The general aims of the pamphlet are now as little open to question as the famous Declaration which he sought to vindicate. Paine trenchantly attacked Burke's claim that no people, not even our own, had an inherent right to choose its own ruler, and that the Revolution Settlement of 1688 was binding for ever. Paine, on the contrary, asserted that "every age and generation must be as free to act for itself _in all cases_ as the ages and generations that preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies." Further, on the general question at issue, Paine remarked: "That men should take up arms, and spend their lives and fortunes, _not_ to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have _not_ rights, is an entirely new species of discovery and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke." In reply to the noble passage: "The age of chivalry is gone ...," Paine shrewdly says: "In the rhapsody of his imagination he has discovered a world of windmills, and his sorrows are that there are no Quixotes to attack them." After thus exposing the weak points of the royalist case, Paine proceeded to defend the mob, firstly, because the aristocratic plots against the French Revolution were really formidable (a very disputable thesis), and secondly, because the mob in all old countries is the outcome of their unfair and brutal system of government. "It is by distortedly exalting some men," he says, "that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is out of nature. A vast mass of mankind are degradedly thrown into the background of the human picture, to bring forward with greater glare the puppet show of State and aristocracy." Here was obviously the Junius of democracy, for whom the only effective answer was the gag and gyve. Indeed, Burke in his "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" suggested that the proper refutation was by means of "criminal justice."[29] Pitt's opinions at this time on French and English democracy tend towards a moderate and reforming royalism--witness his comment on Burke's "Reflections," that the writer would have done well to extol the English constitution rather than to attack the French.[30] In this remark we may detect his preference for construction over destruction, for the allaying, rather than the exciting, of passion. Nevertheless the one-sidedness of the English constitution made for unrest. So soon as one bold voice clearly contrasted those defects with the inspiring precepts of the French Rights of Man, there was an end to political apathy. A proof of this was furnished by the number of replies called forth by Burke's "Reflections." They numbered thirty-eight.[31] Apart from that of Paine, the "Vindiciae Gallicae" of Sir James Mackintosh made the most impression, especially the last chapter, wherein he declared that the conspiracy of the monarchs to crush the liberties of France would recoil on their own heads.