When the multitude are not under this discipline, they can
scarcely be said to be in civil society. Give once a certain
constitution of things which produces a variety of conditions and
circumstances in a state, and there is in Nature and reason a principle
which, for their own benefit, postpones, not the interest, but the
judgment, of those who are _numero plures_, to those who are _virtute et
honore majores_. Numbers in a state (supposing, which is not the case in
France, that a state does exist) are always of consideration,--but they
are not the whole consideration. It is in things more serious than a
play, that it may be truly said, _Satis est equitem mihi plaudere_.
A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or
separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of any large body
rightly constituted. It is formed out of a class of legitimate
presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be admitted for actual
truths. To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and
sordid from one's infancy; to be taught to respect one's self; to be
habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early
to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled
to take a large view of the wide-spread and infinitely diversified
combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure 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.
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