Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/30

20 to oppose them in the second, will be discerned; and Mr. Adams's system must sustain the shock of admitting, that a king cannot be a good remedy against the evils of any species of aristocracy, created by himself for an instrument, not for a check of monarchical power.

The aristocratical varieties just described, evince a factitious origin; and the frauds practised by the Roman aristociacy for self-preservation, in common with its Grecian predecessor, acknowledge a similar ancestry. It usurped the dignities of government, monopolized public property, enriched itself by conquest and by forcing the people to borrow at exorbitant usury of itself, to supply the loss of labour whilst fighting for the lands it monopolized, assumed the priesthood, practised upon the vulgar superstition, and impressed an idea that its progeny was well born, by prohibiting the connubial intercourse between itself and inferior orders. Nature needed not these arbitrary and fraudulent helps, in manufacturing aristocracy, had she been its parent.

And what was the fate of this Roman aristocracy, thus entrenched behind law, religion and robbery? It was modified occasionally by popular lucid intervals, until the people, wearied with its injuries and frauds, took refuge from the oppression of five hundred tyrants under that of one. Then this ancient aristocracy merged in a despotism, and for centuries remained in a state of abeyance. Why may not a modern aristocracy merge in the principle of representation? The peerage of England, like the conscript fathers under an Emperor, being in this state of abeyance, so little requires Mr. Adams's king and commons to control it, that it would naturally become extinct, except for the nourishment of royal patronage.

Mr. Adams's hypothesis, being evidently borrowed from the English model, we will view that model with more attention than will be devoted to other forms of government.

For the sake of perspicuity, I shall call the ancient aristocracy, chiefly created and supported by superstition, "the aristocracy of the first age;" that produced by conquest,