tant a citizen; but if the spirit of your laws
preserves masses of property in a particular class, the government of
the country will follow the disposition of the property. So also you may
have an apparent despotism without any formal popular control, and with
no aristocracy, either natural or artificial, and the spirit of the
government may nevertheless be republican. Thus the ancient polity
of Rome, in its best days, was an aristocracy, and the government of
Constantinople is the nearest approach to a democracy on a great
scale, and maintained during a great period, that history offers.
The constitution of France during the last half century has been fast
approaching that of the Turks. The barbarous Jacobins blended modern
equality with the refined civilisation of ancient France; the barbarous
Ottomans blended their equality with the refined civilisation of ancient
Rome. Paris secured to the Jacobins those luxuries that their system
never could have produced: Byzantium served the same purpose to the
Turks. Both the French and their turbaned prototypes commenced
their system with popular enthusiasm, and terminated it with general
subjection. Napoleon and Louis Philippe are playing the same part as the
Suleimans and the Mahmouds. The Chambers are but a second-rate Divan,
the Prefects but inferior Pachas: a solitary being rules alike in the
Seraglio and the Tuileries, and the whole nation bows to his despotism
on condition that they have no other master save himself.

The disposition of property in England throws the government of the
country into the hands of its natural aristocracy. I do not believe that
any scheme of the suffrage, or any method of election, could divert
that power into other quarters. It is the necessary consequence of our
present social state. I believe, the wider the popular suffrage, the
more powerful would be the natural aristocracy. This seems to me an
inevitable consequence; but I admit this proposition on the clear
understanding that such an extension should be established on a fair,
and not a factious, basis.

Here, then, arises the question of the ballot, into the merits of which.
I shall take another opportunity of entering, recording only now my
opinion, that in the present arrangement of the constituencies, even the
ballot would favour the power of the natural aristocracy, and that, if
the ballot were simultaneously introduced with a fair and not a factious
extension of the suffrage, it