way else, domestically or publicly, it is
still a monster.

In France aristocracy had one feature less in its countenance than what
it has in some other countries. It did not compose a body of hereditary
legislators. It was not "a corporation of aristocracy," for such I have
heard M. de la Fayette describe an English House of Peers. Let us then
examine the grounds upon which the French Constitution has resolved
against having such a House in France.

Because, in the first place, as is already mentioned, aristocracy is
kept up by family tyranny and injustice.

Secondly. Because there is an unnatural unfitness in an aristocracy to
be legislators for a nation. Their ideas of distributive justice are
corrupted at the very source. They begin life by trampling on all their
younger brothers and sisters, and relations of every kind, and are
taught and educated so to do. With what ideas of justice or honour can
that man enter a house of legislation, who absorbs in his own person
the inheritance of a whole family of children or doles out to them some
pitiful portion with the insolence of a gift?

Thirdly. Because the idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent
as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an
hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous
as an hereditary poet laureate.

Fourthly. Because a body of men, holding themselves accountable to
nobody, ought not to be trusted by anybody.

Fifthly. Because it is continuing the uncivilised principle of
governments founded in conquest, and the base idea of man having
property in man, and governing him by personal right.

Sixthly. Because aristocracy has a tendency to deteriorate the human
species. By the universal economy of nature it is known, and by the
instance of the Jews it is proved, that the human species has a tendency
to degenerate, in any small number of persons, when separated from the
general stock of society, and inter-marrying constantly with each other.
It defeats even its pretended end, and becomes in time the opposite of
what is noble in man. Mr. Burke talks of nobility; let him show what
it is. The greatest characters the world have known have arisen on the
democratic floor. Aristocracy has not been able to keep a proportionate
pace with democracy. The artificial Noble shrinks into a dwarf before
the Noble of Nature; and in the few instances of those (for there are
some in all countries) in whom n