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 thing which appears to me a violation of
every order of nature, and of common sense.

When I look into history and see the multitudes of men, otherwise
virtuous, who have died, and their families been ruined, in the defence
of knaves and fools, and which they would not have done, had they
reasoned at all upon the system; I do not know a greater good that an
individual can render to mankind, than to endeavour to break the chains
of political superstition. Those chains are now dissolving fast,
and proclamations and persecutions will serve but to hasten that
dissolution.

Having thus spoken of the Hereditary System as a bad System, and subject
to every possible defect, I now come to the Representative System, and
this Mr. Adam will find stated in the Second Part of Rights of Man, not
only as the best, but as the only _Theory_ of Government under which the
liberties of the people can be permanently secure.

But it is needless now to talk of mere theory, since there is already a
government in full practice, established upon that theory; or in other
words, upon the Rights of Man, and has been so for almost twenty years.
Mr. Pitt, in a speech of his some short time since, said, "That there
never did, and never could exist a Government established upon those
Rights, and that if it began at noon, it would end at night." Mr. Pitt
has not yet arrived at the degree of a school-boy in this species of
knowledge; his practice has been confined to the means of _extorting
revenue_, and his boast has been--_how much!_ Whereas the boast of the
system of government that