Historical voices

It may with reason be said that in the manner the English nation is represented it signifies not where the right resides, whether in the Crown or in the Parliament.

We can all see the absurdity of worshipping Aaron's molten calf, or Nebuchadnezzar's golden image; but why do men continue to practise themselves the absurdities they despise in others?

In England this right is said to reside in a metaphor shown at the Tower for sixpence or a shilling a piece: so are the lions; and it would be a step nearer to reason to say it resided in them, for any inanimate metaphor is no more than a…

If those who vote the supplies are the same persons who receive the supplies when voted, and are to account for the expenditure of those supplies to those who voted them, it is themselves accountable to themselves, and the Comedy of Errors…

Everything in the English government appears to me the reverse of what it ought to be, and of what it is said to be.

Had governments agreed to quarrel on purpose to fleece their countries by taxes, they could not have succeeded better than they have done.

Ah! this government of loaves and fishes has more mischief in it than people have yet reflected on.

May, then, the example of all France contribute to regenerate the freedom which a province of it destroyed!

Conquest and tyranny transplanted themselves with William the Conqueror from Normandy into England, and the country is yet disfigured with the marks.

Certainly they are not, and certain am I, that when the people of England come to reflect upon them they will, like France, annihilate those badges of ancient oppression, those traces of a conquered nation.

A man even of the same town, whose parents were not in circumstances to give him an occupation, is debarred, in many cases, from the natural right of acquiring one, be his genius or industry what it may.

An Englishman is not free of his own country; every one of those places presents a barrier in his way, and tells him he is not a freeman--that he has no rights.

In these chartered monopolies, a man coming from another part of the country is hunted from them as if he were a foreign enemy.

Every chartered town is an aristocratical monopoly in itself, and the qualification of electors proceeds out of those chartered monopolies.

In England, game is made the property of those at whose expense it is not fed; and with respect to monopolies, the country is cut up into monopolies.

Is there anything by which you can trace the marks of freedom, or discover those of wisdom?

It is admitted that all this is altered, but there is much to be done yet, before we have a fair representation of the people.

All the old charters are the badges of this conquest, and it is from this source that the capriciousness of election arises.

Can anything be more limited, and at the same time more capricious, than the qualification of electors is in England?

There is, moreover, a paradox in the idea of vitiated bodies reforming themselves.

The right of reform is in the nation in its original character, and the constitutional method would be by a general convention elected for the purpose.

It might make itself what it pleased; and wherever such a right is set up, it shows there is no constitution.

A government on the principles on which constitutional governments arising out of society are established, cannot have the right of altering itself.

The court of judicature does not make the laws, neither can it alter them; it only acts in conformity to the laws made: and the government is in like manner governed by the constitution.