I do not, my dear Sir, conceive you to be of that sophistical, captious spirit, or of that uncandid dullness, as to require, for every general observation or sentiment, an explicit detail of the correctives and exceptions which reason will presume to be included in all the general propositions which come from reasonable men.  You do not imagine that I wish to confine power, authority, and distinction to blood and names and titles.  No, Sir.  There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive.  Wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever state, condition, profession, or trade, the passport of Heaven to human place and honor.  Woe to the country which would madly and impiously reject the service of the talents and virtues, civil, military, or religious, that are given to grace and to serve it; and would condemn to obscurity everything formed to diffuse lustre and glory around a state!  Woe to that country, too, that, passing into the opposite extreme, considers a low education, a mean, contracted view of things, a sordid, mercenary occupation, as a preferable title to command!  Everything ought to be open,—­but not indifferently to every man.  No rotation, no appointment by lot, no mode of election operating in the spirit of sortition or rotation, can be generally good in a government conversant in extensive objects; because they have no tendency, direct or indirect, to select the man with a view to the duty, or to accommodate the one to the other.  I do not hesitate to say that the road to eminence and power, from obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course.  If rare merit be the rarest of all rare things, it ought to pass through some sort of probation.  The temple of honor ought to be seated on an eminence.  If it be opened through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.

Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state, that does not represent its ability, as well as its property.  But as ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as property is sluggish, inert, and timid, it never can be safe from the invasions of ability, unless it be, out of all proportion, predominant in the representation.  It must be represented, too, in great masses of accumulation, or it is not rightly protected.  The characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal.  The great masses, therefore, which excite envy, and tempt rapacity, must be put out of the possibility of danger.  Then they form a natural rampart about the lesser properties in all their gradations.  The same quantity of property which is by the natural course of things divided among many has not the same operation.  Its defensive power is weakened as it is diffused.  In this diffusion each man’s portion is less than what, in the eagerness of his desires, he may flatter himself to obtain by dissipating the accumulations of others.  The plunder of the few would, indeed, give but a share inconceivably small in the distribution to the many.  But the many are not capable of making this calculation; and those who lead them to rapine never intend this distribution.