tock will be gone: the majority of persons then living, in whom the
legal authority resides, will be composed of those who, twenty-one years
before, had no legal existence. Those will be fathers and grandfathers
in their turn, and, in the next twenty-one years, (or less) another race
of minors, arrived at age, will succeed them, and so on.

As this is ever the case, and as every generation is equal in rights to
another, it consequently follows, that there cannot be a right in any
to establish government by hereditary succession, because it would be
supposing itself possessed of a right superior to the rest, namely,
that of commanding by its own authority how the world shall be hereafter
governed and who shall govern it. Every age and generation is, and must
be, (as a matter of right,) as free to act for itself in all cases, as
the age and generation that 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 one generation a
property in the generations that are to follow.

In the first part of the Rights of Man I have spoken of government by
hereditary succession; and I will here close the subject with an extract
from that work, which states it under the two following heads. (1)

1 The quotation, here omitted, will be found in vol. ii. of
this work, beginning with p. 364, and continuing, with a few
omissions, to the 15th line of p. 366. This "Dissertation"
was originally written for circulation in Holland, where
Paine's "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 s