 In his Letter Addressed to the Addressers (1792), and more fully in Dissertation on First Principles of Government 1795) Paine commits to the conclusion that equal rights entail an equal right to have a say in one’s representative. He provides two main arguments. In the Letter… he argues that as every man over the age of twenty-one pays taxes in one form of another, so everyone has a right to vote—or a form of entitlement through contribution. But in the Dissertation he makes the case wholly on the basis of equal natural rights: ‘the right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. (II, 579) ‘It is possible to exclude men from the right of voting, but it impossible to exclude them from the right of rebelling against that exclusion; and when other rights are taken away, the right of rebellion is made perfect.’ (II, 580) This suggests that the role of rights grows in importance for Paine, making little appearance at all before 1788, and then coming to play an expanding role in his account, to provide the underpinning for political authority and an account of its limits, to justify the right to vote, and to make the case for a right to land and the fruits of nature which is translated into an inheritance right and a range of welfare rights. In his account of the origin of rights in Rights of Man (1791), he suggests that those (like Burke) who appeal to the authority of antiquity simply do not go back far enough: