d for.--When a man in a wrong cause attempts to steer his course
by anything else than some polar truth or principle, he is sure to be
lost. It is beyond the compass of his capacity to keep all the parts
of an argument together, and make them unite in one issue, by any
other means than having this guide always in view. Neither memory nor
invention will supply the want of it. The former fails him, and the
latter betrays him.

Notwithstanding the nonsense, for it deserves no better name, that Mr.
Burke has asserted about hereditary rights, and hereditary succession,
and that a Nation has not a right to form a Government of itself; it
happened to fall in his way to give some account of what Government is.
"Government," says he, "is a contrivance of human wisdom."

Admitting that government is a contrivance of human wisdom, it must
necessarily follow, that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights
(as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible
to make wisdom hereditary; and on the other hand, that cannot be a
wise contrivance, which in its operation may commit the government of a
nation to the wisdom of an idiot. The ground which Mr. Burke now
takes is fatal to every part of his cause. The argument changes from
hereditary rights to hereditary wisdom; and the question is, Who is the
wisest man? He must now show that every one in the line of hereditary
succession was a Solomon, or his title is not good to be a king. What a
stroke has Mr. Burke now made! To use a sailor's phrase, he has swabbed
the deck, and scarcely left a name legible in the list of Kings; and
he has mowed down and thinned the House of Peers, with a scythe as
formidable as Death and Time.

But Mr. Burke appears to have been aware of this retort; and he has
taken care to guard against it, by making government to be not only
a contrivance of human wisdom, but a monopoly of wisdom. He puts the
nation as fools on one side, and places his government of wisdom, all
wise men of Gotham, on the other side; and he then proclaims, and says
that "Men have a Right that their Wants should be provided for by this
wisdom." Having thus made proclamation, he next proceeds to explain to
them what their wants are, and also what their rights are. In this
he has succeeded dextrously, for he makes their wants to be a want of
wisdom; but as this is cold comfort, he then informs them, that they
have a right (not to any of the wisdom) but to be governed b