Note 26 — Chapter I · Self-Help—National and Individual.

“I have seen,” said he, “a hundred times in the course of my life, a weak man exhibit genuine public virtue, because supported by a wife who sustained hint in his course, not so much by advising him to such and such acts, as by exercising a strengthening influence over the manner in which duty or even ambition was to be regarded. Much oftener, however, it must be confessed, have I seen private and domestic life gradually transform a man to whom nature had given generosity, disinterestedness, and even some capacity for greatness, into an ambitious, mean-spirited, vulgar, and selfish creature who, in matters relating to his country, ended by considering them only in so far as they rendered his own particular condition more comfortable and easy.”—‘Œuvres de Tocqueville.’ II. 349.