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 Parliamen