Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/97

86 New Englanders did not require the entire exclusion of all democratic influence from government. "While I hold," said Cabot, "that a government altogether popular is in effect a government of the populace, I maintain that no government can be relied on that has not a material portion of the democratic mixture in its composition." Cabot explained what should be the true portion of democratic mixture: "If no man in New England could vote for legislators who was not possessed in his own right of two thousand dol­lars' value in land, we could do something better." The Constitution of Massachusetts already restricted the suffrage to persons "having a freehold estate within the commonwealth of an annual income of three pounds, or any estate of the value of sixty pounds." A further restriction to freeholders whose estate was worth two thousand dollars would hardly have left a material mixture of any influence which democrats would have recognized as theirs.

Meanwhile even Cabot and his friends Ames and Colonel Hamilton recognized that the reform they wished could be effected only with the consent of the people; and firm in the conviction that democracy must soon produce a crisis, as in Greece and Rome, in England and France, when political power must revert to the wise and good, or to the despotism of a military chief, they waited for the catastrophe they foresaw. History and their own experience supported them. They were right, so far as human knowledge could make them so; but the old spirit of