How apt to be partial is the widest and closest political observation is shown by the very partial lessons derived from the experience of the New World. Few observe how signally the history of Central and South America contradicts the inferences so confidently drawn from the United States--or rather from the New England of yesterday, and the present condition of California and the States bounded by the Lakes and the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Alleghanies. Among the States of Spanish and Portuguese speech and civilization--it would be too much to say blood--the failure of democracy has been complete, glaring, and ruinous. Social and political anarchy, utter insecurity of life and property, incessant revolution and murderous war, have been its only fruits. The happy accident of hereditary princes, exceptionally wise, able, and forbearing, has barely saved Brazil. The one prosperous, solvent, orderly State between the Rio Grande and Cape Horn is the aristocratic republic of Chili. So large, striking, and impressive a fact can hardly have escaped a thinker like Tocqueville, whose French birth and experience protected him in great measure from the insular ignorance, rather than arrogance, which leads the ablest English writers to base their political philosophy exclusively upon Anglo-Saxon experience and examples: yet it is strange to find so striking a lesson so lightly touched by the wisest, widest, most reflective, and best-informed, among the political teachers of his age.