of the Rights of Man, published by the National Assembly of France,
as the basis on which the constitution of France is built. This he
calls "paltry and blurred sheets of paper about the rights of man."
Does Mr. Burke mean to deny that man has any rights? If he does, then
he must mean that there are no such things as rights anywhere, and
that he has none himself; for who is there in the world but man? But
if Mr. Burke means to admit that man has rights, the question then
will be: What are those rights, and how man came by them originally?

The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity,
respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into
antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the
intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce
what was then done, as a rule for the present day. This is no
authority at all. If we travel still farther into antiquity, we shall
find a direct contrary opinion and practice prevailing; and if
antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities may be
produced, successively contradicting each other; but if we proceed
on, we shall at last come out right; we shall come to the time when
man came from the hand of his Maker. What was he then? Man. Man was
his high and only title, and a higher cannot be given him. But of
titles I shall speak hereafter.

We are now got at the origin of man, and at the origin of his rights.
As to the manner in which the world has been governed from that day
to this, it is no farther any concern of ours than to make a proper
use of the errors or the improvements which the history of it
presents. Those who lived an hundred or a thousand years ago, were
then moderns, as we are now. They had their ancients, and those
ancients had others, and we also shall be ancients in our turn. If