Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays

Freeholder 1 (December 23, 1715)

1. “For it is the rare fortune of these days that a man may think what he likes and say what he thinks.” Tacitus, The Histories, I.1, translated by W. H. Fyfe (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. This motto also appears in the frontispiece of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. 2. In eighteenth-century London, Grub Street was that part of the city where writers hired themselves out. 3. Inkstand. 4. Minimum income to be considered a freeholder. See Whig Examiner 5, p. 112, n. 3. Freeholder, No. 1 Friday, December 23, 1715 Rara temporum felicitas, ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet. Tacit.1 The arguments of an Author lose a great deal of their weight, when we are persuaded that he only writes for argument’s sake, and has no real concern in the cause which he espouses. This is the case of one, who draws his pen in the defence of property, without having any; except, perhaps, in the copy of a libel, or a ballad. One is apt to suspect , that the passion for liberty, which appears in a grub-street2 patriot , arises only from his apprehensions of a goal; and that, whatever he may pretend, he does not write to secure, but to get something of his own. Should the Government be overturned, he has nothing to lose but an old standish.3 I question not but the Reader will conceive a respect for the Author of this paper, from the title of it; since, he may be sure, I am so considerable a man, that I cannot have less than forty shillings a year.4 freeholder 1 199 5. Someone who buys and sells shares of stock in a stock exchange. I have rather chosen this title than any other, because it is what I most glory in, and what most effectually calls to my mind the happiness of that Government under which I live. As a British Freeholder , I should not scruple taking place of a French Marquis; and when I see one of my countrymen amusing himself in his little cabbage -garden, I naturally look upon him as a greater person than the owner of the richest vineyard in Champagne. The House of Commons is the representative of men in my condition . I consider my self as one who give my consent to every law which passes: a Free-holder in our Government being of the nature of a Citizen of Rome in that famous Common-wealth; who, by the election of a Tribune, had a kind of remote voice in every law that was enacted. So that a Free-holder is but one remove from a Legislator , and for that reason ought to stand up in the defence of those laws, which are in some degree of his own making. For such is the nature of our happy constitution, that the bulk of the people virtually give their approbation to every thing they are bound to obey, and prescribe to themselves those rules by which they are to walk. At the same time that I declare I am a Free-holder, I do not exclude my self from any other title. A Free-holder may be either a Voter, or a Knight of the shire; a Wit, or a Fox-hunter; a Scholar, or a Soldier; an Alderman, or a Courtier; a Patriot, or a Stock-jobber.5 But I chuse to be distinguished by this denomination, as the Freeholder is the basis of all other titles. Dignities may be grafted upon it; but this is the substantial stock, that conveys to them their life, taste, and beauty; and without which they are no more than blossoms , that would fall away with every shake of wind. And here I cannot but take occasion to congratulate my country upon the increase of this happy tribe of men, since, by the wisdom of the present Parliament, I find the race of Free-holders spreading into the remotest corners of the Island. I mean that Act which passed in the late Session for the encouragement of loyalty in Scotland : by which it is provided, That all and every Vassal and Vassals in Scotland, who shall continue peaceable, and in dutiful allegiance to his 200 selected essays 6. In 1707, Scotland and England were unified and the Scottish parliament disbanded. Residual loyalty to the Stuart line...