It wants no other outlet, for in all directions its rival, who are born below it, can serve as usefully and as well as itself.

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.[2213]--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.

Never was an aristocracy more liberal, more humane, and more thoroughly converted to useful reforms;[2214] many of them remain so under the knife of the guillotine.
The magistrates of the superior tribunals, in particular, traditionally and by virtue of their institution, were the enemies of excessive expenditure and the critics of arbitrary acts.

As to the gentry of the provinces, "they were so weary," says one of them,[2215] "of the Court and the Ministers that most of them were democrats." For many years, in the Provincial Assemblies, the whole of the upper class, the clergy, nobles, and Third-Estate, furnishes abundant evidence of its good disposition, of its application to business, its capacity and even generosity.