Wesley Corpus

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. Never, therefore, patronize those iniquitous laws. No; if you are a lover of liberty, an enemy to slavery and oppression, exhort them to shake off this servile yoke. 22. To set this whole matter in another light, I beg leave to repeat the sum of a small tract lately published.* Have not the people, in every age and nation, the right to dispose of the supreme power; of investing therewith whom they please, and upon what conditions they see good? Conse quently, if those conditions are not observed, they have a right to take it away. To prove this, it is argued, “All men living are naturally equal; none is above another; and all are naturally free masters of their own actions; therefore, no man can have any power over another, but by his own consent; therefore, the power which any Governors enjoy, must be originally derived from the people, and presupposes an original compact between them and their first Governors.” 23. But, who are the people? Are they every man, woman, and child? Why not? Is it not one fundamental * Thoughts on the Origin of Power.