“I smile to myself when I contemplate the ridiculous insignificance into which literature and all the sciences would sink, were they made hereditary, commented Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (1791), and I carry the same idea into governments. A hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary author. I know not whether Homer or Euclid had sons; but I will venture an opinion that if they had, and had left their works unfinished, those sons could not have completed them.”
