Freeholder

“ Every inhabitant was, or easily might be, a freeholder. Settled on lands of his own, he was both farmer and landlord. Having no superior to whom he was obliged to look up, and producing all the necessaries of life from his own grounds, he soon became independent. ”

“ The freeholder, for whose behoof the system was invented, has a claim for special pity. He may possibly have been a blissful, unsophisticated, pastoral proprietor, but, in an evil hour, his men of business tell him that his quiet fields have been developed into building land; and then his misery begins. He seems to see before him the potentiality of wealth without exertion. He is called, by reason of this building land, a man of property; and hearing, and of course believing this, he far too often calculates his expectations as realities, and so begins to live, apart from fact, in dreamy hope. ”

“ A freehold is the qualification in England, and hence it is imagined to be the only proper one. The true idea, in his opinion, was, that every man having evidence of attachment to, and permanent common interest with, the society, ought to share in all its rights and privileges. Was this qualification restrained to freeholders? ”

“ As the tenures of lands changed, the term freeholder lost its original significance, and no longer described a man who held land of the state by virtue of his civil freedom, but only one who held it in fee-simple that is, free of any liability to military or civil services. ”

“ Choose not therefore such who are likely to truck away your liberties for an equivalent to themselves, and to sell you to those against whom it is their duty to defend you. When their duty is in one scale, and a thousand pounds a year, or more, or even less, is thrown into the contrary scale, you may easily guess, as the world goes, how the balance is like to turn.
It is the right and duty of the freeholders and burghers of Great Britain, to examine into the conduct, and to know the opinions and intentions, of such as offer themselves to their choice. ”

“ The few of his neighbours who do acquire freeholds, he perceives to be comparatively prosperous. He does not take into account that the prosperity of the freeholder is maintained by precisely the same exceptional energy and thrift which in the first instance enabled him to secure the freehold. ”

“ By encouraging and materially aiding landholding among the masses so that every citizen may become an independent freeholder, we shall have gone a long way towards the desideratum of social and economic stability. ”

“ Nine tenths of the people are at present freeholders, and these will certainly be pleased with it. As to merchants, &c., if they have wealth, and value the right, they can acquire it. If not, they don't deserve it. ”

“ If we suffer the liberty of the freeholders to be infringed, what can we expect but to be charged with betraying our trust, and giving up to servitude and oppression those who deputed us to this assembly, as the guardians of their privileges, and the asserters of their birthright ”

“ You are freemen, and men of reason and spirit; awaken your spirit, exert your reason, and assert your freedom. You have a right to petition the Parliament, you have a right to address the king, to propose your thoughts and grievances to both; and to be heard and relieved when you suffer any. And from the same reason and equity, you, Gentlemen freeholders, have a right and a near concern to advise your neighbouring boroughs in the choice of their members, and to warn them of the consequences, if they make a bad one. ”

“ NONE from henceforth may distrain his Freeholders to answer for their Freeholds, nor for any Things touching their Freehold, without the King's Writ:
(2) Nor shall cause his Freeholders to swear against their Wills; for no Man may do that without the King's Commandment. ”

“ From the larger standpoint of social and political organisation the freeholders constituted an element in society the very nature of which we can hardly understand, because our modern life offers no analogy to it. We tend to draw our social lines not between small properties and great, but between those who have property and those who have not, and to think of the men who stand between the very rich and the very poor, the men of whom our ancestors boasted as the “Commons of England,” as men who do not own but are employed by owners. ”

“ There still existed customary freeholders, who owned their land subject
to certain customary obligations to the lord of a manor.
The people displaced by enclosure became laborers dependent on wages or
paupers. Their discontent was expressed in this poem:
"They hang the man and flog the woman That steals a goose from off the common But leave the greater criminal loose That steals the common from the goose." ”

“ Viewing the subject in its merits alone, the freeholders of the country would be the safest depositories of republican liberty. In future times, a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of property. ”

“ The extent of land which was held by the petty freeholders was very large, and the possession of it was jealously treasured; the private estates of the nobles and gentlemen were either cultivated by their own servants, or let out, as at present, to free tenants; or (in earlier times) were occupied by villains, a class who, without being bondmen, were expected to furnish further services than those of the field, services which were limited by the law, and recognized by an outward ceremony, a solemn oath and promise from the villain to his lord. ”

“ We know that it has been elsewhere wrung from the reluctant grasp of the freeholders, who deeply, but silently, lament the forced concession. Our statesmen have been privately admonished by them to profit by the experience of their error, and hold fast by our institutions. ”

“ Instead of aiming to influence the less wealthy and less instructed Freeholders through the medium of those whom they have been accustomed to confide in—instead of descending by legitimate gradations from high to lower, from the well-instructed and widely-experienced to those who have not had equal advantages—it commences at the bottom; far beneath the degree of the poorest Freeholders; and works upwards, with an inflammatory appeal to feelings that owe their birth to previous mistatement of facts. ”

“ Secondly, free men, both proprietors of benefices and cultivators; Thirdly, free men, neither properly freeholders nor beneficiaries, and cultivators; Fourthly, men not free, to whom the hereditary possession of tributary land had been granted on the payment of certain fees and services; Fifthly, men not free, who only enjoyed the permanent occupancy of tributary land. Here again we cannot find any general and fixed social condition which shall determine what were the rank, the rights, and other qualifications of the individuals belonging to it. ”

“ There may be at present a majority of the nation who are every freeholders, or the heirs or aspirants to freeholds, and the day may not be very near when such will cease to make Up a majority of the community. ”

“ The changes improved the efficiency of justice and served to accommodate it to the changing circumstances of the social system.
"No man by force of arms, malice or menacing shall disturb anyone in making free election [of sheriffs, coroners, conservators of the peace by freeholders of the county] ."
"No city, borough, town, nor man shall be amerced without reasonable cause and according to the severity of his trespass. That is, every freeman saving his freehold, a merchant saving his merchandise, a villein saving his wainage [implements of agriculture] , and that by his peers." ”

“ In legislating for new conditions of society, men should resort to principles, and not be guided entirely by precedent. Qui hœret in literâ, hœret in cortice. The freehold was adopted by our ancestors as the test of qualification, not because there was any greater virtue in a lease for life, than for a term of ninety-nine years, but because, as the name implies, it was the peculiar tenure of the freeman, and the test of his being such, which in those primitive times was considered a sufficient qualification for the exercise of the elective franchise. ”

“ A freehold, though it be but in ice and snow, will make the owner pleased in the possession, and stout in the defence of it.... I consider myself as one who give my consent to every law which passes.... A free-holder is but one remove from a legislator, and for that reason ought to stand up in the defence of those laws which are in some degree of his own making." [619]
These are all English feelings, made up of calculation and pride, energetic and austere; and this portrait is capped by that of the married man:
"Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion ”

“ Instead of that, you know nothing but the continual substitution of the good pleasure of the prince for your theories, the arrest of the course of economic law by arbitrary power, and, under the pretext of equity, the deception of the wage worker and the monopolist alike! Your liberty is but a half-liberty, your justice but a half-justice, and all your wisdom consists in those middle terms whose iniquity is always twofold, since they justify the pretensions of neither one party nor the other! ”

“ Make the freedman a voter, a land-owner, a tax-payer, permit him to sue and be sued, give him in every respect free franchise, and the recompense will be security, peace, and prosperity. Anything less than absolute right will sooner or later bring trouble in its train. ”

“ A person claiming to be free must prove his right to his liberty. This, it will be seen, throws the burden of proof upon the slave, who, in all probability, finds it out of his power to procure such evidence. And if any free person shall attempt to aid a freeman in re-gaining his freedom, he is compelled to enter into security in the sum of one thousand dollars, and if the person claiming to be free shall fail to establish such fact, the thousand dollars are forfeited to the state. ”

“ So, then, it would be dangerous to our liberty to have such a law as that of England which allows, in certain cases, a freeman who is likely to become a freebooter, or at least a hanger-on upon the community, to be compelled to work for himself; and not at all dangerous to that same liberty to compel one half of our population to work for the other! ”

“ But who can enjoy political liberty if he is deprived, permanently, of personal liberty, and the exercise of his own industry and his own faculties? To those unfortunate individuals, doomed to the everlasting bondage of debt, what is it that we have free institutions of government? ”

“ For distinction, the association was to be called The Society of the Free and Easy, "free, as being, by the general practice and habit of the virtues, free from the dominion of vice; and particularly by the practice of industry and frugality, free from debt, which exposes a man to confinement, and a species of slavery to his creditors." ”

“ Property is liberty. Property is theft; property is liberty: these two propositions are equally demonstrated and subsist side by side in the System of Contradictions. I also did the same on each of the economic categories, the Division of Labor, Competition, the State, Credit, the Community, etc.; showing in turn how each of these ideas, and consequently how these institutions they generate, have a positive and a negative side; how they give rise to a double series of diametrically opposed results: and always I conclude to the necessity of an agreement, conciliation, or synthesis. ”

“ Sir, the link which binds the public creditors, as such, to their country, binds them equally to all governments, whether arbitrary or free. In a free government, this principle of abject dependence, if extended through all the ramifications of society, must be fatal to liberty. ”

“ From such plain, unpoetical traits of national character are born the arts and the graces, and all that is civilised and refined in life. A rich people is not less virtuous, and is certainly far happier, than a poor one. Therefore we say, let the Freehold Movement have wide support, for it is a schoolmaster, teaching the path leading the people of this country to wealth, and to the power and independence which wealth alone can give. ”

“ All consumption which is not reproductive of utility is destruction. Property, whether it consumes or hoards or capitalizes, is productive of inutility,—the cause of sterility and death.
8. The satisfaction of a natural right always gives rise to an equation; in other words, the right to a thing is necessarily balanced by the possession of the thing. Thus, between the right to liberty and the condition of a free man there is a balance, an equation; between the right to be a father and paternity, an equation; between the right to security and the social guarantee, an equation. ”

“ That no freeman ought to be taken, imprisoned, or disseized of his freehold, liberties, privileges, or franchises, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, or deprived of his life, liberty, or property, but by the law of the land. ”

“ Your only ambition ought to be the security of your property, and to live like freemen. And are you not free? Is not your property secure? or can these men accomplish their designs and conspiracies, but at the expence of your estates and your freedom? They seek their own grandeur, and all their advantages, from your ruin and servitude. You must pay the whole and long reckoning at last. ”

“ The people desire the privileges inseparably annexed, since Magna Charta, to the freehold which they have by descent or obtain as the fruits of their industry. They call for no man's estate; they desire not to be dispossessed of their own. ”

“ And if the poorest freeman walked abroad in the pride of independence, because the baron could no longer insult him, or the priest oppress him, or the king himself strip him of land and gear, how could he deny the same blessings to his neighbour, the rustic labourer, who was already master of cart and plough and was probably richer and better fed than himself? ”