Wesley Corpus

20. I ask a second question: By what right do you exclude men who have not lived one-and-twenty years from that “unalienable privilege of human nature,” choosing their own Governors? Is not a man a free agent, though he has lived only twenty years, and ten or eleven months? Can you deny, that men from eighteen to twenty-one are “members of the state?” Can any one doubt, whether they are a part of “the individuals that compose it?” Why then are not these permitted to “choose their Governors, and to give their suffrages by their representatives?” Let any who say these rights are inseparable from the people, get over this difficulty, if they can; not by breaking an insipid jest on the occasion, but by giving a plain, sober, rational answer. If it be said, “O, women and striplings have not wisdom enough to choose their own Governors;” I answer, Whether they have or no, both the one and the other have all the rights which are “inseparable from human nature.” Either, therefore, this right is not inseparable from human nature, or both women and striplings are partakers of it. 21. I ask a third question: By what authority do you exclude a vast majority of adults from choosing their own Governors, and giving their votes by their representatives, merely because they have not such an income; because they have not forty shillings a year? What, if they have not? Have they not the rights which, you say, belong to man as man? And are they not included in the people? Have they not a will of their own 7 Are they not free agents? Who then can, with either justice or equity, debar them from the exercise of their natural rights? “O, but the laws of the land debar them from it.” Did they make those laws themselves? Did they consent to them, either in person or by their representatives, before they were enacted? “No; they were enacted by their forefathers long before they were born.” Then, what are they to them? You have assured us, that if men may give away their own liberty, they cannot give away the liberty of others, of their children or descendants. Nay, you have told us, that no man has a right to give away his own liberty; that it is unalienable from the nature of every child of man.