oint, and would enable the State to act
in mass, as your people have so often done, and with so much effect, by
their town-meetings. The law for religious freedom, which made a part of
this system, having put down the aristocracy of the clergy, and restored
to the citizen the freedom of the mind, and those of entails and
descents nurturing an equality of condition among them, this on
education would have raised the mass of the people to the high ground
of moral respectability necessary to their own safety, and to orderly
government; and would have completed the great object of qualifying them
to select the veritable aristoi, for the trusts of government, to the
exclusion of the pseudalists: and the same Theognis, who has furnished
the epigraphs of your two letters, assures us that

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Although this law has not yet been acted on but in a small and
inefficient degree, it is still considered as before the legislature,
with other bills of the revised code, not yet taken up, and I have great
hope that some patriotic spirit will, at a favorable moment, call it up,
and make it the key-stone of the arch of our government.

With respect to aristocracy, we should further consider, that before the
establishment of the American States, nothing was known to history
but the man of the old world, crowded within limits either small or
overcharged, and steeped in the vices which that situation generates. A
government adapted to such men would be one thing; but a very different
one, that for the man of these States. Here every one may have land to
labor for himself, if he chooses; or, preferring the exercise of any
other industry, may exact for it such compensation as not only to afford
a comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation
from labor in old age. Every one, by his property or by his satisfactory
situation, is interested in the support of law and order. And such men
may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control
over their public affairs, and a degree of freedom, which, in the hands
of the canaille of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted
to the demolition and destruction of every thing public and private. The
history of the last twenty-five years of France, and of the last forty
years in America, nay, of its last two hundred years, proves the truth
of both parts of this observation.

But even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the min