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."