it has been deemed a qualification merely, and not a title.
(_Wilcox_, chap. iii. p. 456.) Let it not be said that the legal
meaning of the word freeman is peculiar to British corporations, and
that we have it not in the charters and constitutions of Pennsylvania.
The laws agreed upon in England in May 1682, use the word in this
specific sense, and even furnish a definition of it: `Every inhabitant
of the said province that is, or shall be, a purchaser of one hundred
acres of land or upwards, his heirs or assigns, and every person who
shall have paid his passage, and shall have taken up one hundred acres
of land, at a penny an acre, and have cultivated ten acres thereof; and
every person that hath been a servant or bondsman, and is free by his
service, that shall have taken up his fifty acres of land, and shall
have cultivated twenty thereof; and every inhabitant, artificer, or
other resident in the said province, that pays scot and lot to the
government, _shall be deemed and accounted a *freeman* of the said
province_; and every such person shall be capable of electing, or being
elected, representatives of the people in provincial council, or general
assembly of the said province.' Now, why this minute and elaborate
detail? Had it been intended that all but servants and slaves should be
freemen to every intent, it had been easier and more natural to say so.
But it was not intended. It was foreseen that there would be
inhabitants, neither planters nor taxable, who, though free as the
winds, might be unsafe depositories of popular power; and the design
was, to admit no man to the freedom of the province who had not a stake
in it. That the clause which relates to freedom by service was not
intended for manumitted slaves is evident, from the fact that there were
none; and it regarded not slavery, but limited servitude expired by
efflux of time. At that time, certainly, the case of a manumitted
slave, or of his free-born progeny, was not contemplated as one to be
provided for in the founder's scheme of policy: I have quoted the
passage, however, to show that the word freeman was applied in a
peculiar sense to the political compact of our ancestors, resting like a
corporation, on a charter from the crown; and exactly as it was applied
to bodies politic at home. In entire consonance, it was declared in the
Act of Union, given at Chester in the same year, that strangers and
foreigners holding land `according to the law of