John Thelwall, speech made at Copenhagen Fields in Islington in 1795.
I do not mean equality of property. that is totally impossible in the present state of human intellect and industry. The equality I mean is equality of rights. The equality which protects the poor against the insults and oppressions of the rich, as well as the rich against the insults and invasions of the poor.
Perhaps before twilight information may be lodged at the Privy Council that I am making an inflammatory harangue to persuade you to level property and murder all the proprietors. But I have taken care, by having a shorthand writer at my elbow, that they shall not be able to prove me to have said anything that I do not say.
John Thelwall, Rights of Nature (1796)
I affirm that every man, and every woman, and every child, ought to obtain something more, in the general distribution of the fruits of labour, than food, and rags, and a wretched hammock with a poor rug to cover it; and that, without working twelve or fourteen hours a day from six to sixty. They have a claim, a sacred and inviolable claim to some comfort and enjoyment to some tolerable leisure for such discussions, and some means of or such information as may lead to an understanding of their rights.
The fact is that the hideous accumulation of capital in a few hands, like all diseases not absolutely mortal, carries in its own enormity, the seeds of its cure. Man is, by his very nature, social and communicative - proud to display the little knowledge he possesses, and eager, as opportunity pretends, to increase his store. Whatever presses men together, therefore, though it may generate some vices, is favourable to the diffusion of knowledge, and ultimately promotive of human liberty. Hence every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.
Lift up your voices. Wear not your lungs with sighs and sullen murmurs. Exert once more the manly energies of reason; and tell them, with a clear and decided tone, that "peace is not peace without reform" and "your discontents can never be allayed without the restoration of equal rights and equal laws".
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