Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/37

Rh lords were feudal barons; now that they are only titled courtiers, mutual harmony, the probable effect, is equally warranted by the actual fact. King, lords and commons are melted up together by the aristocracy of the third age, retaining, like Cerberus, three mouths, and yet possessing all the defects of political power collected into one body, so ably demonstrated by Mr. Adams; and the unhappy English are exposed to all the oppressions of a substantial aristocracy existing in the monopolies of paper and patronage, and to all the evils of a legislative power in the ghost of an unsubstantial one.

We are ready to acknowledge that extraordinary virtue, talents and wealth united, will govern, and ought to govern, and yet it is denied that this confession is reconcileable with the system of king, lords and commons. If a body of men, which possesses the virtue, talents and wealth of a nation, ought to govern; it follows, that a body of men, which does not possess these attributes, ought not to govern.

The aristocracy of Rome for instance, did, at certain periods, possess a greater proportion of virtue talents and wealth, than can be found in any cast or order of men at present, among commercial nations; which, and not the house of lords in England, Mr. Adams must have had in his eye, when in speaking of an aristocracy, he utters the following expressions, 'it is the brightest ornament and glory of a nation, and may always be made the greatest blessing of society, if it be judiciously managed in the constitution;" unless he can shew us, that the English house of lords merits this eulogy.

Plebeian ignorance was both the cause and justification of the Roman aristocracy. That might have been a worse magistrate, than patrician knowledge; and the magic circle drawn by superstition around the conscript fathers, might have been necessary to restrain the excesses of a rude nation inclosed within a single city. But this supplies no argument in favor of an aristocracy, in societies not of national aggregation, but of national dispersion; not of