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 consequences; 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 amongst the first benefactors to mankind; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuous art; to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess 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.

When great multitudes act together, under that discipline of Nature, I recognize the PEOPLE.  I acknowledge something that perhaps equals, and ought always to guide, the sovereignty of convention.  In all things the voice of this grand chorus of national harmony ought to have a mighty and decisive influence.  But when you disturb this harmony,—­when you break up this beautiful order, this array of truth and Nature, as well as of habit and prejudice,—­when you separate the common sort of men from their proper chieftains, so as to form them into an adverse army,—­I no longer know that venerable object called the people in such a disbanded race of deserters and vagabonds.  For a while they may be terrible, indeed,—­but in such a manner as wild beasts are terrible.  The mind owes to them no sort of submission.  They are, as they have always been reputed, rebels.  They may lawfully be fought with, and brought under, whenever an advantage offers.  Those who attempt by outrage and violence to deprive men of any advantage which they hold under the laws, and to destroy the natural order of life, proclaim war against them.