"Government is best which governs not at all"

     Reading Thoreau's "On Civil Disobedience" was a simultaneously interesting and amusing experience. Expanding up Deane's questions, "how might the essay's title have appeared an oxymoron in the 1840s,"   I believe that people of the 1840s would likely have regarded Thoreau as slightly insane.   At a time period when being "patriotic" was extremely important, Thoreau's ideas on government and being a good citizen must have appeared anarchical and somewhat off-base.   Being civil would have been living and making changes within the American System, and being disobedient was not encouraged.  Tocqueville may have enjoyed the spirit of Thoreau, but I think that in the end, Tocqueville would have found Thoreau to be contrary to the small amount of order that democracy is able to achieve, and would have seen him as an overly individualistic, impractical pantheist.   I think he would have explained Thoreau using a term from his book, pantheist.  He also may have painted Thoreau as the manifestation of the overly-individualistic American.  I don't think he would have held him up as the epitome of a good democratic citizen. 
   On the other hand, Thoreau would scorn these other citizens, including Tocqueville, who looked down on him, because he saw himself as having the true vision of good.   He viewed other Americans as being simple pegs in a machine, who do not focus upon whether what they are doing under the law is moral.  He thinks that at the end of the day, government is a petty way of controlling mankind, ultimately crushing man's natural spirit.   Personally, I feel that Thoreau was correct in saying that people should be more careful to examine the government laws and procedures they are following, and to disregard them if they are not moral.  It is this very idea which allowed the Civil Rights Movement to take place.  However, on the larger scale, I feel that his perspective on government as a pathetic system was rather impractical.  He thought that people should be left entirely to their own devices, but I think he disregards the fact that government is a necessary evil and that perhaps instead of being contrary to its existence, it would be more beneficial to make the system better.