On every principle which
supposes society to be in virtue of a free covenant, this compulsive
incorporation must be null and void.
As a people can have no right to a corporate capacity without universal
consent, so neither have they a right to hold exclusively any lands in
the name and title of a corporation. On the scheme of the present rulers
in our neighboring country, regenerated as they are, they have no more
right to the territory called France than I have. I have a right to
pitch my tent in any unoccupied place I can find for it; and I may apply
to my own maintenance any part of their unoccupied soil. I may purchase
the house or vineyard of any individual proprietor who refuses his
consent (and most proprietors have, as far as they dared, refused it) to
the new incorporation. I stand in his independent place. Who are these
insolent men, calling themselves the French nation, that would
monopolize this fair domain of Nature? Is it because they speak a
certain jargon? Is it their mode of chattering, to me unintelligible,
that forms their title to my land? Who are they who claim by
prescription and descent from certain gangs of banditti called Franks,
and Burgundians, and Visigoths, of whom I may have never heard, and
ninety-nine out of an hundred of themselves certainly never have heard,
whilst at the very time they tell me that prescription and long
possession form no title to property? Who are they that presume to
assert that the land which I purchased of the individual, a natural
person, and not a fiction of state, belongs to them, who in the very
capacity in which they make their claim can exist only as an imaginary
being, and in virtue of the very prescription which they reject and
disown? This mode of arguing might be pushed into all the detail, so as
to leave no sort of doubt, that, on their principles, and on the sort of
footing on which they have thought proper to place themselves, the crowd
of men, on the other side of the Channel, who have the impudence to call
themselves a people, can never be the lawful, exclusive possessors of
the soil.
Pages:
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248