their
benefit only, your social-stake system is all well enough; but if the
object be the general good, you have no choice but to trust its custody
to the general keeping. Let us suppose two men--since you happen to be
a man, and not a monikin--let us suppose two men perfectly equal in
morals, intelligence, public virtue and patriotism, one of whom shall be
rich and the other shall have nothing. A crisis arrives in the affairs
of their common country, and both are called upon to exercise their
franchise, on a question--as almost all great questions must--that
unavoidably will have some influence on property generally. Which would
give the most impartial vote--he who, of necessity, must be swayed by
his personal interest, or he who has no inducement of the sort to go
astray?"

"Certainly he who has nothing to influence him to go wrong. But the
question is not fairly put--"

"Your pardon, Sir John--it is put fairly as an abstract question, and
one that is to prove a principle. I am glad to hear you say that a man
would be apt to decide in this manner; for it shows his identity with
a monikin. We hold that all of us are apt to think most of ourselves on
such occasions."

"My dear brigadier, do not mistake sophistry for reason. Surely, if
power belonged only to the poor--and the poor, or the comparatively
poor, always compose the mass--they would exercise it in a way to strip
the rich of their possessions."

"We think not, in Leaplow. Cases might exist, in which such a state of
things would occur under a reaction; but reactions imply abuses, and are
not to be quoted to maintain a principle. He who was drunk yesterday,
may need an unnatural stimulus to-day; while he who is uniformly
temperate preserves his proper tone of body without recourse to a remedy
so dangerous. Such an experiment, under a strong provocation, might
possibly be made; but it could scarcely be made twice among any people,
and not even once among a people that submits in season to a just
division of its authority, since it is obviously destructive of a
leading principle of civilization. According to our monikin histories,
all the attacks upon property have been produced by property's grasping
at more than fairly belongs to its immunities. If you make political
power a concomitant of property, both may go together, certainly; but if
kept separate, the danger to the latter will never exceed the danger
in which it is put daily by the arts of the money-g