tide of mental
faculties flowed as far as it could in certain channels, and then
forsook its course, and arose in others. How irrational then is the
hereditary system, which establishes channels of power, in company
with which wisdom refuses to flow! By continuing this absurdity, man is
perpetually in contradiction with himself; he accepts, for a king, or a
chief magistrate, or a legislator, a person whom he would not elect for
a constable.

It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and
talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward. There is
existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which,
unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that
condition, to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that
the whole of its faculties should be employed, the construction of
government ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular
operation, all that extent of capacity which never fails to appear in
revolutions.

This cannot take place in the insipid state of hereditary government,
not only because it prevents, but because it operates to benumb. When
the mind of a nation is bowed down by any political superstition in its
government, such as hereditary succession is, it loses a considerable
portion of its powers on all other subjects and objects. Hereditary
succession requires the same obedience to ignorance, as to wisdom;
and when once the mind can bring itself to pay this indiscriminate
reverence, it descends below the stature of mental manhood. It is fit
to be great only in little things. It acts a treachery upon itself, and
suffocates the sensations that urge the detection.

Though the ancient governments present to us a miserable picture of the
condition of man, there is one which above all others exempts itself
from the general description. I mean the democracy of the Athenians. We
see more to admire, and less to condemn, in that great, extraordinary
people, than in anything which history affords.

Mr. Burke is so little acquainted with constituent principles of
government, that he confounds democracy and representation together.
Representation was a thing unknown in the ancient democracies. In those
the mass of the people met and enacted laws (grammatically speaking) in
the first person. Simple democracy was no other than the common hall of
the ancients. It signifies the form, as well as the public principle of
the gover