The owners of forests were permitted to deprive us of
cheap fuel, the owners of forges of cheap iron, the owners of factories
of cheap clothing.
'In some of this stupid inaction Guizot supported him conscientiously,
for, like Thiers, he is ignorant of the first principles of political
economy, but he knows too much the philosophy of Government not to have
felt, on every other point, that the King was wrong.
'If he supposed that Tocqueville wished to be in his place, on the
conditions on which he held office, he was utterly mistaken.
'Tocqueville was ambitious; he wished for power. So did I. We would
gladly have been real Ministers, but nothing would have tempted us to be
the slaves of the _pensee immuable_, or to sit in a Cabinet in which we
were constantly out-voted, or to defend, as Guizot had to do in the
Chamber, conduct which we had disapproved in the Council.
'You ask why Tocqueville joined the Gauche whom he despised, against the
Droit with whom he sympathised?
'He voted with the Gauche only where he thought their votes right. Where
he thought them wrong, as, for instance, in all that respected Algeria,
he left them.
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