If they are equally right in principle, it is mere matter of opinion
which we prefer. If the one be demonstratively better than the other,
that difference directs our choice; but if one of them should be so
absolutely false as not to have a right to existence, the matter settles
itself at once; because a negative proved on one thing, where two only
are offered, and one must be accepted, amounts to an affirmative on the
other.

The revolutions that are now spreading themselves in the world have
their origin in this state of the case, and the present war is a
conflict between the representative system founded on the rights of the
people, and the hereditary system founded in usurpation. As to what are
called Monarchy, Royalty, and Aristocracy, they do not, either as things
or as terms, sufficiently describe the hereditary system; they are but
secondary things or signs of the hereditary system, and which fall of
themselves if that system has not a right to exist. Were there no
such terms as Monarchy, Royalty, and Aristocracy, or were other terms
substituted in their place, the hereditary system, if it continued,
would not be altered thereby. It would be the same system under any
other titulary name as it is now.

The character therefore of the revolutions of the present day
distinguishes itself most definitively by grounding itself on the system
of representative government, in opposition to the hereditary. No other
distinction reaches the whole of the principle.

Having thus opened the case generally, I proceed, in the first place, to
examine the hereditary system, because it has the priority in point of
time. The representative system is the invention of the modern world;
and, that no doubt may arise as to my own opinion, I declare it
before hand, which is, _that there is not a problem in Euclid more
mathematically true, than that hereditary government has not a right to
exist. When therefore we take from any man the exercise of hereditary
power, we take away that which he never had the right to possess, and
which no law or custom could, or ever can, give him a title to_.

The arguments that have hitherto been employed against the hereditary
system have been chiefly founded upon the absurdity of it, and its
incompetency to the purpose of good government. Nothing can present to
our judgment, or to our imagination, a figure of greater absurdity, than
that of seeing the government of a nation fall, as it frequently doe