Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/38

28 national intelligence, but of national intelligence; not sustained by superstition, but by a common interest.

Similar causes produced the feudal aristocracy. The conquering tribes were moving cities and colonising armies, and hereditary privileges were preferred to national annihilation. The feudal commanders, compared with their ignorant vassals, possessed that superiority in renown, talents and wealth, which might have produced the feudal system, as the moral effect of these moral causes. Such a form of government might have been the best which these moving cities, these tribes or these armies could bear, and yet execrable for a nation, not in the same moral state.

Having thus conceded to Mr. Adams, that wherever a few possess the mass of the renown, virtue, talents and wealth of a nation, that they will become an aristocracy, and probably ought to do so; it would be a concession, strictly reciprocal, to admit, that wherever no such body is to be found, an aristocracy ought not to be created by legal assignments of wealth and poverty. As the first species of minority will govern, because of the power arising from such monopolies only, so no other species can, without these sources of power. Where its sources are, power will be found; and hence the great mass of wealth, created by the system of paper and patronage, has annihilated the power of the didactick and titled peerage of England; because it has not a sufficient mass of virtue, renown, talents or wealth, to oppose against stock and patronage.

The aristocracies of the first and second ages were indebted for their power to ignorance, fraud and superstition; now reason, sincerity and truth, are demanded by the human mind. It disdains to worship a pageant or fear a phantom, and is only to be guided by views of interest or happiness. This change in the human character indicates an impossibility of reviving the principles which sustained the aristocracies of the first and second age, when mankind believed in the Gods of a pantheon, and in the prophetic powers of convulsed women.