Daily Inspiration Quote by Ezra Stiles

A clergyman’s sentence, but it moves like a blueprint for power. Stiles isn’t praising “society” in the warm, communal sense; he’s treating it as a machine with a built-in hierarchy. If society has a “nature,” then inequality can be presented not as a choice but as a requirement. That’s the trick: he frames a ruling class as the logical outgrowth of social order itself, not the product of conquest, wealth, or self-dealing.

The key word is “interested.” Stiles concedes that the “higher branch” has stakes of its own, then flips that self-interest into a public virtue: because it has the most to lose, it becomes the “natural conservator” of everyone’s interest. It’s an early American argument for elite stewardship, a pre-democratic comfort with deference dressed up as realism. “Superior” doesn’t merely describe capacity; it confers moral authorization. If their superiority “arises” from function, then resistance starts to look like sabotage of the common good.

Context sharpens the subtext. Stiles lived through the Revolution and the fragile early republic, when leaders feared popular volatility as much as British overreach. Clergymen like him often fused Providence with governance: order was not just practical but sanctified. The sentence offers a priestly version of checks and balances - a “higher branch” that stabilizes the whole - while quietly narrowing who gets to define the “universal interest.” The universal, in practice, is curated.