sure to
read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and
attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be
habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise
danger in the pursuit of honor and duty; to be formed to the greatest
degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things
in which no fault is committed with impunity and the slightest mistakes
draw on the most ruinous consequences; to be led to a guarded and
regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an instructor
of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a
reconciler between God and man; to be employed as an administrator of
law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to
mankind; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuous
art; to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to
have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of
diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an
habitual regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of
men that form what I should call a _natural_ aristocracy, without which
there is no nation.

The state of civil society which necessarily generates this aristocracy
is a state of Nature,--and much more truly so than a savage and
incoherent mode of life. For man is by nature reasonable; and he is
never perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason
may be best cultivated and most predominates. Art is man's nature. We
are as much, at least, in a state of Nature in formed manhood as in
immature and helpless infancy. Men, qualified in the manner I have just
described, form in Nature, as she operates in the common modification of
society, the leading, guiding, and governing part. It is the soul to the
body, without which the man does not exist. To give, therefore, no more
importance, in the social order, to such descriptions of men than that
of so many units is a horrible usurpation.

When great multitudes act together, under that discipline of Nature, I
recognize the PEOPLE. I acknowledge something that perhaps equals, and
ought always to guide, the sovereignty of convention. In all things the
voice of this grand chorus of national harmony ought to have a mighty
and decisive influence. But when you disturb this harmony,--when you
break up this beautiful order, this array of truth and Natu