from the government, and from nobler employments.  In all these countries, either by express law, or by usage more operative, the noble castes are almost universally, in their turn, excluded from commerce, manufacture, farming of land, and in general from all lucrative civil professions.  The nobles have the monopoly of honor; the plebeians a monopoly of all the means of acquiring wealth.  Thus some sort of a balance is formed among conditions; a sort of compensation is furnished to those who, in a limited sense, are excluded from the government of the state.

Between the extreme of a total exclusion, to which your maxim goes, and an universal unmodified capacity, to which the fanatics pretend, there are many different degrees and stages, and a great variety of temperaments, upon which prudence may give full scope to its exertions.  For you know that the decisions of prudence (contrary to the system of the insane reasoners) differ from those of judicature; and that almost all the former are determined on the more or the less, the earlier or the later, and on a balance of advantage and inconvenience, of good and evil.

In all considerations which turn upon the question of vesting or continuing the state solely and exclusively in some one description of citizens, prudent legislators will consider how far the general form and principles of their commonwealth render it fit to be cast into an oligarchical shape, or to remain always in it.  We know that the government of Ireland (the same as the British) is not in its constitution wholly aristocratical; and as it is not such in its form, so neither is it in its spirit.  If it had been inveterately aristocratical, exclusions might be more patiently submitted to.  The lot of one plebeian would be the lot of all; and an habitual reverence and admiration of certain families might make the people content to see government wholly in hands to whom it seemed naturally to belong.  But our Constitution has a plebeian member, which forms an essential integrant part of it.  A plebeian oligarchy is a monster; and no people, not absolutely domestic or predial slaves, will long endure it.  The Protestants of Ireland are not alone sufficiently the people to form a democracy; and they are too numerous to answer the ends and purposes of an aristocracy.  Admiration, that first source of obedience, can be only the claim or the imposture of the few.  I hold it to be absolutely impossible for two millions of plebeians, composing certainly a very clear and decided majority in that class, to become so far in love with six or seven hundred thousand of their fellow-citizens (to all outward appearance plebeians like themselves, and many of them tradesmen, servants, and otherwise inferior to some of them) as to see with satisfaction, or even with patience, an exclusive power vested in them, by which constitutionally they become the absolute masters, and, by the manners derived