es assessed to the
House and Window-light tax in each county. This will give the rule
for apportioning the number of Members to be elected to the National
Convention in each of the counties.

If the total number of inhabitants in England be seven millions, and the
total number of Members to be elected to the Convention be one thousand,
the number of members to be elected in a county containing one hundred
and fifty thousand inhabitants will be _twenty-one_, and in like
proportion for any other county.

As the election of a Convention must, in order to ascertain the general
sense of the nation, go on grounds different from that of Parliamentary
elections, the mode that best promises this end will have no
difficulties to combat with from absurd customs and pretended rights.
The right of every man will be the same, whether he lives in a city,
a town, or a village. The custom of attaching Rights to _place_, or
in other words, to inanimate matter, instead of to the _person_,
independently of place, is too absurd to make any part of a rational
argument.

As every man in the nation, of the age of twenty-one years, pays taxes,
either out of the property he possesses, or out of the product of his
labor, which is property to him; and is amenable in his own person to
every law of the land; so has every one the same equal right to vote,
and no one part of the nation, nor any individual, has a right to
dispute the right of another. The man who should do this ought to
forfeit the exercise of his _own_ right, for a term of years. This would
render the punishment consistent with the crime.

When a qualification to vote is regulated by years, it is placed on the
firmest possible ground; because the qualification is such, as nothing
but dying before the time can take away; and the equality of Rights, as
a principle, is recognized in the act of regulating the exercise. But
when Rights are placed upon, or made dependant upon property, they are
on the most precarious of all tenures. "Riches make themselves wings,
and fly away," and the rights fly with them; and thus they become lost
to the man when they would be of most value.

It is from a strange mixture of tyranny and cowardice, that exclusions
have been set up and continued. The boldness to do wrong at first,
changes afterwards into cowardly craft, and at last into fear. The
Representatives in England appear now to act as if they were afraid to
do right, even in part, lest it shou