s and defects of the English
government, and capable of producing more happiness to the people, and
that also with an eightieth part of the taxes, which the present English
system of government consumes; I hope he will do me the justice, when
he next goes to the House, to get up and confess he had been mistaken in
saying, that I had _established nothing, and that I had destroyed every
principle of subordination_. Having thus opened the case, I now come to
the point.

In the Second Part of the Rights of Man, I have distinguished government
into two classes or systems: the one the hereditary system, the other
the representative system.

In the First Part of _Rights of Man_, I have endeavoured to shew, and
I challenge any man to refute it, that there does not exist a right
to establish hereditary government; or, in other words, hereditary
governors; because hereditary government always means a government
yet to come, and the case always is, that the people who are to live
afterwards, have always the same right to choose a government for
themselves, as the people had who lived before them.

In the Second Part of _Rights of Man_, I have not repeated those
arguments, because they are irrefutable; but have confined myself to
shew the defects of what is called hereditary government, or hereditary
succession, that it must, from the nature of it, throw government into
the hands of men totally unworthy of it, from want of principle, or
unfitted for it from want of capacity.--James the IId. is recorded as
an instance of the first of these cases; and instances are to be found
almost all over Europe to prove the truth of the latter.

To shew the absurdity of the Hereditary System still more strongly, I
will now put the following case:--Take any fifty men promiscuously, and
it will be very extraordinary, if, out of that number, one man should be
found, whose principles and talents taken together (for some might have
principles, and others might have talents) would render him a person
truly fitted to fill any very extraordinary office of National Trust.
If then such a fitness of character could not be expected to be found
in more than one person out of fifty, it would happen but once in a
thousand years to the eldest son of any one family, admitting each, on
an average, to hold the office twenty years. Mr. Adam talks of something
in the Constitution which he calls _most sacred_; but I hope he does not
mean hereditary succession, a