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4 x 5". To W.R. Grey. French text, untranslated but apparently sends an invitation to “friends of James Wilson."

Wilson was probably the Scottish businessman, statesman and economist who founded “The Economist” newspaper in 1843 and like Chevalier was an advocate of "free trade." 

Chevalier was sent to the United States in 1834 by the French Government to “observe the state of industrial and financial affairs in the Americas” - three years after Alexis de Tocqueville had come to America on an official mission to study the prison system. Both De Tocqueville and Chevalier traveled widely.,observing and reflecting on the political, social and economic institutions of the new nation, and then wrote books about their observations. 

De Tocqueville’s notes were published in France in 1835, and, in 1838, translated in the US as the now-classic “Democracy in America.”. Cheavlier’s  American notes appeared in France in 1837 and went through four editions. But they were not published  in America until  a year after De Tocqueville’s American edition, which undoubtedly upstaged Chevalier's “Society, Manners and Politics in the United States”  among American readers. Both men had subsequent careers in public service – De Tocqueville as Minister of Foreign Affairs of the revolutionary government which replaced the French monarchy in 1848, Chevalier in 1860 as driving force of a “free trade” agreement between England and France. But as rival authors of observations on Jacksonian America, De Tocqueville’s name has lived on, while Chevalier has been all but forgotten.