a body of proprietors?  In short, if you can cause a man to be imprisoned or whipped if he do not work enough to please you; if you can sell him by auction for a time limited; if you can forcibly separate him from his wife to prevent their having children; if you can shut him up in his dwelling place when you please, and for as long a time as you please; if you can force him to draw a cart or wagon like a beast of draught; if you can, when the humour seizes you, and at the suggestion of your mere fears, or whim, cause him to be shut up in a dungeon during your pleasure:  if you can, at your pleasure, do these things to him, is it not to be impudently hypocritical to affect to call him a free-man?  But, after all, these may all be wanting, and yet the man be a slave, if he be allowed to have no property; and, as I have shown, no property he can have, not even in that labour, which is not only property, but the basis of all other property, unless he have a share in making the laws to which he is compelled to submit.

346.  It is said, that he may have this share virtually though not in form and name; for that his employers may have such share, and they will, as a matter of course, act for him.  This doctrine, pushed home, would make the chief of the nation the sole maker of the laws; for, if the rich can thus act for the poor, why should not the chief act for the rich?  This matter is very completely explained by the practice in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.  There the maxim is, that every free man, with the exception of men stained with crime and men insane, has a right to have a voice in choosing those who make the laws.  The number of Representatives sent to the Congress is, in each State, proportioned to the number of free people.  But, as there are slaves in some of the States, these States have a certain portion of additional numbers on account of those slaves!  Thus the slaves are represented by their owners, and this is real, practical, open and undisguised virtual representation!  No doubt that white men may be represented in the same way; for the colour of the skin is nothing; but let them be called slaves, then; let it not be pretended that they are free men; let not the word liberty be polluted by being applied to their state; let it be openly and honestly avowed, as in America, that they are slaves; and then will come the question whether men ought to exist in such a state, or whether they ought to do every thing in their power to rescue themselves from it.