Historical voices

The only use to be made of this power (and which it always has made), is to ward off taxes from itself, and throw the burthen upon those articles of consumption by which itself would be least affected.

What pillar of security does the landed interest require more than any other interest in the state, or what right has it to a distinct and separate representation from the general interest of a nation?

No better reason can be given, why a house of legislation should be composed entirely of men whose occupation consists in letting landed property, than why it should be composed of those who hire, or of brewers, or bakers, or any other…

To be a successful candidate, he must be destitute of the qualities that constitute a just legislator; and being thus disciplined to corruption by the mode of entering into Parliament, it is not to be expected that the representative…

A man of moral honour and good political principles cannot submit to the mean drudgery and disgraceful arts, by which such elections are carried.

As one of the Houses of the English Parliament is, in a great measure, made up of elections from these corporations; and as it is unnatural that a pure stream should flow from a foul fountain, its vices are but a continuation of the vices…

Every man is a customer in proportion to his ability; and as all parts of a nation trade with each other, whatever affects any of the parts must necessarily communicate to the whole.

As population is one of the chief sources of wealth (for without it land itself has no value), everything which operates to prevent it must lessen the value of property; and as corporations have not only this tendency, but directly this…

This species of feudality is kept up to aggrandise the corporations at the ruin of towns; and the effect is visible.

His rights are circumscribed to the town, and, in some cases, to the parish of his birth; and all other parts, though in his native land, are to him as a foreign country.

He is not free of the nation, in the same manner that a Frenchman is free of France, and an American of America.

A native of England, under the operation of these charters and corporations, cannot be said to be an Englishman in the full sense of the word.

They are sources of endless contentions in the places where they exist, and they lessen the common rights of national society.

They do not give rights to A, but they make a difference in favour of A by taking away the right of B, and consequently are instruments of injustice.

Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few.

It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights.

Knowing my own heart and feeling myself as I now do, superior to all the skirmish of party, the inveteracy of interested or mistaken opponents, I answer not to falsehood or abuse, but proceed to the defects of the English Government.

I know the value of moral instruction, and I have seen the danger of the contrary.

Fortified with that proud integrity, that disdains to triumph or to yield, I will advocate the Rights of Man.

The millions that are superfluously wasted upon governments are more than sufficient to reform those evils, and to benefit the condition of every man in a nation, not included within the purlieus of a court.

Bred up without morals, and cast upon the world without a prospect, they are the exposed sacrifice of vice and legal barbarity.

Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor?

Instead of this, the resources of a country are lavished upon kings, upon courts, upon hirelings, impostors and prostitutes; and even the poor themselves, with all their wants upon them, are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses…

Civil government does not exist in executions; but in making such provision for the instruction of youth and the support of age, as to exclude, as much as possible, profligacy from the one and despair from the other.