Believing it therefore a question at least arduous in the theory, and in the practice very critical, it would become us to ascertain, as well as we can, what form it is that our incantations are about to call up from darkness and the sleep of ages. When the supreme authority of the people is in question, before we attempt to extend or to confine it, we ought to fix in our minds, with some degree of distinctness, an idea of what it is we mean, when we say the PEOPLE.

In a state of rude nature there is no such thing as a people. A number of men in themselves have no collective capacity. The idea of a people is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial; and made, like all other legal fictions, by common agreement. What the particular nature of that agreement was, is collected from the form into which the particular society has been cast. Any other is not their covenant. When men, therefore, break up the original compact or agreement which gives its corporate form and capacity to a state, they are no longer a people; they have no longer a corporate existence; they have no longer a legal, coactive force to bind within, nor a claim to be recognised abroad. They are a number of vague, loose individuals, and nothing more. With them all is to begin again. Alas! they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass, which has a true, politic personality.

We hear much from men, who have not acquired their hardness of assertion from the profundity of their thinking, about the omnipotence of a majority, in such a dissolution of an ancient society as hath taken place in France. But amongst men so disbanded, there can be no such thing as majority or minority; or power in any one person to bind The power of acting by a majority, which the gentlemen theorists seem to assume so readily, after they have violated the contract out of which it has arisen, (if at all it existed.) must be grounded on two assumptions; first, that of an incorporation produced by unanimity; and secondly, an unanimous agreement, that the act of a mere majority (say of one) shall pass with them and with others as the act of the whole.

We are so little affected by things which are habitual, that we consider this idea of the decision of a majority as if it

number of individuals, who can agree upon it, have an un doubted right to form themselves into a state apart, and wholly independent. If any of these is forced into the fellowship of another, this is conquest, and not compact. Or every principle, which supposes society to be in virtue of a free covenant, this compulsive incorporation must be null and void.

As a people can have no right to a corporate capacity without universal consent, so neither have they a right to hold exclusively any lands in the name and title of a corporation. On the scheme of the present rulers in our neighbouring country, regenerated as they are, they have no more right to the territory called France than I have. I have a right to pitch my tent in any unoccupied place I can find for it; and I may apply to my own maintenance any part of their unoccupied soil. I may purchase the house or vineyard of any individual proprietor who refuses his consent (and most proprietors have, as far as they dared, refused it) to the new incorporation. I stand in his independent place. Who are these insolent men calling themselves the French nation, that would monopolize this fair domain of nature? Is it because they speak a certain jargon? Is it their mode of chattering, to me unintelligible, that forms their title to my land? Who are they who claim by prescription and descent from certain gangs of banditti called Franks, and Burgundians, and Visigoths, of whom I may have never heard, and ninety-nine out of an hundred of themselves certainly never have heard; whilst at the very time they tell me, that prescription and long possession form no title to property ? Who are they that presume to assert that the land which I purchased of the individual, a natural person, and not a fiction of state, belongs to them, who in the very capacity in which they make their claim can exist only as an imaginary being, and in virtue of the very prescription which they reject and disown? This mode of arguing might be pushed into all the detail, so as to leave no sort of doubt, that on their principles, and on the sort of footing on which they have thought proper to place themselves, the crowd of men, on the other side of the channel, who have the impudence to call themselves a people, can never be the lawful, exclusive possessors of the soil. By what they call reason.

ing without prejudice, they leave not one stone upon an
in the fabric of human society. They subvert all the aut
ity which they hold, as well as all that which they ha
destroyed.

As in the abstract, it is perfectly clear, that, out of a state of civil society, majority and minority are relations which can have no existence; and that, in civil society, its own specific conventions in each corporation determine what it is that constitutes the people, so as to make their act the signification of the general will: to come to particulars, it is equally clear, that neither in France nor in England has the original or any subsequent compact of the state, expressed or implied, constituted a majority of men, told by the head, to be the acting people of their several communities. And I see as little of policy or utility, as there is of right, in laying down a principle that a majority of men told by the head are to be considered as the people, and that as such their will is to be law. What policy can there be found in arrangements made in defiance of every political principle? To enable men to act with the weight and character of a people, and to answer the ends for which they are incorporated into that capacity, we must suppose them (by means immediate or consequential) to be in that state of habitual social discipline, in which the wiser, the more expert, and/ the more opulent conduct, and by conducting enlighten and protect, the weaker, the less knowing, and the less provided with the goods of fortune. 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

AN APPEAL FROM

class of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as ge must be admitted for actual truths. To be bred of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from fancy; to be taught to respect one's self; to be to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated gr be enabled to take a large view of the wide-spread nitely diversified combinations of men and affairs society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to co be enabled to draw the court and attention of the learned wherever they are to be found;-to be hab armies to command and to obey; to be taught danger in the pursuit of honour and duty; to be the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and ci tion, in a state of things in which no fault is comm impunity, and the slightest mistakes draw on the ous consequences—to be led to a guarded and regu duct, from a sense that you are considered as an of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns you act as a reconciler between God and manployed as an administrator of law and justice, thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuo be amongst rich traders, who from their success sumed to have sharp and vigorous understandin possess the virtues of diligence, order, constanc gularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regar mutative justice-these are the circumstances of form what I should call a natural aristocracy, with there is no nation.

The state of civil society, which necessarily gen aristocracy, is a state of nature; and much mor than a savage and incoherent mode of life. For nature reasonable; and he is never perfectly in h state, but when he is placed where reason may be vated, and most predominates. Art is man's nat are as much, at least, in a state of nature in formed as in immature and helpless infancy. Men, qualif manner I have just described, form in nature, as sh in the common modification of society, the leading and governing part. It is the soul to the body