useful
practice, from the incompetency of knowledge, as was the democratical
form, from the multiplicity of population. The one degenerates, by
extension, into confusion; the other, into ignorance and incapacity, of
which all the great monarchies are an evidence. The monarchical form,
therefore, could not be a substitute for the democratical, because it
has equal inconveniences.

Much less could it when made hereditary. This is the most effectual of
all forms to preclude knowledge. Neither could the high democratical
mind have voluntarily yielded itself to be governed by children and
idiots, and all the motley insignificance of character, which attends
such a mere animal system, the disgrace and the reproach of reason and
of man.

As to the aristocratical form, it has the same vices and defects with
the monarchical, except that the chance of abilities is better from the
proportion of numbers, but there is still no security for the right use
and application of them.*[17]

Referring them to the original simple democracy, it affords the true
data from which government on a large scale can begin. It is incapable
of extension, not from its principle, but from the inconvenience of its
form; and monarchy and aristocracy, from their incapacity. Retaining,
then, democracy as the ground, and rejecting the corrupt systems of
monarchy and aristocracy, the representative system naturally presents
itself; remedying at once the defects of the simple democracy as to
form, and the incapacity of the other two with respect to knowledge.

Simple democracy was society governing itself without the aid of
secondary means. By ingrafting representation upon democracy, we arrive
at a system of government capable of embracing and confederating all the
various interests and every extent of territory and population; and that
also with advantages as much superior to hereditary government, as the
republic of letters is to hereditary literature.

It is on this system that the American government is founded. It is
representation ingrafted upon democracy. It has fixed the form by a
scale parallel in all cases to the extent of the principle. What Athens
was in miniature America will be in magnitude. The one was the wonder of
the ancient world; the other is becoming the admiration of the present.
It is the easiest of all the forms of government to be understood and
the most eligible in practice; and excludes at once the ignorance and
insecurity of