THOMAS PAINE
"Where Liberty is, there is my country." The sentiment has a Latin ring;
one can imagine an early Stoic as its author. It was spoken by Benjamin
Franklin, and no saying better expresses the spirit of eighteenth
century humanity. "Where is not Liberty, there is mine." The answer is
Thomas Paine's. It is the watchword of the knight errant, the marching
music that sent Lafayette to America, and Byron to Greece, the motto of
every man who prizes striving above enjoyment, honours comradeship above
patriotism, and follows an idea that no frontier can arrest. Paine was
indeed of no century, and no formula of classification can confine him.
His writing is of the age of enlightenment; his actions belong to
romance. His clear, manly style, his sturdy commonsense, the rapier play
of his epigrams, the formal, logical architecture of his thoughts, his
complacent limitations, his horror of mystery and Gothic half-lights,
his harsh contempt for all the sacred muddle of priestly traditions and
aristocratic politics, his assurance, his intellectual courage, his
humanity--all that, in its best and its worst, belongs to the century of
Voltaire and the Revolution. In his spirit of adventure, in his passion
for movement and combat, there Paine is romantic. Paine thought in prose
and acted epics. He drew horizons on paper and pursued the infinite in
deeds.
Tom Paine was born, the son of a Quaker stay-maker, in 1737, at
Thetford, in the county of Norfolk. His parents were poor, but he owed
much, he tells us, to a good moral education and picked up "a tolerable
stock of useful learning," though he knew no language but his own. A
"Friend" he was to the end in his independence, his rationalism, and his
humanity, though he laughed when he thought of what a sad-coloured world
the Quakers would have made of the creation, if they had been consulted.
The boy craved adventure, and was prevented at seventeen from enlisting
in the crew of the privateer _Terrible_, Captain Death, only to sail
somewhat later in the _King of Prussia_, Captain Mendez. One cruise
under a licensed pirate was enough for him, and he soon settled in
London, making stays for a living and spending his leisure in the study
of astronomy. He qualified as an exciseman, acquiring in this employment
a grasp of finance and an interest in budgets of which he afterwards
made good use in his writings. Cashiered for negligence, he turned
schoolmaster, and even aspired to ordination in the Church of England.
Reinstated as a "gauger," he was eventually dismissed for writing a
pamphlet in defence of the excisemen's agitation for higher wages. He
was twice married, but his first wife died within a year of marriage,
and the second, with whom he had started a "tobacco-mill," agreed on its
failure, apparently for no definite fault on either side, to a mutual
separation. At thirty-seven, penniless, lonely, and stamped with
failure, yet conscious of powers which had found no scope in the Old
World, he emigrated in 1774 to America with a letter from Benjamin
Franklin as his passport to fortune.
Opportunity came promptly, and Paine was presently settled in
Philadelphia as the editor of the _Pennsylvania Magazine_. From the
pages of this periodical, his admirable biographer, Mr. Moncure D.
Conway, has unearthed a series of articles which show that Paine had
somehow brought with him from England a mental equipment which ranked
him already among the moral pioneers of his generation. He advocates
international arbitration; he attacks duelling; he suggests more
rational ideas of marriage and divorce; he pleads for mercy to animals;
he demands justice for women. Above all, he assails negro slavery, and
with such mastery and fervour, that five weeks after the appearance of
his article, the first American Anti-Slavery Society was founded at
Philadelphia. The abolition of slavery was a cause for which he never
ceased to struggle, and when in later life he became the target of
religious persecutors, it was in their dual capacity of Christians and
slave-owners that men stoned him. The American colonies were now at the
parting of the ways in the struggle with the Mother Country. The revolt
had begun with a limited object, and few if any of its leaders realised
whither they were tending. Paine it was, who after the slaughter at
Lexington, abandoned all thoughts of reconciliation and was the first to
preach independence and republicanism.
His pamphlet, _Common-Sense_ (1776), achieved a circulation which was an
event in the history of printing, and fixed in men's minds as firm
resolves what were, before he wrote, no more than fluid ideas. It spoke
to rebels and made a nation. Poor though Paine was, he poured the whole
of the immense profits which he received from the sale of his little
book into the colonial war-chest, shouldered a musket, joined
Washington's army as a private, and was soon promoted to be aide-de-camp
to General Greene. Paine's most valuable weapon, however, was still his
pen. Writing at night, after endless marches, by the light of camp fires
at a moment of general depression, when even Washington thought that the
game was "pretty well up," Paine began to write the series of pamphlets
afterwards collected under the title of _The American Crisis_. They did
for the American volunteers what Rouget de Lisle's immortal song did for
the French levies in the revolutionary wars, what Koerner's martial
ballads did for the German patriots in the Napoleonic wars. These superb
pages of exhortation were read in every camp to the disheartened men;
their courage commanded victory. Burke himself wrote nothing finer than
the opening sentences of the first "crisis," a trumpet call indeed, but
phrased by an artist who knew the science of compelling music from
brass:--
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the
sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his
country; but he that stands it now, deserves the thanks of man and
woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this
consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious the
triumph. What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly; it is dearness
only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper
price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an
article as freedom should not be highly rated."
"Common-sense" Paine was now the chief of the moral forces behind the
fighting Republic, and his power of thinking boldly and stating clearly
drove it forward to its destiny under the leadership of men whom Nature
had gifted with less trenchant minds. He was in succession Foreign
Secretary to Congress and clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, and we
find him converting despair into triumph by the magic of self-sacrifice.
He it was who in 1780 saved the finances of the war in a moment of
despair, by starting the patriotic subscription with the gift of his own
salary, and in 1781 proved his diplomatic gift in a journey to Paris by
obtaining money-aid from the French Court.
Paine might have settled down to enjoy his fame, after the war, on the
little property which the State of New York gave him. He loathed
inaction and escaped middle age. In 1787 he returned to England, partly
to carry his pen where the work of liberation called for it, partly to
forward his mechanical inventions. Paine, self-educated though he was,
was a capable mathematician, and he followed the progress of the applied
sciences with passion. His inventions include a long list of things
partly useful, partly whimsical, a planing machine, a crane, a smokeless
candle and a gunpowder motor. But his fame as an inventor rests on his
construction of the first iron bridge, made after his models and plans
at Wearmouth. He was received as a leader and teacher in the ardent
circle of reformers grouped round the Revolution Society and the
Corresponding Society. Others were the dreamers and theorists of
liberty. He had been at the making of a Republic, and his American
experience gave the stimulus to English Radicalism which events in
France were presently to repeat. His fame was already European, and at
the fall of the Bastille, it was to Paine that Lafayette confided its
key, when a free France sent that symbol of defeated despotism as a
present to a free America. He seemed the natural link between three
revolutions, the one which had succeeded in the New World, the other
which was transforming France, and the third which was yet to come in
England.
Burke's _Reflections_ rang in his ears like a challenge, and he sat
promptly down in his inn to write his reply. _The Rights of Man_ is an
answer to Burke, but it is much more. The vivid pages of history in
which he explains and defends the French Revolution which Burke had
attacked and misunderstood, are only an illustration to his main
argument. He expounds the right of revolution, and blows away the cobweb
argument of legality by which his antagonist had sought to confine
posterity within the settlement of 1688. Every age and generation must
be free to act for itself. Man has no property in man, and the claim of
one generation to govern beyond the grave is of all tyrannies the most
insolent. Burke had contended for the right of the dead to govern the
living, but that which a whole nation chooses to do, it has a right to
do. The men of 1688, who surrendered their own rights and bound
themselves to obey King William and his heirs, might indeed choose to be
slaves; but that could not lessen the right of their children to be
free. Wrongs cannot have a legal descent. Here was a bold and triumphant
answer to a sophistical argument; but it served Paine only as a preface
to his exposition of the American constitution, which was "to Liberty
what a grammar is to language," and to his plea for the adoption in
England of the French charter of the Rights of Man.
Paine felt that he had made one Republic with a pamphlet, why not
another? He had the unlimited faith of his generation in the efficacy of
argument, and experience had proved his power. As Carlyle, in his
whimsical dramatic fashion, said of him, "He can and will free all this
world; perhaps even the other." Godwin, as became the philosopher of the
movement, set his hopes on the slower working of education: to make men
wise was to make them free. Paine was the pamphleteer of the human camp.
He saw mankind as an embattled legion and believed, true man of action
that he was, that freedom could be won like victory by the impetus of a
resolute charge. He quotes the epigram of his fellow-soldier, Lafayette,
"For a nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and
to be free it is sufficient that she wills it." Godwin would have sent
men to school to liberty; Paine called them to her unfurled standard.
It is easy to understand the success of Paine's book, which appeared in
March, 1791. It was theory and practice in one; it was the armed logic
which had driven King George's regiments from America, the edged
argument which had razed the Bastille. It was bold reasoning, and it was
also inspired writing. Holcroft and Godwin helped to bring out _The
Rights of Man_, threatened with suppression or mutilation by the
publishers, and a panting incoherent shout of joy in a note from
Holcroft to Godwin is typical of the excitement which it caused:--
"I have got it--if this do not cure my cough it is a damned perverse
mule of a cough. The pamphlet--from the row--But mum--we don't sell
it--oh, no--ears and eggs--verbatim, except the addition of a short
preface, which as you have not seen, I send you my copy.--Not a single
castration (Laud be unto God and J. S. Jordan!) can I discover--Hey, for
the new Jerusalem! The Millennium! And peace and eternal beatitude be
unto the soul of Thomas Paine."
The usual prosecutions of booksellers followed; but everywhere the new
societies of reform were circulating the book, and if it helped to send
some good men to Botany Bay, copies enough were sold to earn a sum of a
thousand pounds for the author, which, with his usual disinterestedness,
he promptly gave to the Corresponding Society. A second part appeared in
1792; and at length Pitt adopted Burke's opinion that criminal justice
was the proper argument with which to refute Tom Paine. Acting on a hint
from William Blake, who, in a vision more prosaic and veridical than was
usual with him, had seen the constables searching for his friend, Paine
escaped to France, and was convicted in his absence of high treason.
Paine landed at Calais an outlaw, to find himself already elected its
deputy to the Convention. As in America, so in France, his was the first
voice to urge the uncompromising solution. He advocated the abolition of
the monarchy; but his was a courage that always served humanity. The
work which he did as a member, with Sieyes, Danton, Condorcet, and five
others, of the little committee named to draft the constitution, was
ephemeral. His brave pleading for the King's life was a deed that
deserves to live. He loved to think of himself as a woodman swinging an
axe against rotten institutions and dying beliefs; but he weighted no
guillotines. Paine argued against the command that we should "love our
enemies," but he would not persecute them. This knight-errant would
fling his shield over the very spies who tracked his steps. In Paris he
saved the life of one of Pitt's agents who had vilified him, and
procured the liberation of a bullying English officer who had struck him
in public. The Terror made mercy a traitor, and Paine found himself
overwhelmed in the vengeance which overtook all that was noblest in the
Revolution. He spent ten months in prison, racked with fever, and an
anecdote which seems to be authentic, tells how he escaped death by the
negligence of a jailor. This overworked official hastily chalked the
sign which meant that a prisoner was marked for next batch of the
guillotine's victims, on the inside instead of the outside of Paine's
cell-door.
Condorcet, in hiding and awaiting death, wrote in these months his
_Sketch_ of human progress. Paine, meditating on the end that seemed
near, composed the first part of his _Age of Reason_. Paine was, like
Franklin, Jefferson and Washington, a deist; and he differed from them
only in the courage which prompted him to declare his belief. He came
from gaol a broken man, hardly able to stand, while the Convention,
returned to its sound senses, welcomed him back to his place of honour
on its benches. The record of his last years in America, whither he
returned in 1802, belongs rather to the history of persecution than to
the biography of a soldier of liberty. His work was done; and, though
his pen was still active and influential, slave-owners, ex-royalists,
and the fanatics of orthodoxy combined to embitter the end of the man
who had dared to deny the inspiration of the Bible. His book was burned
in England by the hangman. Bishops in their answers mingled grudging
concessions with personal abuse. An agent of Pitt's was hired to write a
scurrilous biography of the Government's most dreaded foe. In America,
the grandsons of the Puritan colonists who had flogged Quaker women as
witches, denied him a place on the stage-coach, lest an offended God
should strike it with lightning.
Paine died, a lonely old man, in 1809. His personal character stands
written in his career; and it is unnecessary to-day even to mention the
libels which his biographer has finally refuted. In a generation of
brave men he was the boldest. He could rouse the passions of men, and he
could brave them. If the Royalist Burke was eloquent for a Queen,
Republican Paine risked his life for a King. No wrong found him
indifferent; and he used his pen not only for the democracy which might
reward him, but for animals, slaves and women. Poverty never left him,
yet he made fortunes with his pen, and gave them to the cause he served.
A naive vanity was his only fault as a man. It was his fate to escape
the gallows in England and the guillotine in France. He deserved them
both; in that age there was no higher praise. A better democrat never
wore the armour of the knight-errant; a better Christian never assailed
Orthodoxy.
Neither by training nor by temperament was Paine a speculative thinker;
but his political writing has none the less an immense significance.
Godwin was a writer removed by his profoundly individual genius from the
average thought of his day. Paine agreed more nearly with the advanced
minds of his generation, and he taught the rest to agree with him. No
one since him or before him has stated the plain democratic case against
monarchy and aristocracy with half his spirit and force. Earlier writers
on these themes were timid; the moderns are bored. Paine is writing of
what he understands, and feels to be of the first importance. He cares
as much about abolishing titles as a modern reformer may feel about
nationalising land. His main theory in politics has a lucid simplicity.
Men are born as God created them, free and equal; that is the assumption
alike of natural and revealed religion. Burke, who "fears God," looks
with "awe to kings," with "duty to magistrates," and with "respect to
nobility," is but erecting a wilderness of turnpike gates between man
and his Maker. Natural rights inhere in man by reason of his existence;
civil rights are founded in natural rights and are designed to secure
and guarantee them. He gives an individual twist to the doctrine of the
social compact. Some governments arise out of the people, others over
the people. The latter are based on conquest or priestcraft, and the
former on reason. Government will be firmly based on the social compact
only when nations deliberately sit down as the Americans have done, and
the French are doing, to frame a constitution on the basis of the Rights
of Man.
As for the English Government, it clearly arose in conquest; and to
speak of a British Constitution is playing with words. Parliament,
imperfectly and capriciously elected, is supposed to hold the common
purse in trust; but the men who vote the supplies are also those who
receive them. The national purse is the common hack on which each party
mounts in turn, in the countryman's fashion of "ride and tie." They
order these things better in France. As for our system of conducting
wars, it is all done over the heads of the people. War is with us the
art of conquering at home. Taxes are not raised to carry on wars, but
wars raised to carry on taxes. The shrewd hard-hitting blows range over
the whole surface of existing institutions. Godwin from his intellectual
eminence saw in all the follies and crimes of mankind nothing worse than
the effects of "prejudice" and the consequences of fallacious reasoning.
Paine saw more self-interest in the world than prejudice. When he came
to preach the abolition of war, first through an alliance of Britain,
America and France, and then through "a confederation of nations" and a
European Congress, he saw the obstacle in the egoism of courts and
courtiers which appear to quarrel but agree to plunder. Another seven
years, he wrote in 1792, would see the end of monarchy and aristocracy
in Europe. While they continue, with war as their trade, peace has not
the security of a day.
Paine's writing gains rather than loses in theoretic interest, because
the warmth of his sympathies melts, as he proceeds, the icy logic of his
eighteenth century individualism. He starts where all his school
started, with a sharp antithesis between society and government.
"Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the
former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections; the
latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages
intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the
last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing; but government
even in its best state is a necessary evil.... Government, like dress,
is the badge of our lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on
the ruins of the bowers of paradise."
That was the familiar pessimism which led in practical politics to
_laissez faire_, and in speculation to Godwin's philosophic anarchism.
Paine himself seems for a moment to take that road. He enjoys telling us
how well the American colonies managed in the early stages of the war
without any regular form of government. He assures us that "the more
perfect civilisation is, the less occasion has it for government." But
he had served an apprenticeship to life; looking around him at the
streets filled with beggars and the jails crowded with poor men, he
suddenly forgets that the whole purpose of government is to secure the
individual against the invasion of his rights, and straightway bursts
into a new definition:--"Civil government does not consist in
executions; but in making such provision for the instruction of youth
and the support of age as to exclude as much as possible profligacy from
the one and despair from the other. Instead of this the resources of a
country are lavished upon kings ... and the poor themselves are
compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them."
It is amazing how much good Paine can extract from a necessary evil. He
has suddenly conceived of government as the instrument of the social
conscience. He means to use it as a means of securing a better
organisation of society. Paine was a man of action, and no mere logic
could hold him. He proceeds in a breathless chapter to evolve a
programme of social reform which, after the slumbers of a century, his
Radical successors have just begun to realise. Some hints came to him
from Condorcet, but most of these daringly novel ideas sprang from
Paine's own inventive brain, and all of them are presented by the
whilom exciseman, with a wealth of financial detail, as if he were a
Chancellor of the Exchequer addressing the first Republican Parliament
in the year One of Liberty. He would break up the poor laws, "these
instruments of civil torture." He has saved the major part of the cost
of defence by a naval alliance with the other Sea Powers, and the
abolition of capture at sea. Instead of poor relief he would give a
subsidy to the children of the very poor, and pensions to the aged. Four
pounds a year for every child under fourteen in every necessitous family
will ensure the health and instruction of the next generation. It will
cost two millions and a half, but it will banish ignorance. He would pay
the costs of compulsory education. Pensions are to be granted not of
grace but of right, as an aid to the infirm after fifty years, and a
subsidy to the aged after sixty. Maternity benefit is anticipated in a
donation of twenty shillings to every poor mother at the birth of a
child. Casual labour is to be cared for in some sort of
workhouse-factories in London. These reforms are to be financed partly
by economies and partly by a graduated income-tax, for which Paine
presents an elaborate schedule. When the poor are happy and the jails
empty, then at last may a nation boast of its constitution. In this
pregnant chapter Paine not only sketched the work of the future; he
exploded his own premises.
The odium that still clings to Paine's theological writings comes mainly
from those who have not read them. When Mr. Roosevelt the other day
called him "a dirty little Atheist," he exposed nothing but his own
ignorance. Paine was a deist, and he wrote _The Age of Reason_ on the
threshold of a French prison, primarily to counteract the atheism which
he thought he saw at work among the Jacobins--an odd diagnosis, for
Robespierre was at least as ardent in his deism as Paine himself. He
believed in a God, Whose bounty he saw in nature; he taught the doctrine
of conditional immortality, and his quarrel with revealed religion was
chiefly that it set up for worship a God of cruelty and injustice. From
the stories of the Jewish massacres ordained by divine command, down to
the orthodox doctrine of the scheme of redemption, he saw nothing but a
history derogatory to the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty. To
believe the Old Testament we must unbelieve our faith in the moral
justice of God. It might "hurt the stubbornness of a priest" to destroy
this fiction, but it would tranquilise the consciences of millions. From
this starting-point he proceeds in the later second and third parts to a
detailed criticism designed to show that the books of the Bible were not
written by their reputed authors, that the miracles are incredible, that
the passages claimed as prophecy have been wrested from their contexts,
and that many inconsistencies are to be found in the narrative portions
of the Gospels.
Acute and fearless though it is, this detailed argument has only an
historical interest to-day. When the violence of his persecutors had
goaded Paine into anger, he lost all sense of tact in controversy, and
lapsed occasionally into harsh vulgarities. But the anger was just, and
the zeal for mental honesty has had its reward. Paine had no sense for
the mystery and poetry of traditional religion. But what he attacked was
not presented to him as poetry. He was assailing a dogmatic orthodoxy
which had itself converted poetry into literal fact. As literal fact it
was incredible; and Paine, taking it all at the valuation of its own
professors, assailed it with a disbelief as prosaic as their belief, but
intellectually more honest. His interpretation of the Bible is
unscientific, if you will, but it is nearer to the truth of history than
the conventional belief of his day. If his polemics seem rough and
superfluous to us, it is only because his direct frontal attacks forced
on the work of Biblical criticism, and long ago compelled the
abandonment of most of the positions which he assailed. In spite of its
grave faults of taste and temper and manner, _The Age of Reason_
performed an indispensable service to honesty and morals. It was the
bravest thing he did, for it threatened his name with an immortality of
libel. His place in history is secure at last. The neglected pioneer of
one revolution, the honoured victim of another, brave to the point of
folly, and as humane as he was brave, no man in his generation preached
republican virtue in better English, nor lived it with a finer disregard
of self.