LETTER XI.—­TO JAMES MADISON, September 6, 1789

TO JAMES MADISON.

Paris, September 6, 1789.

Dear Sir,

I sit down to write to you, without knowing by what occasion I shall send my letter.  I do it, because a subject comes into my head, which I wrould wish to develope[sp.] a little more than is practicable in the hurry of the moment of making up general despatches.

The question, whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this, or our side of the water.  Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also among the fundamental principles of every government.  The course of reflection in which we are immersed here, on the elementary principles of society, has presented this question to my mind; and that no such obligation can be so transmitted, I think very capable of proof.  I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living:  that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.  The portion occupied by any individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, and reverts to the society.  If the society has formed no rules for the appropriation of its lands in severalty, it will be taken by the first occupants, and these will generally be the wife and children of the decedent.  If they have formed rules of appropriation, those rules may give it to the wife and children, or to some one of them, or to the legatee of the deceased.  So they may give it to his creditor.

But the child, the legatee, or creditor, takes it not by natural right, but by a law of the society of which he is a member, and to which he is subject.  Then, no man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him.  For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come; and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living, which is the reverse of our principle.

What is true of every member of the society individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals.  To keep our ideas clear when applying them to a multitude, let us suppose a whole generation of men to be born on the same day, to attain mature age on the same day, and to die on the same day, leaving a succeeding generation in the moment of attaining their mature age, all together.  Let the ripe age be supposed of twenty-one years, and their period of life thirty-four years more, that being the average term given by the bills of mortality to persons of twenty-one years of age.  Each successive generation would, in this way, come and go off the stage at a fixed moment, as individuals do now.