1 The National Intelligencer, November 15th. The venerable
Mr. Gales, so long associated with this paper, had been in
youth a prosecuted adherent of Paine in Sheffield, England.
The paper distinguished itself by the kindly welcome it gave
Paine on his return to America. (See issues of Nov. 3 and
10, 1802.) Paine landed at Baltimore, Oct. 30th.--_Editor._,
After an absence of almost fifteen years, I am again returned to the
country in whose dangers I bore my share, and to whose greatness I
contributed my part.
When I sailed for Europe, in the spring of 1787, it was my intention to
return to America the next year, and enjoy in retirement the esteem of
my friends, and the repose I was entitled to. I had stood out the storm
of one revolution, and had no wish to embark in another. But other
scenes and other circumstances than those of contemplated ease were
allotted to me. The French revolution was beginning to germinate when I
arrived in France. The principles of it were good, they were copied
from America, and the men who conducted it were honest. But the fury of
faction soon extinguished the one, and sent the other to the scaffold.
Of those who began that revolution, I am almost the only survivor,
and that through a thousand dangers. I owe this not to the prayers of
priests, nor to the piety of hypocrites, but to the continued protection
of Providence.
But while I beheld with pleasure the dawn of liberty rising in Europe,
I saw with regret the lustre of it fading in America. In less than two
years from the time of my departure some distant symptoms painfully
suggested the idea that the principles of the revolution were expiring
on the soil that produced them. I received at that time a letter from a
female literary correspondent, and in my answer to her, I expressed my
fears on that head.(1)
I now know from the information I obtain upon the spot, that the
impressions that then distressed me, for I was proud of America, were
but too well founded. She was turning her back on her own glory, and
making hasty strides in the retrograde path of oblivion. But a spark
from the altar of _Seventy-six_, unextinguished and unextinguishable
through the long night of error, is again lighting up, in every part of
the Union, the genuine name of rational liberty.
As the French revolution advanced, it fixed the attention of the world,
and drew from the pensioned pen (2) of Edmund Burke a furious attack.
This brought me once more on the public theatre of politics, and
occasioned the pamphlet _Rights of Man_. It had the greatest run of
any work ever published in the English language. The number of copies
circulated in England, Scotland, and Ireland, besides translations
into foreign languages, was between four and five hundred thousand. The
principles of that work were the same as those in _Common Sense_, and
the effects would have been the same in England as that had produced in
America, could the vote of the nation been quietly taken, or had equal
opportunities of consulting or acting existed. The only difference
between the two works was, that the one was adapted to the local
circumstances of England, and the other to those of America. As to
myself, I acted in both cases alike; I relinquished to the people of
England, as I had done to those of America, all profits from the work.
My reward existed in the ambition to do good, and the independent
happiness of my own mind.
1 Paine here quotes a passage from his letter to Mrs. Few,
already given in the Memorial to Monroe (XXI.). The entire
letter to Mrs. Few will be printed in the Appendix to Vol.
IV. of this work.--_Editor._