Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/156

 rich, under such a system as ours, will afford no security to the possessors either of wealth or of hereditary rank. By the infinitely various channels of acquiring wealth, the latter are exposed to an incessant irruption of fresh enemies, ready to avenge "the outrages of a rival pride, and exalt their wealth to what they consider its natural rank and estimation." Even if they were only opposed by fortunes of less recent acquisition, a political philosopher has told them, that "there are always, in that description, men whose fortunes, when their minds are once vitiated by passion or by evil principle, are by no means a security against their taking their part against the pubhc tranquillity. We see to what low and despicable passions of all kinds many men in that class are ready to sacrifice the patrimonial estates, which might be perpetuated in their families with splendour, and with the fame of hereditary benefactors to mankind, from generation to generation. Do we not see how lightly people treat their fortunes when under the influence of the passion of gaming? The game of ambition or resentment will be played, by many of the rich and great, as desperately, and with as much blindness to the consequences, as any other game." Nor can rank alone be relied upon as a protection. "Turbulent discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order. One of the first symptoms they discover of a foolish and mischievous ambition is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they partake with others." "Confounded by the complication of distempered passions, their reason is disturbed, their views become vast and perplexed; to others inexplicable,—to themselves uncertain. They find on all sides bounds to their unprincipled ambition in any fixed order of things. But in the fog and haze of confusion all is enlarged, and appears without any limit. When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to ambition without a distinct object, and