n to New York.

I am, with great and sincere esteem, Dear Sir, your affectionate friend
and servant,

Th: Jefferson.

P. S. I just now learn that Mr. Necker proposed yesterday to the
National Assembly a loan of eighty millions, on terms more tempting to
the lender than the former, and that they approved it, leaving him to
arrange the details, in order that they might occupy themselves at once
about the constitution. T. J.

LETTER XI.--TO JAMES MADISON, September 6, 1789

TO JAMES MADISON.

Paris, September 6, 1789.

Dear Sir,

I sit down to write to you, without knowing by what occasion I shall
send my letter. I do it, because a subject comes into my head, which I
wrould wish to develope[sp.] a little more than is practicable in the
hurry of the moment of making up general despatches.

The question, whether one generation of men has a right to bind another,
seems never to have been started either on this, or our side of the
water. Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit
decision, but place also among the fundamental principles of every
government. The course of reflection in which we are immersed here, on
the elementary principles of society, has presented this question to my
mind; and that no such obligation can be so transmitted, I think very
capable of proof. I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be
self-evident, that _the earth belongs in usufruct to the living_: that
the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by
any individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, and reverts
to the society. If the society has formed no rules for the appropriation
of its lands in severalty, it will be taken by the first occupants, and
these will generally be the wife and children of the decedent. If they
have formed rules of appropriation, those rules may give it to the wife
and children, or to some one of them, or to the legatee of the deceased.
So they may give it to his creditor.

But the child, the legatee, or creditor, takes it not by natural right,
but by a law of the society of which he is a member, and to which he
is subject. Then, no man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he
occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the
payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during
his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations
to come; and then the lands would belong to the dead, an