Page:The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper, 1838.djvu/73

Rh so, as they who impose the burthens generally find the means to evade their payment: the apophthegm that "it is better to have one tyrant than many," applying peculiarly to aristocracies, and not to democracies, which cannot permanently tyrannize at all, without tyrannizing over those who rule.

Aristocracies have a natural tendency to wars and aggrandizement, which bring with them the inevitable penalties of taxes, injustice, demoralization and blood-shed. This charge has been brought against republicks generally, but a distinction should be made between a republick with an aristocratical base, and a republick with a democratical base, their characters being as dissimilar as those of any two forms of government known. Aristocracies, feeling less of the better impulses of man, are beyond their influence, while their means of combining are so great, that they oftener listen to their interests than to those sentiments of natural justice that in a greater or less degree always control masses.

Aristocracies usually favor those vices that spring from the love of money, which there is divine authority for believing to be "the root of all evil." In modern aristocracies, the controlling principle is property, an influence the most corrupting to which men submit, and which, when its ordinary temptations are found united to those of political patronage and power, is much too strong for human virtue. Direct bribery, therefore, has been found to be the bane of aristocracies, the influence of individuals supplying the place of merit, services and public virtue. In Rome this system was conducted so openly, that every man of note had his "clients," a term which then signified one who depended on the favor of another for the advancement of his interests, and even for the maintenance of his rights.