An Aristocracy Essential To The Constitution Of A State

A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the State, or separable from it. It is formed out of a class of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be admitted for actual truths. To be bred in a place of to see nothing low and sordid from one s infancy ; to be taught to respect one s self ; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye ; to look early to public opinion ; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society ; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse ; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned wherever they are to be found ; to be habituated in armies to command and to obey ; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty ; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity, and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous conse quences ; to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct from a sense that you are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man ; to be employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby among the first benefactors to mankind ; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenious art ; to be among rich traders, who, from their success, are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possgss the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation. The state of civil society, which necessarily generates this aristocracy, is a state of nature ; and much more truly so than a savage and incoherent mode of life. For man is, by nature, reasonable ; and he is never perfectly in his natural state but when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated and most predominates. Art is man s nature. We are as much, at least, in a state of nature in formed manhood as in immature and helpless infancy. Men, qualified in the manner I have just described, form in Nature, as she operates in the common modification of society, the leading, guiding, and governing part. It is the soul to the body, without which the man does not exist. To give, therefore, no more importance, in the social order, to such descriptions of men than that of so many units is a horrible usurpation.


"Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs," 1791.

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Fonte: http://www.archive.org/stream/forgottentruthss00burkuoft/forgottentruthss00burkuoft_djvu.txt.