the world, founded on a new system of government, but I have arrived at
an eminence in political literature, the most difficult of all lines to
succeed and excel in, which aristocracy with all its aids has not been
able to reach or to rival.*[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.

But charters and corporations have a more extensive evil effect
than what relates merely to elections. They are sources of endless
contentions in the places where they exist, and they lessen the common
rights of national society. A native of England, under the operation of
these charters and corporations, cannot be said to be an Englishman in
the full sense of the word. He is not free of the nation, in the same
manner that a Frenchman is free of France, and an American of America.
His rights are circumscribed to the town, and, in some cases, to the
parish of his birth; and all other parts, though in his native land, are
to him as a foreign country. To acquire a residence in these, he must
undergo a local naturalisation by purchase, or he is forbidden or
expelled the place. This species of feudality is kept up to aggrandise
the corporations at the ruin of towns; and the effe