The Rights of Man | Page 9

to undertake it nor fortitude to support
it; and now that there is one, he seeks an escape by condemning it.
Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great part of his work is
taken up with abusing Dr. Price (one of the best-hearted men that lives) and the two
societies in England known by the name of the Revolution Society and the Society for
Constitutional Information.
Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being the anniversary of
what is called in England the Revolution, which took place 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of
this sermon, says: "The political Divine proceeds dogmatically to assert, that by the

principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental
rights:
1. To choose our own governors.
2. To cashier them for misconduct.
3. To frame a government for ourselves."
Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in
this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole; that it is a right
resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the
nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists anywhere; and, what is still more strange
and marvellous, he says: "that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and
that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes." That men
should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to
maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the
paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.
The method which Mr. Burke takes to prove that the people of England have no such
rights, and that such rights do not now exist in the nation, either in whole or in part, or
anywhere at all, is of the same marvellous and monstrous kind with what he has already
said; for his arguments are that the persons, or the generation of persons, in whom they
did exist, are dead, and with them the right is dead also. To prove this, he quotes a
declaration made by Parliament about a hundred years ago, to William and Mary, in these
words: "The Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, do, in the name of the people
aforesaid" (meaning the people of England then living) "most humbly and faithfully
submit themselves, their heirs and posterities, for Ever." He quotes a clause of another
Act of Parliament made in the same reign, the terms of which he says, "bind us"
(meaning the people of their day), "our heirs and our posterity, to them, their heirs and
posterity, to the end of time."
Mr. Burke conceives his point sufficiently established by producing those clauses, which
he enforces by saying that they exclude the right of the nation for ever. And not yet
content with making such declarations, repeated over and over again, he farther says,
"that if the people of England possessed such a right before the Revolution" (which he
acknowledges to have been the case, not only in England, but throughout Europe, at an
early period), "yet that the English Nation did, at the time of the Revolution, most
solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their posterity, for ever."
As Mr. Burke occasionally applies the poison drawn from his horrid principles, not only
to the English nation, but to the French Revolution and the National Assembly, and
charges that august, illuminated and illuminating body of men with the epithet of
usurpers, I shall, sans ceremonie, place another system of principles in opposition to his.
The English Parliament of 1688 did a certain thing, which, for themselves and their
constituents, they had a right to do, and which it appeared right should be done. But, in
addition to this right, which they possessed by delegation, they set up another right by
assumption, that of binding and controlling posterity to the end of time. The case,
therefore, divides itself into two parts; the right which they possessed by delegation, and
the right which they set up by assumption. The first is admitted; but with respect to the
second, I replyThere never did, there never 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