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 from their circumstances, must be capable of exercising upon them, daily and hourly, an insulting and vexatious superiority. Neither are the majority of the Irish indemnified (as in some aristocracies) for this state of humiliating vassalage (often inverting the nature of things and relations) by having the lower walks of industry wholly abandoned to them. They are rivalled, to say the least of the matter, in every laborious and lucrative course of life; while every franchise, every honor, every trust, every place, down to the very lowest and least confidential, (besides whole professions,) is reserved for the master caste.