ding of mankind. To call it an Aristocracy, is to
do injustice to that form of government. Aristocracy is the government
of the _best_. Its standard qualification for accession to power is
_merit_, ascertained by popular election, recurring at short intervals
of time. If even that government is prone to degenerate into tyranny,
what must be the character of that form of polity in which the
standard qualification for access to power is wealth in the possession
of slaves? It is doubly tainted with the infection of riches and of
slavery. _There is no name in the language of national jurisprudence
that can define it_--no model in the records of ancient history, or in
the political theories of Aristotle, with which it can be likened. It
was introduced into the Constitution of the United States by an
equivocation--a representation of property under the name of persons.
Little did the members of the Convention from the free States imagine
or foresee what a sacrifice to Moloch was hidden under the mask of
this concession.'--'The House of Representatives of the U. States
consists of 223 members--all, by the _letter_ of the Constitution,
representatives only of _persons_, as 135 of them really are; but the
other 88, equally representing the _persons_ of their constituents, by
whom they are elected, also represent, under the name of _other
persons_, upwards of two and a half millions of _slaves_, held as the
_property_ of less than half a million of the white constituents, and
valued at twelve hundred millions of dollars. Each of these 88 members
represents in fact the whole of that mass of associated wealth, and
the persons and exclusive interests of its owners; all thus knit
together, like the members of a moneyed corporation, with a capital
not of thirty-five or forty or fifty, but of twelve hundred millions
of dollars, exhibiting the most extraordinary exemplification of the
anti-republican tendencies of associated wealth that the world ever
saw.'--'Here is one class of men, consisting of not more than
one-fortieth part of the whole people, not more than one-thirtieth
part of the free population, exclusively devoted to their personal
interests identified with their own as slaveholders of the same
associated wealth, and wielding by their votes, upon every question of
government or of public policy, two-fifths of the whole power of the
House. In the Senate of the Union, the proportion of the slaveholding
power is yet greater. By