National Gazette

ARISTOCRACY and DEMOCRACY

The world is at this moment engaged in the important contest—whether the people shall rise, or be slaves ; the success or ruin of the French republic decides the question. In the mean time the aristocracy of all countries are employing, every engine that fear, or art, or revenge can devise, to secure and increase their power. Here their intentions are unequivocal, while with one hand they seem to decorate the statue of liberty, the other is assiduously employed in undermining its base. While they pretend to emancipate the Catholic, they are forging new fetters for both Catholics and Protestants. With an army of mercenaries at their back, they throw off the mask, and declare in the senate, that—" the people [whom they call the rabble] has no part in the constitution; that an aristocracy forms the essence of it ; that wealth makes power, and right."—It remains, however, for the bayonet alone to render such logic convincing. Wealth indeed might claim a right to rule, if wisdom and virtue were its constant concomitants, and if those who wanted one, were proportionably deficient in the other. But since an ass is not the less an ass, although his panniers be loaded with gold ; there is no moral reason why a wealthy knave or fool should lord it over a wise and virtuous, although poor, man. Were the people proof against the corruptions of wealth. they would soon convince their tyrants, that the right is originally, and at all times in them and that power and competency would follow.
[Belfast Paper.]