"If an aristocracy has lasted long, therefore, it is the natural and just inference that it enjoyed the confidence and loyalty of the people. It fulfilled a necessary and vital function in a way so satisfactory as to make the people secure and contented. On the other hand, history makes it no less evident that aristocracies have failed and given place to democracies. But does this, really, prove anything more than that aristocracies are like most everything else in that, with the lapse of time, they tend to wear out, or because of fatal mistakes finally break down? It surely does not prove aristocracies essentially unsound either in theory or in practice. On the contrary, history as I read it, supports my conviction that aristocracy is the form a great people’s life tends to take in its period of health, that it is under this form its greatness is achieved and longest maintained, that democracy appears only when its vitality has begun to break, and that the very advent of democracy therefore is a symptom of its sickness and a portent of its approaching dissolution"
-William Simpson
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