Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/285

Rh rable proportion of either into a few hands, will destroy it. As power follows wealth, the majority must have wealth or lose power. If wealth is accumulated in the hands of a few, either by a feudal or a stock monopoly, it carries the pow- er also; and a government becomes as certainly aristociatical by a monopoly of wealth, as by a monopoly of arms. A minority, obtaining a majority of wealth or arms in any mode, becomes the government.

Nobility and hierarchy cannot acquire in the United States the article of wealth, necessary to constitute a separate order or interest, and therefore they can only be used as feints to cover the real attack. It cannot be forgotten, that aristocracy is a Proteus, capable of assuming various forms, and that to make these forms appear in that natural hideousness common to the features of the family, it is necessary to touch it with some test, an accumulation of wealth by law without industry, is this test. In our situation and temper it can only be effected by patronage and paper, which now bestow monarchy and groans upon England. Title without wealth is the shadow; an accumulation of wealth by law, is the substance. We have only to determine which is the feint, and which is the foe.

We hear indeed of the aristocracy of the first and second ages, from the repinings not the efforts of hierarchy and title; whilst paper systems and patronage, the aristocracy of the third, are using force, faith and credit, as the two others did religion and feudality; and these new artifices cloak themselves under the smoke produced by the explosion of the old.

Against one shadow of aristocracy, the general constitution provides in these words, no title of nobility shall be granted by the United States." Suppose, as a provision against the other, some member of the convention had proposed, "that the reinstatement of Jupiter, and the convocation of Olympus should be prohibited:" Ought he not to have been seconded by the inventor of the security against aristocracy, contained in the prohibition of title? The