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Updated: June 12, 2025
The great cry raised against Sir F. Burdett's principles at that time was, that he had been the associate of the traitors Despard and O'Connor. This was most infamous, and was resented by every upright and honest freeholder in the county.
Coming to freedom in manhood, mortgaged for a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars as his own price, he has earned and carried to the Southern robber thousands of dollars, the price extorted for his wife and children, and is now a freeholder in this District. They have twenty-one churches, which they own, and which they maintain at an annual cost of over twenty thousand dollars.
The qualification of a freeholder is, therefore, much lower in Queen Anne's days than in those of Henry VI. But what of that? Parliament, it must be presumed, sees good reason why it should be lower. And at all events, till the law operates amiss, there can be no reason to alter it.
We see then that the slave of the Roman villa, a being both economically and politically unfree, developed throughout North-Western Europe, in the course of the thousand years or more of the uninterrupted growth of the Church, first into the serf and then into the peasant, a being both economically and politically free: The three forms under which labour was exercised the serf, secure in his position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were but a fraction of his produce; the freeholder, a man independent save for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent; the Guild, in which well-divided capital worked co-operatively for craft production, for transport and for commerce all three between them were making for a society which should be based upon the principle of property.
The anarchy and commotion of passion was repellent to a mind devoted to clearness and order. But there was still another thing the son of the Thagaste freeholder had any amount of common sense. That at least was left to him of the paternal heritage.
I contended that it was not at all necessary for a Candidate to be proposed either by a freeman or a freeholder; that Sir John was entitled to offer himself without any such formality, and that if one man polled for him that made him a legal Candidate; and I urged him to do so, but he stood mute and shuffled from the point.
This affair really puzzles the worthy gentleman, who could as easily fancy a county member not being a freeholder as an university not being at Oxford or Cambridge.
It is true, the ancient common law required the jurors to be freeholders; but the term freeholder no longer expresses the same idea that it did in the ancient common law; because no land is now holden in England on the same principle, or by the same tenure, as that on which all the land was held in the early times of the common law.
Steele thought the humour of the Freeholder too nice and gentle for such noisy times, and is reported to have said that the Ministry made use of a lute, when they should have called for a trumpet.
The patents to Gilbert and Raleigh took the form of a grant of lordship by feudal tenure; and from the papers left by the former we can create again, even to details, his vision of a transformed wilderness, America's future state: an America of extensive proprietary domains; an America reproducing, in its lords and landed gentry surrounded by freeholder and tenant, in its counties and boroughs and parishes, the social and political aristocracy of old England.
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