“There never did, there never will, and there never can,
exist a Parliament, or any description of men,
in any country, possessed of the right or the power
of binding or controlling posterity to the “end of Time”,
or of commanding forever 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 which they have neither the right nor the power
to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself
in all cases as the ages and generations which proceeded 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 any generation
a property in the generations which are to follow.”
Tom Paine.
Islander.