men. You do not imagine that I
wish to confine power, authority, and distinction to blood and names and
titles. No, Sir. There is no qualification for government but virtue and
wisdom, actual or presumptive. Wherever they are actually found, they
have, in whatever state, condition, profession, or trade, the passport
of Heaven to human place and honor. Woe to the country which would madly
and impiously reject the service of the talents and virtues, civil,
military, or religious, that are given to grace and to serve it; and
would condemn to obscurity everything formed to diffuse lustre and glory
around a state! Woe to that country, too, that, passing into the
opposite extreme, considers a low education, a mean, contracted view of
things, a sordid, mercenary occupation, as a preferable title to
command! Everything ought to be open,--but not indifferently to every
man. No rotation, no appointment by lot, no mode of election operating
in the spirit of sortition or rotation, can be generally good in a
government conversant in extensive objects; because they have no
tendency, direct or indirect, to select the man with a view to the duty,
or to accommodate the one to the other. I do not hesitate to say that
the road to eminence and power, from obscure condition, ought not to be
made too easy, nor a thing too much of course. If rare merit be the
rarest of all rare things, it ought to pass through some sort of
probation. The temple of honor ought to be seated on an eminence. If it
be opened through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that virtue is
never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.

Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state, that does not
represent its ability, as well as its property. But as ability is a
vigorous and active principle, and as property is sluggish, inert, and
timid, it never can be safe from the invasions of ability, unless it be,
out of all proportion, predominant in the representation. It must be
represented, too, in great masses of accumulation, or it is not rightly
protected. The characteristic essence of property, formed out of the
combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be
_unequal_. The great masses, therefore, which excite envy, and tempt
rapacity, must be put out of the possibility of danger. Then they form a
natural rampart about the lesser properties in all their gradations. The
same quantity of property which is by the natural course of things
di