“The rich, the well-born, and the able, acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense in a house of representatives. The most illustrious of them must, therefore, be separated from the mass, and placed by themselves in a senate; this is, to all honest and useful intents, an ostracism.”

— John Adams

There are certain phrases from our childhood history lessons that stay with us for one reason or another. “Government of the rich, well-born and able,” is one that has remained glued in our memory since we first heard it back in our seventh-grade American history class.

We remember it, we think, because of the intriguing way a very wise teacher lead his class into looking at the concept.

On its face, it seemed to make a lot of sense. Who better to govern than the “best” among us, the ones who had the advantages of education, travel and experience in faraway places?

It was one of the leading principles of the Federalists, those American patriots who conceived of and defended the Constitution as it was being debated by an infant country that seemed for a moment in history to have lost its way.

Among the leading Federalists of that time were John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, giant figures, then as now.

But then that wily history teacher brought another American giant into the discussion — Thomas Jefferson, the leader of what was then called the Democrat-Republicans.

Jefferson’s lifestyle was distinctly aristocratic, but his political principles were revolutionary and democratic with a lower-case “d,” and he was suspicious of a “government of the rich, well-born and able.” It was he, after all, who had written in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” and the Federalist concept of a government of the upper classes seemed to him to fly in the face of those words.

The framers of the Constitution got around the conflict by instituting a system of checks and balances between the branches of the government, and future generations tilted the scale a little more to Jefferson’s side over the years by extending the franchise to larger and larger segments of the population.

The system has seemed to work pretty well for more than 200 years, but not without the natural tension that comes with any conflict in basic principles.

We got to thinking about all that when we read in the paper Monday that the top two candidates in the last race for mayor of Denton spent more than $120,000 between them in their election and runoff campaigns.

In Denton, at least, it looks as though the Federalists are enjoying a time in the sun, an idea that seemed to worry even some of those who benefited from the phenomenon.

Mark Burroughs, who eventually won the mayor’s seat from incumbent Perry McNeill in a hotly contested runoff, spent more than $81,000 in his campaign. McNeill spent just over $42,000 in his losing effort. We don’t know about well-born and able, but it’s beginning to look as though a candidate is going to have to be rich to be mayor of Denton in the future.

Nobody, including the two men who spent all that money, seemed very satisfied at that prospect. Burroughs said he hoped it was an anomaly brought about by the fact that two established local political figures were facing each other in a spirited contest.

We hope so, too, but all those zeros still worry us a little bit.

We would hate to see the mayor’s chair reserved for only one class of Denton resident, no matter how “able” that class turns out to be.

We do not see an easy way to calm our fears; it is almost impossible to cram political toothpaste back into the tube once the squeeze has been administered.

But a political campaign that ends up costing almost a buck for every man, woman and child in this good town is a campaign that costs too much, and we’re not talking entirely about money.