tion naturally presents itself, What is the best form
of government for conducting the Res-Publica, or the Public Business
of a nation, after it becomes too extensive and populous for the simple
democratical form? It cannot be monarchy, because monarchy is subject
to an objection of the same amount to which the simple democratical form
was subject.

It is possible that an individual may lay down a system of principles,
on which government shall be constitutionally established to any extent
of territory. This is no more than an operation of the mind, acting by
its own powers. But the practice upon those principles, as applying to
the various and numerous circumstances of a nation, its agriculture,
manufacture, trade, commerce, etc., etc., a knowledge of a different
kind, and which can be had only from the various parts of society. It is
an assemblage of practical knowledge, which no individual can possess;
and therefore the monarchical form is as much limited, in 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,