 Although still a member of the National Convention, Paine had rarely attended and did not do so after his release. His one intervention was his Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1795), a critique of the Constitution of 1795, and a summary of his own thinking about politics, in which he urged the Convention to institute universal manhood suffrage. In 1796, responding to the attempted coup by Babeuf’s ‘conspiracy of equals’, Paine’s Agrarian Justice developed further ideas fist canvassed in the second part of Rights of Man and set out a principled case for a tax on inheritance so as to provide a capital grant for all reaching the age of majority, together with an annual pension for all at fifty, arguing that the earth is common property to the human race and that everyone is owed compensation for the private appropriation of it.