“Your aristoi,” he lectured to Jefferson, “are the most difficult Animals to manage, of anything in the Whole Theory and practice of Government.” In his Defence, Adams had written three volumes of relentless and seemingly endless prose to show that political power invariably rested in the hands of a few prominent individuals and families. Whether it was the feudal barons of medieval France, the landed gentry of Elizabethan England, the merchant class of colonial New England, or the great planter families of the Chesapeake, history showed that the many always deferred to the few. Why? “I say it is the Ordonance of God Almighty, in the Constitution of human nature, and wrought into the Fabric of the Universe,” Adams answered. “Philosophers and Politicians may nibble and quibble, but they will never get rid of it. Their only resource is to controul it.” In the Adams formulation, aristocracies were to society as the passions were to the individual personality, permanent fixtures susceptible to disciplined containment and artful channeling, but never altogether removable. “You may think you can eliminate it,” Adams warned, but “Aristocracy like Waterfowl dives for Ages and rises again with brighter Plumage.” All the Jeffersonian chants about human equality were delusions that pandered to mankind’s urge to believe an impossible dream. “Inequalities of Mind and Body are so established by God Almighty in the Constitution of Human Nature,” Adams declared, “that no Art or policy can ever plain them down to a level.”
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