mortality on those who achieved "worldly honor," as Machiavelli put it. In Smith's words, "through remembrance, the deed could acquire a permanence denied to the doer.... Without the glorious deed and its foundation in political memory, men would no longer attempt the 'rare and unparalleled thing.' " Machiavelli spoke of "customs" in connection with hereditary regimes, of "recollections" in connection with republics.

Burke, on the other hand, celebrated the principle of heredity and said of the English constitution that its "sole authority is that it has existed time out of mind." Heredity commended itself as the source of political authority, according to Smith, because the ties of blood are "automatic and inescapable." ^* Faced with the difficulty that heirs sometimes quarrel over a legacy, Burke could only plead with his countrymen not to allow "their sure inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild, litigious spirit." Though he knew that custom itself is constantly changing, just as the legacy of the past is always open to dispute, Burke took refuge, according to Smith, in the thought that custom "somehow succeeded in hiding change ..., purging the mind of the memory of dangerous examples of innovation.... The first task of conservatism must be the obliteration of such remembrance."

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Smith points out that "the materialism of the hereditary argument," however, invited the egalitarian rebuttal that flesh and blood make all men the same. In his History of Florence, "Machiavelli discusses the tendency of relations founded upon blood to submerge the noble deed as a standard by which to judge men." In the speech he puts into the mouth of a plebeian agitator, he shows how the principle of heredity can be turned back against itself: "Do not be frightened by their antiquity of blood which they shame us with, for all men, since they had one and the same beginning, are equally ancient; by nature they are all made in one way. Strip us all naked; you will see us all alike; dress us then in their clothes and they in ours; without doubt we shall seem noble and they ignoble, for only poverty and riches make us unequal."

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