A byproduct of democracy since Aristotle has been the fear that the proletariat majority would use its voting power to press the opulent minority for what was later called 'land reforms' at the time, general social reforms and redistribution of wealth. Aristotle's answer was more equality (proposing steps similar to the modern European Welfare State), James Madison's answer was less democracy, that power should stay in the hands of 'the privileged few' (hence the senate). This is a recurring theme in all western constitutions and spills over into our judicial systems.
"The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe; when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be jsut, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability. Various have been the propositions; but my opinion is, the longer they continue in office, the better will these views be answered." - James Madison, Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787
By 1792 Madison had revised his hopes that he expressed originally in a 1787 letter to Jefferson that the country be ruled by
the "enlightened Statesman, or the benevolent philosopher". Subsequently he fretted that the new republic was "substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty," leading to "a real domination of the few under an apparent liberty of the many." In another letter to Jefferson (Jennifer Nedelsky, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and its Legacy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 44-5):
"[M]y imagination will not attempt to set bounds to the daring depravity of the times. The stock-jobbers [big investors] will become the pretorian band of the Government, at once its tool and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses and overawing it by its clamours and combinations."
