The dead as fellow citizens: Burke and Paine
It is the democracy of the dead.
The intergenerational community has a useful earlier comparison in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Society's ends require many generations, Burke argues, so its partnership includes the living, the dead and those yet unborn. Chesterton gives that continuity a different political vocabulary: inherited judgment becomes an enlarged electorate. This is a comparison of arguments, not evidence that this sentence derives from Burke. The inspected Burke witness is the University of Virginia's digital transcription carrying the 1790 Dodsley imprint, pp. 143–45.
Paine supplies the missing reason why a democrat might nevertheless resist the analogy. In Rights of Man, Part I (1791), answering Burke's appeal to the settlement of 1688, he argues that each generation possesses equal freedom to govern itself. Earlier legislators cannot surrender that freedom on behalf of people not yet born. Crucially, Paine allows old laws to continue when the living consent to retain them: his objection concerns irrevocable ancestral authority, not the mere age of a practice. See the opening discussion in Conway's collected edition, digitized by Project Gutenberg.
That distinction sharpens Chesterton's claim. Giving ancestors a hearing need not bind their descendants; giving them an unanswerable veto would. His language of councils and opinions supports the first reading, while his treatment of consensus as authority presses toward the second. The paragraph does not specify how the ancestral votes are counted or how conflicting traditions are adjudicated. Its democratic argument establishes a claim to consideration more clearly than a rule for settling disputes. Burke's contrasting formulation is here.
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