For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Formerly bodily powers gave place among the aristoi. But since the invention of gunpowder has armed the weak as well as the strong with missile death, bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground of distinction. There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government? The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent it’s ascendancy. On the question, What is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging it’s errors. You think it best to put the Pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where also they may be a protection to wealth against the Agrarian and plundering enterprises of the Majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil. For if the coordinate branches can arrest their action, so may they that of the coordinates. Mischief may be done negatively as well as positively. Of this a cabal in the Senate of the U. S. has furnished many proofs. Nor do I believe them necessary to protect the wealthy; because enough of these will find their way into every branch of the legislation to protect themselves. From 15. to 20. legislatures of our own, in action for 30. years past, have proved that no fears of an equalisation of property are to be apprehended from them.
I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the real good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society. ~Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 28 Oct. 1813 (Cappon 2:387-92)
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The featured image is a portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1916) by Edward Percy Moran (1862–1935) and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Note the similarity between Jefferson’s idea of the natural aristocracy and Cicero’s articulation of the same idea in Des Republica.
“If a free people will choose those to whom it entrusts itself and will choose entirely the best men (provided it wants to be safe), certainly the safety of cities depends on the best men’s judgments—especially since nature has provided not only that the highest men in virtue and mind should be in charge of the weaker, but also that the latter should be willing to obey the highest men. But they say that this best form has been overturned by the depraved opinions of men who, because of their ignorance of virtue—which is in few men and is judged and noticed by few—[sometimes] think that the best men are the prosperous and the rich, at other times that the best men are those born of a noble family. When, because of this error of the crowd, the wealth—and not the virtues—of a few has begun to control the republic, those leading men cling to the title of “the best men,” but they lack the substance… There is no more deformed species of a city than that in which the most prosperous men are considered the best.”