*[28]
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 begin with charters and corporations.
It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It
operates by a contrary effect- that of taking rights away. 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. If charters were constructed so as to express in
direct terms, "that every inhabitant, who is not a member of a
corporation, shall not exercise the right of voting," such charters
would, in the face, be charters not of rights, but of exclusion. The
effect is the same under the form they now stand; and the only persons
on whom they operate are the persons whom they exclude. Those whose
rights are guaranteed, by not being taken away, exercise no other
rights than as members of the community they are entitled to without a
charter; and, therefore, all charters have no other than an indirect
negative operation. 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.
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