assumption. The first is admitted; but with respect to the second, I
reply-

  There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a
Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in
any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and
controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for
ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and
therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers
of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power
to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all
cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and
presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and
insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any
generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The
Parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no
more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind
or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the
people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those
who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every
generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its
occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to
be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants
cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns
of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall
be its governors, or how its government shall be organised, or how
administered.

  I am not contending for nor against any form of government, nor
for nor against any party, here or elsewhere. That which a whole
nation chooses to do it has a right to do. Mr. Burke says, No.
Where, then, does the right exist? I am contending for the rights of
the living, and against their being willed away and controlled and
contracted for by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead, and
Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the
rights and freedom of the living. There was a time when kings disposed
of their crowns by will upon their death-beds, and consigned the
people, like beasts of the field, to whatever successor they
appointed. This is now so exploded as scarcely to be remembered, and
so monstrous as hardly to be believed. But the Parliamentary clauses
upon which Mr. Burke builds his political church are of the same
nature.

  The laws of every country must be analogous to some common
principle. In England no parent or master, nor all the authority of
Parliament, omnipotent as it has called itself, can bind or control
the personal freedom even of an individual beyond the age of
twenty-one years. On what ground of right, then, could the
Parliament of 1688, or any other Parliament, bind all posterity for
ever?

  Those who have quitted the world, and those who have not yet arrived
at it, are as remote from each other as the utmost stretch of mortal
imagination can conceive. What possible obligation, then, can exist
between them- what rule or principle can be laid down that of two
nonentities, the one out of existence and the other not in, and who
never can meet in this world, the one should control the other to
the end of time?

  In England it is said that money cannot be taken out of the
pockets of the people without their consent. But who authorised, or
who could authorise, the Parliament of 1688 to control and take away
the freedom of posterity (who were not in existence to give or to
withhold their consent) and limit and confine their right of acting in
certain cases for ever?

  A greater absurdity cannot present itself to the understanding of
man than what Mr. Burke offers to his readers. He tells them, and he
tells the world to come, that a certain body of men who existed a
hundred years ago made a law, and that there does not exist in the
nation, nor ever will, nor ever can, a power to alter it. Under how
many subtilties or absurdities has the divine right to govern been
imposed on the credulity of mankind? Mr. Burke has discovered a new
one, and he has shortened his journey to Rome by appealing to the
power of this infallible Parliament of former days, and he produces
what it has done as of divine authority, for that power must certainly
be more than human which no human power to the end of time can alter.

  But Mr. Burke has done some service- not to his cause, but to his
country- by bringing those clauses into public view. They serve to
demonstrate how necessary it is at all times to watch against the
attempted encroachment of power, and to prevent its running to excess.
It is somewhat extraordinary that the offence for which James II.
was expelled, that of setting up power by assumption, should be
re-acted, under another shape and form, by the Parliament that
expelled him. It shows that the Rights of Man were but imperfectly
understood at the Revolution, for certain it is that the right which
that Parliament set up by assumption (for by the delegation it had
not, and could not have it, because none could give it) over the
persons and freedom of posterity for ever was of the same tyrannical
unfounded kind which James attempted to set up over the Parliament and
the nation, and for which he was expelled. The only difference is (for
in principle they differ not) that the one was an usurper over living,
and the other over the unborn; and as the one has no better
authority to stand upon than the other, both of them must be equally
null and void, and of no effect.

  From what, or from whence, does Mr. Burke prove the right of any
human power to bind posterity for ever? He has produced his clauses,