PAINE, Thomas. A Letter to Mr. Secretary Dundas, in Answer to his Observations in the House of Commons, May 25th, on the Rights of Man, and the late Proclamation [THE EXCEEDINGLY RARE DUBLIN EDITION]

Dublin: Printed by James Moore, No. 45, College-Green, 1792. pp. 16. Disbound. Lightly foxed, otherwise a very good copy.

COPAC locates only 1 printed copy. OCLC locates, under two accession numbers, copies only at Yale, the Clements and Newberry Libraries, and the American Philosophical Society. This Dublin edition is one of the rarest of the several 1792 printings of Paine’s response to Dundas’s attack in Parliament on the “wicked and seditious” ‘Rights of Man’. The ‘Late Proclamation’ is the royal decree against seditious writings, issued on May 21, 1792, and directed especially against the second part of ‘Rights of Man’. Paine denounces “hereditary government, or hereditary succession,” which deprives the people “to chuse a government for themselves” and “must most certainly, from the nature of it, throw government into the hands of men totally unworthy of it.”

[L4 File Q]