Among the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and
irritate each other, Mr. Burke's pamphlet on the French Revolution
is an extraordinary instance. Neither the People of France, nor the
National Assembly, were troubling themselves about the affairs of
England, or the English Parliament; and that Mr. Burke should commence
an unprovoked attack upon them, both in Parliament and in public, is a
conduct that cannot be pardoned on the score of manners, nor justified
on that of policy.

  There is scarcely an epithet of abuse to be found in the English
language, with which Mr. Burke has not loaded the French Nation and
the National Assembly. Everything which rancour, prejudice,
ignorance or knowledge could suggest, is poured forth in the copious
fury of near four hundred pages. In the strain and on the plan Mr.
Burke was writing, he might have written on to as many thousands. When
the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the
man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted.

  Hitherto Mr. Burke has been mistaken and disappointed in the
opinions he had formed of the affairs of France; but such is the
ingenuity of his hope, or the malignancy of his despair, that it
furnishes him with new pretences to go on. There was a time when it
was impossible to make Mr. Burke believe there would be any Revolution
in France. His opinion then was, that the French had neither spirit to
undertake it nor fortitude to support it; and now that there is one,
he seeks an escape by condemning it.

  Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great
part of his work is taken up with abusing Dr. Price (one of the
best-hearted men that lives) and the two societies in England known by
the name of the Revolution Society and the Society for
Constitutional Information.

  Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789,
being the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution,
which took place 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of this sermon, says:
"The political Divine proceeds dogmatically to assert, that by the
principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired
three fundamental rights:

     1. To choose our own governors.

     2. To cashier them for misconduct.

     3. To frame a government for ourselves."

  Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in
this or in that person, or in this or in that description of
persons, but that it exists in the whole; that it is a right
resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a
right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it
exists anywhere; and, what is still more strange and marvellous, he
says: "that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and
that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives
and fortunes." That men should take up arms and spend their lives
and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they
have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited
to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.

  The method which Mr. Burke takes to prove that the people of England
have no such rights, and that such rights do not now exist in the
nation, either in whole or in part, or anywhere at all, is of the same
marvellous and monstrous kind with what he has already said; for his
arguments are that the persons, or the generation of persons, in
whom they did exist, are dead, and with them the right is dead also.
To prove this, he quotes a declaration made by Parliament about a
hundred years ago, to William and Mary, in these words: "The Lords
Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, do, in the name of the people
aforesaid" (meaning the people of England then living) "most humbly
and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities, for
EVER." He quotes a clause of another Act of Parliament made in the
same reign, the terms of which he says, "bind us" (meaning the
people of their day), "our heirs and our posterity, to them, their
heirs and posterity, to the end of time."

  Mr. Burke conceives his point sufficiently established by
producing those clauses, which he enforces by saying that they exclude
the right of the nation for ever. And not yet content with making such
declarations, repeated over and over again, he farther says, "that
if the people of England possessed such a right before the Revolution"
(which he acknowledges to have been the case, not only in England, but
throughout Europe, at an early period), "yet that the English Nation
did, at the time of the Revolution, most solemnly renounce and
abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their posterity, for ever."

  As Mr. Burke occasionally applies the poison drawn from his horrid
principles, not only to the English nation, but to the French
Revolution and the National Assembly, and charges that august,
illuminated and illuminating body of men with the epithet of usurpers,
I shall, sans ceremonie, place another system of principles in
opposition to his.

  The English Parliament of 1688 did a certain thing, which, for
themselves and their constituents, they had a right to do, and which
it appeared right should be done. But, in addition to this right,
which they possessed by delegation, they set up another right by
assumption, that of binding and controlling posterity to the end of
time. The case, therefore, divides itself into two parts; the right
which they possessed by delegation, and the right which they set up by