“the chartered rights of men.”
The charters, which we call by distinction great, are public instruments of this nature; I mean the charters of King John and King Henry the Third. The things secured by these instruments may, without any deceitful ambiguity, be very fitly called the chartered rights of men.
These charters have made the very name of a charter dear to the heart of every Englishman—But, Sir, there may be, and there are charters, not only different in nature, but formed on principles the very reverse of those of the great charter. Of this kind is the charter of the East India Company. Magna charta is a charter to restrain power, and to destroy monopoly. The East India charter is a charter to establish monopoly, and to create power. Political power and commercial mono∣poly are not the rights of men; and the rights to them derived from charters, it is fallacious and sophistical to call
Godwin Caleb Williams
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11323/11323-h/11323-h.htm#PREFACE
When I had written about seven-tenths of the first volume, I was prevailed upon by the extreme importunity of an old and intimate friend to allow him the perusal of my manuscript. On the second day he returned it with a note to this purpose: “I return you your manuscript, because I promised to do so. If I had obeyed the impulse of my own mind, I should have thrust it in the fire. If you persist, the book will infallibly prove the grave of your literary fame.”
Thus I have endeavoured to give a true history of the concoction and mode of writing of this mighty trifle. When I had done, I soon became sensible that I had done in a manner nothing. How many flat and insipid parts does the book contain! How terribly unequal does it appear to me! From time to time the author plainly reels to and fro like a drunken man. And, when I had done all, what had I done? Written a book to amuse boys and girls in their vacant hours, a story to be hastily gobbled up by them, swallowed in a pusillanimous and unanimated mood, without chewing and digestion. I was in this respect greatly impressed with the confession of one of the most accomplished readers and excellent critics that any author could have fallen in with (the unfortunate Joseph Gerald). He told me that he had received my book late one evening, and had read through the three volumes before he closed his eyes. Thus, what had cost me twelve months’ labour, ceaseless heartaches and industry, now sinking in despair, and now roused and sustained in unusual energy, he went over in a few hours, shut the book, laid himself on his pillow, slept, and was refreshed, and cried,
“Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”
1. The object of moral and political discourse is how to maximize the amount and variety of pleasure and happiness.
2. Injustice and violence produced the demand for government, but due to its propensity toward war and despotism and its perpetuation of inequality, government has come to embody and perpetuate injustice.
3. Government’s chief object is security, and it achieves this through abridging individual independence. This prevents the cultivation of the individual’s happiness. One should aim to maintain general security, while minimizing such damages.
4. Justice must aim at producing the greatest sum of happiness and it requires impartiality. Justice is universal.
5. One’s duty is to fulfill one’s capacity to bring about the general advantage. One’s right is to their share to this general advantage. Ordinarily, one’s contribution to general advantage should be at their discretion. One’s injury to the
general good might sometimes warrant political superintendence.
6. One’s actions are based on feelings rather than reason. Reason merely allows the comparison and balancing of different feelings. Reason, therefore, allows us to regulate our feelings, making its improvement the best method to improve our
social condition.
7. Reason’s clarity and strength depend on the cultivation of knowledge. The cultivation of knowledge is unlimited. Therefore, our social condition is capable of perpetual improvement; however, institutions calculated to give perpetuity to any
particular mode of thinking, or condition of existence, are harmful.
8. The cultivation of happiness requires that we avoid prejudice and protect freedom of inquiry. It also requires leisure for intellectual cultivation, therefore extreme inequality is to be avoided.
1794 Treason Trials From Wikipedia.
Historical context
[“”The historical backdrop to the Treason Trials is complex; it involves not only the British parliamentary reform efforts of the 1770s and 1780s but also the French Revolution. In the 1770s and 1780s, there was an effort among liberal-minded Members of Parliament to reform the British electoral system. A disproportionately small number of electors voted for MPs and many seats were bought. Christopher Wyvill and William Pitt the Younger argued for additional seats to be added to the House of Commons and the Duke of Richmond and John Cartwright advocated a more radical reform: “the payment of MPs, an end to corruption and patronage in parliamentary elections, annual parliaments (partly to enable the speedy removal of corrupt MPs) and, preeminently and most controversially, universal manhood suffrage”.[1] Both efforts failed and the reform movement appeared moribund in the mid-1780s.Once the revolution in France began to demonstrate the power of popular agitation, the British reform movement was reinvigorated. Much of the vigorous political debate in the 1790s in Britain was sparked by the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Surprising his friends and enemies alike, Burke, who had supported the American Revolution, criticized the French Revolution and the British radicals who had welcomed its early stages. While the radicals saw the revolution as analogous to Britain’s own Glorious Revolution in 1688, which had restricted the powers of the monarchy, Burke argued that the appropriate historical analogy was the English Civil War (1642–1651) in which Charles I had been executed in 1649. He viewed the French Revolution as the violent overthrow of a legitimate government. In Reflections he argues that citizens do not have the right to revolt against their government, because civilizations, including governments, are the result of social and political consensus. If a culture’s traditions were challenged, the result would be endless anarchy. There was an immediate response from the British supporters of the French revolution, most notably Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Men and Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man. In this lively pamphlet war, now referred to as the “Revolution Controversy”, British political commentators addressed topics ranging from representative government to human rights to the separation of church and state.[2]
1792 was the “annus mirabilis of eighteenth-century radicalism”: its most important texts, such as Rights of Man, were published and the influence of the radical associations was at its height. In fact, it was as a result of the publication of the Rights of Man that such associations began to proliferate.[3] The most significant groups, made up of artisans, merchants and others from the middling and lower sorts, were the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, the London Corresponding Society (LCS) and the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI).[4] But it was not until these groups formed an alliance with the more genteel Society of the Friends of the People that the government became concerned. When this sympathy became known, the government issued a royal proclamation against seditious writings on 21 May 1792. In a dramatic increase compared to the rest of the century, there were over 100 prosecutions for sedition in the 1790s alone.[5] The British government, fearing an uprising similar to the French Revolution, took even more drastic steps to quash the radicals. They made an increasing number of political arrests and infiltrated the radical groups; they threatened to “revoke the licences of publicans who continued to host politicized debating societies and to carry reformist literature”; they seized the mail of “suspected dissidents”; and they supported groups that disrupted radical events and attacked radicals in the press.[6] Additionally, the British Government initiated the Aliens Act of 1793 in order to regulate the entrance of immigrants into Great Britain. Essentially, the Aliens Act enforced that aliens be recorded upon arrival and register with the local justice of the peace. Specifically, immigrants were required to give their names, ranks, occupations, and addresses.[7] Overall, the Aliens Act reduced the number of immigrants into Great Britain out of fear that one of them may be an unwanted spy. Radicals saw this period as “the institution of a system of terror, almost as hideous in its features, almost as gigantic in its stature, and infinitely more pernicious in its tendency, than France ever knew”.[8]””]
John Swinton quote is from 1853 not 1953.
On Scottish Independence, Usury and The true purpose of Colonial Governent
A WALKING TOUR WITH PETER LINEBAUGH AND FABIAN TOMPSETT. “THE CHARTERED RIGHTS OF MEN.”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_Controversy
Thomas Hardy (political reformer)
Garrow’s Law, BBC dramatisation based on Hardy’s trial (episode 4, series 1)
Fox has been portrayed on screen by many actors:including
Blake Ritson in a 2011 episode of the television series Garrow’s Law
Fox proposed an East India Bill to place the government of the ailing and oppressive British East India Company, at that time in control of a considerable expanse of India, on a sounder footing with a board of governors responsible to Parliament and more resistant to Crown patronage. It passed the Commons by 153 to 80, but, when the King made it clear that any peer who voted in favour of the bill would be considered a personal enemy of the Crown, the Lords divided against Fox by 95 to 76.[24] George now felt justified in dismissing Fox and North from government and in nominating William Pitt in their place; at twenty-four years of age, the youngest British prime minister in history was appointed to office, apparently on the authority of the votes of 19 peers. Fox used his parliamentary majority to oppose Pitt’s nomination, and every subsequent measure that he put before the House, until March 1784, when the King dissolved Parliament and, in the following general election, Pitt was returned with a substantial majority.
Thelwall’s career as an editor and journalist was quite successful, but the highlight of this period was his political activism. In the wake of the French Revolution, he became “intoxicated in the French doctrines of the day”.[3] He started to hold talks in London’s radical societies and, having made acquaintance with fellow radical John Horne Tooke, contributed to ground the London Corresponding Society in 1792. In 1794 he, Horne Tooke and Thomas Hardy were tried for treason following lectures protesting at the arrest of other political activists. After spending some time at the Tower and at Newgate, the three were acquitted. Government officials who considered him to be the most dangerous man in Britain continued to hound him even after his acquittal. In 1795, after prime minister William Pitt the Younger’s Gagging Acts (the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act) received Royal Assent, Thelwall’s lectures had a shift in theme, from contemporary political comment to the history of Rome to dodge censorship.[4]
by John Thelwall
Coleridge expresses it better than I could in Table Talk.this from 27th April 1823.
April 27. 1823.
KEAN.—SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH.—SIR H. DAVY.—ROBERT SMITH.—CANNING.— NATIONAL DEBT.—POOR LAWS.
The national debt has, in fact, made more men rich than have a right to be so, or, rather, any ultimate power, in case of a struggle, of actualizing their riches. It is, in effect, like an ordinary, where three hundred tickets have been distributed, but where there is, in truth, room only for one hundred. So long as you can amuse the company with any thing else, or make them come in successively, all is well, and the whole three hundred fancy themselves sure of a dinner; but if any suspicion of a hoax should arise, and they were all to rush into the room at once, there would be two hundred without a potato for their money; and the table would be occupied by the landholders, who live on the spot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Thomas_Paine
Pitt’s administration took the guilty verdict in Paine’s trial as a sign that further prosecutions for sedition were possible and so began many. In the 17 months following the trial, 11 publishers of the Rights of Man were prosecuted, receiving prison sentences of up to four years.[33] They acted as a prelude to the 1794 Treason Trials in which a dozen reformers were indicted for allegedly conspiring to bring about a revolution.[34] Erskine played a prominent role in defending many of them, including Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and John Thelwall,[35] all three of whom were acquitted.[36]
DRAMATISATION OF THE TRIAL OF THE CHARTISTS AT SHIRE HALL, MONMOUTH
JUSTIN WALKER – NEW CHARTIST MOVEMENT
From 2011 to 2022. !0 more years of Oligarchical misrule.
https://sites.google.com/site/the99percentdeclaration/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_are_the_99%25
http://leconomistamascherato.blogspot.com/2016/07/basic-income-lets-name-real-problems.html
After Defeat of Swiss Basic Income Proposal, Let’s Name the Real Problems, Find the Real Solution
4 thoughts on ““the chartered rights of men.”. Burke, and The East India Company Charter. Thomas Paine the trial of common sense! SOme Pamphleteer memorabilia.”