will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any
description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed
of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to
the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be
governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts
or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have
neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in
themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to
act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded
it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most
ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man;
neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to
follow. The Parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period,
had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to
bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or
the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those
who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation
is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions
require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be
accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with
him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this
world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be
its governors, or how its government shall be organised, or how
administered.

I am not contending for nor against any form of government, nor for nor
against any party, here or elsewhere. That which a whole nation chooses
to do it has a right to do. Mr. Burke says, No. Where, then, does the
right exist? I am contending for the rights of the living, and against
their being willed away and controlled and contracted for by the
manuscript assumed authority of the dead, and Mr. Burke is contending
for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living.
There was a time when kings disposed of their crowns by will upon their
death-beds, and consigned the people, like beasts of the field, to
whatever successor they appointed. This is now so exploded as scarcely
to be remembered, and so monstrous as hardly to be believed. But the
Parliamentary clauses upon which Mr. Burke builds his political church
are of the same nature.

Th