ARISTOCRACY.

The notion of an hereditary aristocracy being serviceable to the people by curbing the monarch, is opposed to all fact. The aristocracy is a class constituted, as it were, expressly for servitude. The extravagance of a single individual will lay a noble family for generations at the feet of a minister; and, if this be wanting, the necessity of providing for younger children, at the public expense, works the same consequence. Tacitus tells us, that on the decline of the republic, the consular, patrician, and equestrian orders, rushed headlong into servitude; and he adds, “the more illustrious the family, the more corrupt and eager were the individuals.” In Spain, the aristocracy is entirely gangrened and worthless. In France, before and since the revolution, the highest nobility grasped at personal servitude in the household of the monarch. The indirect good this order has effected in England, may be explained by the homely proverb, that declares the circumstance under which honest men come by their own. Kings granted concessions to the people to oppose them with more effect to the nobility; and the nobility made the people a pretext for opposing the sovereign; but both fought for themselves,—that is, for the power of ruling the state to their own exclusive advantage.

The brightest page in the history of aristocracies, is that which relates the events of the revolution of 1688. Yet, what a tissue of heartless intrigue, corruption, and tergiversation! what underhand correspondencies with the excluded family! what promptitude to overturn the work of their own hands, are displayed in the lives of the great men of that day! Since the revolution, the aristocracy have been the remora of civilization,—a feather-bed between the walls of despotism, and the battery of public opinion. A surplus wheel in the machinery of the state, they would long since have stopped the movements of government, if their subserviency did not adapt them to every impulse from the crown; while, by means of their representatives in the House of Commons, they modify the proceedings of that body. At the moment in which I write, the influence of the aristocracy, in defeating a liberal ministry, in making the corn laws an affair of their peculiar “order,” in opposing a necessary retrenchment of corrupt expenditure, prove to demonstration the futility of the received theory. Should public opinion, however, triumph in the lower house, the aristocracy must submit to reform, or be crushed. An enlightened people, and an anti-national aristocracy, cannot long co-exist.⁠[23]⁠