"Rights of Man" was not well known.--_Editor._

*****

The history of the English parliament furnishes an example of this kind;
and which merits to be recorded, as being the greatest instance of
legislative ignorance and want of principle that is to be found in any
country. The case is as follows:

The English parliament of 1688, imported a man and his wife from
Holland, _William and Mary_, and made them king and queen of England.
(2) Having done this, the said parliament made a law to convey the
government of the country to the heirs of William and Mary, in the
following words: "We, the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, do,
in the name of the people of England, most humbly and faithfully submit
_ourselves, our heirs, and posterities_, to William and Mary, _their
heirs and posterities_, for ever." And in a subsequent law, as quoted by
Edmund Burke, the said parliament, in the name of the people of England
then living, _binds the said people, their heirs and posterities, to
William and Mary, their heirs and posterities, to the end of time_.

2 "The Bill of Rights (temp. William III.) shows that the
Lords and Commons met not in Parliament but in convention,
that they declared against James II., and in favour of
William III. The latter was accepted as sovereign, and, when
monarch. Acta of Parliament were passed confirming what had
been done."--Joseph Fisher in Notes and Queries (London),
May 2,1874. This does not affect Paine's argument, as a
Convention could have no more right to bind the future than
a Parliament.--_Editor._.

It is not sufficient that we laugh at the ignorance of such law-makers;
it is necessary that we reprobate their want of principle. The
constituent assembly of France, 1789, fell into the same vice as the
parliament of England had done, and assumed to establish an hereditary
succession in the family of the Capets, as an act of the constitution
of that year. That every nation, _for the time being_, has a right to
govern itself as it pleases, must always be admitted; but government by
hereditary succession is government for another race of people, and
not for itself; and as those on whom it is to operate are not yet in
existence, or are minors, so neither is the right in existence to set it
up for them, and to assume such a right is treason against the right of
posterity.

I here close the arguments on the first head, that of government