Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/591

Rh we should be surprised by the one, whilst we are watching the other. Hume's illustration of the latter by the Spartan aristocracy, would have been as apt, had that aristocracy extracted its subsistence from the mechanicks and cultivators, or Helots, by paper stock, as by the mode it pursued. It had no titles, and was one interest living on another. The impossibility of providing a balance of property in the United States, for a personal aristocracy, was explained, to shew that an aristocratical principle cannot be introduced in that mode, and if not in that, it can only be introduced in the mode of an aristocracy of interest. Through principles, and not names, this species of political power, becomes real and oppressive. Was any person ever weak enough to discern hierarchy, aristocracy, or monarchy, in Scotch bishops, the American Cincinnati, or Theodore king of Corsica? Wealth is indispensable to sustain both a personal aristocracy, and an aristocracy of interest. The first can never obtain this indispensable principle in the United States, except they should be subdued by an invading or a native army, and divided among its chieftains. The second may obtain it, by means of patronage, corruption, privilege, and paper stock. It may steal into sovereignty with great rapidity, by selling its influence in society to the personal or disinterested parties alternately. Every aristocracy of interest is ardent in this traffick, and a love of power unhappily induces all political parties (unless they are controlled by nations) to bestow wealth and credit upon this species of aristocracy, until their own principles are lost in the corruption they have countenanced to preserve them, and they themselves sink into a state of subjection to their own instruments.