natural and unavoidable, and also that our state of manners
and knowledge is so exactly theirs, that we cannot avoid a
similar aristocracy; namely, one of divine blood; before
these precedents, any more than magna charta, could be
made useful in his mode, to modern liberty. He was unable to do this. We know that man, yoked to obedience by superstition, and half bereft of his faculties by ignorance, was yet impatient under aristocracy; though he believed it to be the offspring of the Gods: the inference which presents itself is, that, enlightened by the effects of printing, he will not easily be subjected by one, which he knows to be the offspring of men.
An opposition to aristocratical power seems to have been constantly coeval with an advance of national information. It began in Greece, appeared at Rome, and has continued the companion of mental improvement, down to the present day. As knowledge advanced in England, this opposition gained ground, and at length a victory, before that wise and natural aristocracy discovered its danger.
By the natural coalition between knowledge and an enmity to aristocracy, that of England was substantially annihilated, whilst its forms remained. The nobility have ceased to be feared, because they have ceased to be powerful; and the prohibition of ennobled orders in America, is the formal effect of their previous substantial destruction, by the progress of knowledge in England.
Knowledge and commerce, by a division of virtue, of talents, and of wealth among multitudes, have annihilated that order of men, who in past ages constituted "a natural aristocracy," (as Mr. Adams thinks) by exclusive virtue, talents and wealth. This ancient object of terror has shrunk into a cypher; whilst a single executive, proposed by Mr. Adams as its check, has become, by the aid of patronage and paper, a political figure, at the head of a long row of decimals.
From the tyranny of aristocracy, Mr. Adams takes refuge under the protection of a king, and considers him as
