The things we do!

But this one it
must have, for on this its aptitudes are superior, natural, unique,
and the State which refuses to employ it resembles the gardener who
in his fondness for a plane surface would repress his best
shoots.[13] -- Hence, in the constructions which aim to utilize the
permanent forces of society and yet maintain civil equality, the
aristocracy is brought to take a part in public affairs by the
duration and gratuitous character of its mission, by the institution
of an hereditary character, by the application of various machinery,
all of which is combined so as to develop the ambition, the culture,
and the political capacity of the upper class, and to place power,
or the control of power, in its hands, on the condition that it
shows itself worthy of exercising it. -- Now, in 1789, the upper
class was not unworthy of it. Members of the parliaments, the
noblemen, bishops, capitalists, were the men amongst whom, and
through whom, the philosophy of the eighteenth century was
propagated.


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