Mr. Burke through a pathless wilderness of
rhapsodies, and a sort of descant upon governments, in which he asserts
whatever he pleases, on the presumption of its being believed, without
offering either evidence or reasons for so doing.

Before anything can be reasoned upon to a conclusion, certain facts,
principles, or data, to reason from, must be established, admitted, or
denied. Mr. Burke with his usual outrage, abused the Declaration of
the Rights of Man, published by the National Assembly of France, as
the basis on which the constitution of France is built. This he calls
"paltry and blurred sheets of paper about the rights of man." Does Mr.
Burke mean to deny that man has any rights? If he does, then he must
mean that there are no such things as rights anywhere, and that he has
none himself; for who is there in the world but man? But if Mr. Burke
means to admit that man has rights, the question then will be: What are
those rights, and how man came by them originally?

The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity,
respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into
antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the
intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what
was then done, as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at
all. If we travel still farther into antiquity, we shall find a direct
contrary opinion and practice prevailing; and if antiquity is to be
authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively
contradicting each other; but if we proceed on, we shall at last come
out right; we shall come to the time when man came from the hand of his
Maker. What was he then? Man. Man was his high and only title, and a
higher cannot be given him. But of titles I shall speak hereafter.

We are now got at the origin of man, and at the origin of his rights.
As to the manner in which the world has been governed from that day to
this, it is no farther any concern of ours than to make a proper use of
the errors or the improvements which the history of it presents. Those
who lived an hundred or a thousand years ago, were then moderns, as we
are now. They had their ancients, and those ancients had others, and we
also shall be ancients in our turn. If the mere name of antiquity is to
govern in the affairs of life, the people who are to live an hundred or
a thousand years hence, may as well take us for a precedent, as we make