discretionary
power of the future government.

A government on the principles on which constitutional governments
arising out of society are established, cannot have the right of
altering itself. If it had, it would be arbitrary. It might make itself
what it pleased; and wherever such a right is set up, it shows there
is no constitution. The act by which the English Parliament empowered
itself to sit seven years, shows there is no constitution in England. It
might, by the same self-authority, have sat any great number of years,
or for life. The bill which the present Mr. Pitt brought into Parliament
some years ago, to reform Parliament, was on the same erroneous
principle. 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. There is, moreover, a paradox in the
idea of vitiated bodies reforming themselves.

From these preliminaries I proceed to draw some comparisons. I have
already spoken of the declaration of rights; and as I mean to be as
concise as possible, I shall proceed to other parts of the French
Constitution.

The constitution of France says that every man who pays a tax of sixty
sous per annum (2s. 6d. English) is an elector. What article will Mr.
Burke place against this? Can anything be more limited, and at the same
time more capricious, than the qualification of electors is in England?
Limited--because not one man in an hundred (I speak much within compass)
is admitted to vote. Capricious--because the lowest character that can
be supposed to exist, and who has not so much as the visible means of an
honest livelihood, is an elector in some places: while in other places,
the man who pays very large taxes, and has a known fair character, and
the farmer who rents to the amount of three or four hundred pounds a
year, with a property on that farm to three or four times that amount,
is not admitted to be an elector. Everything is out of nature, as Mr.
Burke says on another occasion, in this strange chaos, and all sorts of
follies are blended with all sorts of crimes. William the Conqueror and
his descendants parcelled out the country in this manner, and bribed
some parts of it by what they call charters to hold the other parts of
it the better subjected to their will. This is the reason why so many
of those charters abound in Cornwall; the people were averse to the
Government established at the Conquest, and the