Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/34

24 compeers of these titled patricians in wealth, and they, the compeers of Plebeians in subjection to law; and the equalising spirit of knowledge has exalted one class, and reduced the other, to the common standard of mortal men.

An endeavour to record the magnanimity, ambition and consequence, exhibited by the British peerage, would conduct us precisely to the era of the change, at which the history would stop of itself, in defiance of the historian; it would terminate where the history of patronage and paper begins, because one form of aristocracy supplants another; and it would pass on from the dead to the living, as in the ease of any other succession. Thence forward, the English peerage gradually sunk into the aristocracy of the third age; it became the creature of patronage, and the subject of paper; and although it is seen on account of a legislative formulary, it is as little regarded by the nation, as a butterfly by a man in agony. Its number is recruited from the corps raised and disciplined by the system of patronage and paper; and the claims it once possessed to superior knowledge, virtue, wealth and independence, have been long since immolated at the shrines of printing, alienation and executive power.

Nor does Great Britain possess the materials for reviving the aristocracy of the first or second age, or erecting one in any respect correspondent to that contemplated by Mr. Adams's political scheme. If this assertion is established, his hypothesis is destroyed. It is therefore allowable to bring it again into view, that an argument so important, may be better understood.

Every society, in Mr. Adams's opinion, will naturally produce a class of men minor in number, but superior to the major class in virtue, abilities and wealth; and hence, important, dangerous and ambitious. That they may be watched and controlled, they must be thrown into a separate legislative body, and balanced by a king on one side, and a house of Commons on the other: otherwise they will usurp the government.