited, as Tocqueville shows, by the Republic, the Constitutional Monarchy and the Empire from the _Ancien Regime_; the absence of any local school of practical discussion, mutual tolerance, and co-operation; the bitterness of factions fighting not for administrative or legislative control, but for fundamentally incompatible forms of Government,--to anything rather than the unfitness of the French nation for Teutonic liberties. Conservative pessimists and democratic optimists can only find a common ground, a test which both will accept, in the experience of the United States. Whatever vices are found in American democracy must be inherent in democracy itself; and it must be granted that, looking on the surface of public life, the larger facts of national history, and the material condition of the people, there is no evidence, obvious to the hasty observer, of interference with personal freedom, of any demoralizing or weakening influence on individual character exercised by political or social equality. It is outside of the proper field of politics, in facts invisible to distant observers, and not visible at a glance to thoughtful travellers, that we must seek for proof of the bearing of democratic institutions and ideas upon personal and social liberty, upon the maintenance of individual and collective rights.