THE

FREEHOLDER.

No. 1. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1715.

Rara temporum felicitas, ubi sentire quæ velis, et quæ sentias dicere licet. TACIT.

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

It is but justice to a great writer, to distinguish between his hasty, and his deliberate compositions; between such of his works, as he had planned at his leisure, and finished with care, and such as he was called upon to furnish, on the sudden, not with a view to his own fame, but to 'the discharge of some occasional duty, which, a present emergency, or his character and station in life, imposed upon him. Such was apparently the case of the Freeholder; a set of periodical essays, undertaken in the heat of the rebellion in 1715, and with the best purpose of reconciling an abused people to the new succession; at a time when the writer was deeply engaged in public business, and had scarce the leisure to produce these papers so fast, as they were demanded from him. For it was important, in that conjuncture, that the minds of men should be calmed and softened by some immediate applications; and the general good taste of that age, made it expedient that such applications should be administered, not by an ordinary hand, but by the most polite and popular of our writers.

If these considerations be allowed their just weight, The Freeholder will be read with pleasure, and must even be thought to do no small credit to it's author, though it be not always written with that force, or polished every where up to that perfect grace, which we admire so much in the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian.

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-street patriot, arises only from his apprehensions of a gaol; 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.

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.

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 myself as one who give my consent to every law which passes: a freeholder in our government being of the nature of a citizen of Rome in that famous commonwealth; who, by the election of a tribune, had a kind of remote voice in every law that was enacted. So that a freeholder 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 freeholder, I do not exclude myself from any other title. A free

Who, refers to, one, and not to I. He should then have saidwho gives his consent.