right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to
control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people
of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are
to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and
must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require.
It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When
man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having
no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no
longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how
its government shall be organised, or how administered.

I am not contending for nor against any form of government, nor for
nor against any party, here or elsewhere. That which a whole nation
chooses to do it has a right to do. Mr. Burke says, No. Where, then,
does the right exist? I am contending for the rights of the living,
and against their being willed away and controlled and contracted for
by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead, and Mr. Burke is
contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom
of the living. There was a time when kings disposed of their crowns
by will upon their death-beds, and consigned the people, like beasts
of the field, to whatever successor they appointed. This is now so
exploded as scarcely to be remembered, and so monstrous as hardly to
be believed. But the Parliamentary clauses upon which Mr. Burke
builds his political church are of the same nature.

The 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