e laws of every country must be analogous to some common principle.
In England no parent or master, nor all the authority of Parliament,
omnipotent as it has called itself, can bind or control the personal
freedom even of an individual beyond the age of twenty-one years. On
what ground of right, then, could the Parliament of 1688, or any other
Parliament, bind all posterity for ever?

Those who have quitted the world, and those who have not yet arrived
at it, are as remote from each other as the utmost stretch of mortal
imagination can conceive. What possible obligation, then, can exist
between them--what rule or principle can be laid down that of two
nonentities, the one out of existence and the other not in, and who
never can meet in this world, the one should control the other to the
end of time?

In England it is said that money cannot be taken out of the pockets
of the people without their consent. But who authorised, or who could
authorise, the Parliament of 1688 to control and take away the freedom
of posterity (who were not in existence to give or to withhold their
consent) and limit and confine their right of acting in certain cases
for ever?

A greater absurdity cannot present itself to the understanding of man
than what Mr. Burke offers to his readers. He tells them, and he tells
the world to come, that a certain body of men who existed a hundred
years ago made a law, and that there does not exist in the nation, nor
ever will, nor ever can, a power to alter it. Under how many subtilties
or absurdities has the divine right to govern been imposed on the
credulity of mankind? Mr. Burke has discovered a new one, and he
has shortened his journey to Rome by appealing to the power of this
infallible Parliament of former days, and he produces what it has done
as of divine authority, for that power must certainly be more than human
which no human power to the end of time can alter.

But Mr. Burke has done some service--not to his cause, but to his
country--by bringing those clauses into public view. They serve to
demonstrate how necessary it is at all times to watch against the
attempted encroachment of power, and to prevent its running to excess.
It is somewhat extraordinary that the offence for which James II. was
expelled, that of setting up power by assumption, should be re-acted,
under another shape and form, by the Parliament that expelled him. It
shows that the Rights of Man were but imperfectly understood