"We stand a better chance with aristocracy, whether hereditary or elective, than with monarchy"

Ezra Stiles weighs forms of rule by their likelihood of preserving liberty and competent administration. He favors aristocracy over monarchy because power shared among a select few is less likely to devolve into caprice than power concentrated in a single will. A monarch’s virtues or vices become the decisive variable of a nation’s fate; the system has a single point of failure. Even an enlightened sovereign can be followed by a despot, and hereditary succession worsens the lottery. Aristocracy, by contrast, distributes authority across multiple persons who can deliberate, restrain one another, and preserve continuity without placing everything on one individual temperament.

Calling either hereditary or elective aristocracy acceptable shows a pragmatic calculus. Hereditary arrangements can provide stability, institutional memory, and a sense of duty bound to lineage, while elective aristocracy, senates, councils of the eminent, magistrates chosen for merit or property, can infuse accountability and adaptation. Both are judged not by purity of principle but by the odds of checking tyranny and promoting wise governance. A body of the “few” can serve as a ballast against the passions of the moment, filtering legislation, curbing executive excess, and embodying longer horizons of judgment.

Stiles’s preference fits the mixed-constitution tradition from antiquity to Montesquieu: balance monarchy’s energy with aristocracy’s deliberation and democracy’s consent. In the wake of imperial rule, many early American thinkers distrusted the allure of one-man sovereignty but accepted that democracy alone might swing toward faction and volatility. A tempering chamber of the distinguished, however formed, seemed the safer bet. “Better chance” is the operative phrase: no arrangement guarantees virtue, but some architectures make vice harder and prudence easier. By dispersing authority among the few rather than enthroning the one, aristocracy reduces the stakes of personal failure, increases the friction against rash decisions, and raises the likelihood that liberty can survive the vicissitudes of human character.