t 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, but he
must produce also his proofs that such a right existed, and show how it
existed. If it ever existed it must now exist, for whatever appertains
to the nature of man cannot be annihilated by man. It is