Whether One Generation of Men Has a Right to Bind Another Is a Question Pertaining to the Fundamental Principles of Every Government

The concluding article of Lafayette's draft, asserting the right of successive generations "to examine and, if necessary, to modify the form of government" seemed to echo Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. At this distance, in view of the close association of Enlightenment figures from France and the United States, it is difficult to say who influenced whom. It must have been difficult even in their own generation. Distinguished historians have cited Jefferson's letter of September 6, 1789, to James Madison as an example of radically original thought, yet there is strong evidence that its central idea was simply borrowed from an Englishman and amplified by Jefferson. The American minister wrote:

The question whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have ben 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. . . . 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. . . . 

It may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. . . . 

This principle that the earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead, is of very extensive application and consequences, in every country, and most especially in France. 

--Alf J. Mapp Jr., Thomas Jefferson: America's Paradoxical Patriot (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 268.