Page:The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper, 1838.djvu/32

26 necessarily a free government. Aristocracies are oftener republicks than any thing else, and they have been among the most oppressive governments the world has ever known.

No state can grant any title of nobility; but titles of nobility are oftener the consequence than the cause of narrow governments. Neither Venice, Poland, Genoa, Berne, (a canton of Switzerland,) nor most of the other narrow aristocracies of Europe, had any titular nobles, though some of these countries were afflicted by governments of great oppression. Any state of this Union, by altering its own constitution, may place the power of its own government, and, by consequence, its representation in the government of the United States, in any dozen families, making it perpetual and hereditary. The only guarantee against such an act is to be found in the discretion of the people of the several states, none of whom would probably part with power for such a purpose, and the check which the other states might hold over any one of their body, by amending the constitution. As this instrument now exists, however, there can be no reasonable doubts of the power of any one, or of all the states, so to alter their polities.

By considering these facts, we learn the true nature of the government, which may be said to have both a theoretical character, and one in fact. In theory, this character is vague, and, with the immaterial exception of the exclusion of a monarchy and the maintenance of the representative form, one altogether dependent on the policy of the states, by which it may be made a representative aristocracy, a representative democracy, or a union of the two. The government, in fact, is a near approach to that of a representative democracy, though it is not without a slight infusion from a few mild aristocracies. So long as slavery