Thomas Paine

Experience, in all ages, and in all countries, has demonstrated that it is impossible to control Nature in her distribution of mental powers.

The representative system takes society and civilisation for its basis; nature, reason, and experience, for its guide.

It is by adding the evil of hereditary succession to that of monarchy, that a permanent family interest is created, whose constant objects are dominion and revenue.

A government calling itself free, with an hereditary office, is like a thorn in the flesh, that produces a fermentation which endeavours to discharge it.

The civil wars which have originated from contested hereditary claims, are more numerous, and have been more dreadful, and of longer continuance, than those which have been occasioned by election.

This sort of superstition may last a few years more, but it cannot long resist the awakened reason and interest of man.

It requires some talents to be a common mechanic; but to be a king requires only the animal figure of man--a sort of breathing automaton.

And where wisdom and abilities are not necessary, such an office, whatever it may be, is superfluous or insignificant.

Passing over, for the present, all the evils and mischiefs which monarchy has occasioned in the world, nothing can more effectually prove its uselessness in a state of civil government, than making it hereditary.

Hereditaryship is, in this sense, as much an attaint upon principle, as an outrage upon society.

In short, we cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government, than hereditary succession, in all its cases, presents.

Can we then be surprised at the abject state of the human mind in monarchical countries, when the government itself is formed on such an abject levelling system?--It has no fixed character.