A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the State, or separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of any large body rightly constituted. It is formed out of a class of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be admitted for actual truths. To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one's infancy; to be taught to respect one's self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned wherever they are to be found;--to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honor and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, 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.
Not many, even among the wisest of our own generation, would fail to respond favorably to that glowing picture of nature's aristocrats, but when we come to the means by which Burke would assure the existence and supremacy of such a class, it is different. Despite some tincture of the so-called "enlightenment," which few men of that age could entirely escape, Burke had a deep distrust of the restive, self-seeking nature of mankind, and as a restraint upon it he would magnify the passive as opposed to the active power of what is really the same human nature. This passive instinct he called "prejudice"--the unreasoning and unquestioning attachment to the family and "the little platoon we belong to in society," from which our affection, coincident always with a feeling of contented obligation, is gradually enlarged to take in the peculiar institutions of our country; "prejudice renders a man's virtues his habits, ... through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature." Prejudice is thus the binding force which works from below upwards; the corresponding force which moves from above is "prescription"--the possession of rights and authority which have been confirmed by custom. In other words, Burke believed that the only practical way of ensuring a natural aristocracy was by the acceptance of a prescriptive oligarchy; in the long run and after account had been taken of all exceptions--and he was in no wise a blind worshipper of the Whig families which then governed England--he believed that the men of light and leading would already be found among, or by reason of their preëminence would be assumed into, the class of those whose views were broadened by the inherited possession of privilege and honors.