n exact parallel to that feature in the Constitution of the United
States which makes the master the representative of his slave.'--'The
Constitution of the United States expressly prescribes that no title
of nobility shall be granted by the United States. The spirit of this
interdict is not a rooted antipathy to the grant of mere powerless
empty _titles_, but to titles of _nobility_; to the institution of
privileged orders of men. But what order of men under the most
absolute of monarchies, or the most aristocratic of republics, was
ever invested with such an odious and unjust privilege as that of the
separate and exclusive representation of less than half a million
owners of slaves, in the Hall of this House, in the chair of the
Senate, and in the Presidential mansion?'--'This investment of power
in the owners of one species of property concentrated in the highest
authorities of the nation, and disseminated through thirteen of the
twenty-six States of the Union, constitutes a privileged order of men
in the community, more adverse to the rights of all, and more
pernicious to the interests of the whole, than any order of nobility
ever known. To call government thus constituted a Democracy, is to
insult the understanding 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, equ