despotic state power. Consequently, he warned that safeguards had to be erected 
     
     against democracy’s potential “tyranny of the majority” which could erode 
     
     freedom and individuality. 
     
    
   
   
    
     Alexis De Tocqueville’s great historical essay, The Old Regime and The Revolu- 
     
     tion, 1856, radically altered the historical interpretation of the French Revolution 
     
     for he showed that the Revolution did not continue a sharp break with the past. He 
     
     stressed rather the essential continuity between the old regime and the Revolution. 
     
     He argued that the monarchy’s long effort to centralize and rationalize French in- 
     
     stitutions was completed by the Revolution which he described as “the sudden and 
     
     violent termination of a task at which ten generations had labored”. 
     
    
   
   
    
     In his extensive attempts to discover what held the colonists of the New World 
     
     together despite their great disparity, Alexis Charles De Tocqueville stated that he 
     
     believed that religious beliefs as preached throughout the newly colonized areas of 
     
     North America in the early rural and rather primitive churches were the greatest in- 
     
     fluences to maintain solidarity among the brave new settlers. Their beliefs in God, 
     
     righteousness, and goodness reinforced each week by their own clergyman gave 
     
     them the courage and determination to found a new nation. 
     
    
   
   
    
     As if to make valid the theoretical claims of Alexis De Tocqueville, our early 
     
     settlers did raise a continuous campaign in which they demanded clergy of their own 
     
     faith to sustain them in the long struggle ahead. The tiny rural, white painted 
     
     churches of Prince Edward Island did become the focal point of their social and 
     
     religious life, and who can argue concerning their relative importance in keeping 
     
     Canada together as one country.