If men dissolve their ancient incorporation in order to regenerate their community, in that state of things each man has a right, if he pleases, to remain an individual.  Any number of individuals, who can agree upon it, have an undoubted right to form themselves into a state apart and wholly independent.  If any of these is forced into the fellowship of another, this is conquest and not compact.  On every principle which supposes society to be in virtue of a free covenant, this compulsive incorporation must be null and void.

As a people can have no right to a corporate capacity without universal consent, so neither have they a right to hold exclusively any lands in the name and title of a corporation.  On the scheme of the present rulers in our neighboring country, regenerated as they are, they have no more right to the territory called France than I have.  I have a right to pitch my tent in any unoccupied place I can find for it; and I may apply to my own maintenance any part of their unoccupied soil.  I may purchase the house or vineyard of any individual proprietor who refuses his consent (and most proprietors have, as far as they dared, refused it) to the new incorporation.  I stand in his independent place.  Who are these insolent men, calling themselves the French nation, that would monopolize this fair domain of Nature?  Is it because they speak a certain jargon?  Is it their mode of chattering, to me unintelligible, that forms their title to my land?  Who are they who claim by prescription and descent from certain gangs of banditti called Franks, and Burgundians, and Visigoths, of whom I may have never heard, and ninety-nine out of an hundred of themselves certainly never have heard, whilst at the very time they tell me that prescription and long possession form no title to property?  Who are they that presume to assert that the land which I purchased of the individual, a natural person, and not a fiction of state, belongs to them, who in the very capacity in which they make their claim can exist only as an imaginary being, and in virtue of the very prescription which they reject and disown?  This mode of arguing might be pushed into all the detail, so as to leave no sort of doubt, that, on their principles, and on the sort of footing on which they have thought proper to place themselves, the crowd of men, on the other side of the Channel, who have the impudence to call themselves a people, can never be the lawful, exclusive possessors of the soil.  By what they call reasoning without prejudice, they leave not one stone upon another in the fabric of human society.  They subvert all the authority which they hold, as well as all that which they have destroyed.