The Life Of Thomas Paine Volume I Part 19

* "The Development of Const.i.tutional Liberty in the English Colonies of America," by Eben Greenough Scott, 1890.

Every pamphlet of Paine was of the nature of an invention, by which principles of liberty and equality were framed in constructions adapted to emergencies of a republic. But when the emergencies were past, the old contrivances regained their familiar attractions, and these were enhanced by independence. Privilege, so odious in Lords, was not so bad when inherited by democracy; individual sovereignty, unsuited to King George, might be a fine thing for President George; and if England had a House of Peers, why should we not make one out of a peerage of States?

"Our experience in republicanism," wrote Paine, "is yet so slender, that it is much to be doubted whether all our public laws and acts are consistent with, or can be justified on, the principles of a republican government." But the more he talked in this way, or reminded the nation of the "Declaration of Independence" and the "Bill of Rights," the more did he close the doors of the Const.i.tutional Convention against himself.

In those days there used to meet in Franklin's library a "Society for Political Inquiries." It had forty-two members, among them Washington, James Wilson, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, Clymer, Rush, Bingham, Bradford, Hare, Rawle, and Paine. A memorandum of Rawle says: "Paine never opened his mouth, but he furnished one of the few essays which the members of the Society were expected to produce. It was a well written dissertation on the inexpediency of incorporating towns."* That in such company, and at such a time, Paine should be silent, or discuss corporations, suggests political solitude. Franklin, indeed, agreed with him, but was too old to struggle against the reaction in favor of the bicameral and other English inst.i.tutions.

* "Memoir of Penn. Hist. Soc, 1840." The gist of Paine's paper (read Apr. 20,1787) is no doubt contained in "The Rights of Man," Part II., Ch. 5.

M. Chanut ("Nouv. Biog. Generale") says that Paine's bridge was not erected on the Schuylkill because of "the imperfect state of iron manufacture in America." Something of the same kind might be said of the state of political architecture. And so it was, that while the Convention was a.s.sembling in Independence Hall, he who first raised the standard of Independence, and before the Declaration proposed a Charter of the "United Colonies of America," was far out at sea on his way to rejoin his comrades in the old world, whose hearts and burdens he had represented in the new.

The printed Rules of the Society (founded February 9, 1787) are in the Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. The preamble, plainly Paine's, says: "Important as these inquiries are to all, to the inhabitants of these republics they are objects of peculiar magnitude and necessity.

Accustomed to look up to those nations, from whom we have derived our origin, for our laws, our opinions, and our manners, we have retained with undistinguishing reverence their errors, with their improvements; have blended with our public inst.i.tutions the policy of dissimilar countries; and have grafted on our infant commonwealth the manners of ancient and corrupted monarchies. In having effected a separate government, we have as yet effected but a partial independence. The revolution can only be said to be compleat, when we shall have freed ourselves, no less from the influence of foreign prejudices than from the fetters of foreign power."

CHAPTER XVI. RETURNING TO THE OLD HOME

Even now one can hardly repress regret that Paine did not remain in his beloved Bordentown. There he was the honored man; his striking figure, decorated with the n.o.blest a.s.sociations, was regarded with pride; when he rode the lanes on his horse b.u.t.ton, the folk had a pleasant word with him; the best homes prized his intimacy, and the young ladies would sometimes greet the old gentleman with a kiss. From all this he was drawn by the tender letter of a father he was never to see again. He sailed in April for a year's absence; he remained away fifteen,--if such years may be reckoned by calendar.

The French packet from New York had a swift voyage, and early in the summer Paine was receiving honors in Paris. Franklin had given him letters of introduction, but he hardly needed them.* He was already a hero of the progressives, who had relished his artistic dissection of the Abbe Raynal's disparagement of the American Revolution. Among those who greeted him was Auberteuil, whose history of the American Revolution Paine had corrected, an early copy having been sent him (1783) by Franklin for that purpose.

* "This letter goes by Mr. Paine, one of our princ.i.p.al writers at the Revolution, being the author of 'Common Sense,' a pamphlet that had prodigious effects."--Franklin to M. de Veillard.

But Paine's main object in France was to secure a verdict from the Academy of Sciences, the supreme authority, on his bridge, a model of which he carried with him. The Academy received him with the honors due to an M.A. of the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Philosophical Society, and a friend of Franklin. It appointed M. Leroy, M. Bossou, and M. Borda a committee to report on his bridge, On August 18th he writes to Jefferson, then Minister in Paris:

"I am much obliged to you for the book you are so kind to send me. The second part of your letter, concerning taking my picture, I must feel as an honor done to me, not as a favour asked of me--but in this, as in other matters, I am at the disposal of your friendship.

"The committee have among themselves finally agreed on their report; I saw this morning it will be read in the Academy on Wednesday. The report goes pretty fully to support the principles of the construction, with their reasons for that opinion."

On August 15th, a cheery letter had gone to George Clymer in Philadelphia, in which he says:

"This comes by Mr. Derby, of Ma.s.sachusetts, who leaves Paris to-day to take shipping at L' [Orient] for Boston. The enclosed for Dr. Franklin is from his friend Mr. Le Roy, of the Academy of Sciences, respecting the bridge, and the causes that have delayed the completing report. An arch of 4 or 5 hundred feet is such an unprecedented thing, and will so much attract notice in the northern part of Europe, that the Academy is cautious in what manner to express their final opinion. It is, I find, their custom to give reasons for their opinion, and this embarra.s.ses them more than the opinion itself. That the model is strong, and that a bridge constructed on the same principles will also be strong, they appear to be well agreed in, but to what particular causes to a.s.sign the strength they are not agreed in. The Committee was directed by the Academy to examine all the models and plans for iron bridges that had been proposed in France, and they unanimously gave the preference to our own, as being the simplest, strongest, and lightest. They have likewise agreed on some material points."*

Dr. Robinet says that on this visit (1787) Paine, who had long known the "soul of the people," came into relation with eminent men of all groups, philosophical and political,--Condorcet, Achille Duchatelet, Cardinal De Brienne, and, he believes, also Danton, who, like the English republican, was a freemason.** This intercourse, adds the same author, enabled him to print in England his remarkable prophecy concerning the change going on in the French mind. Dr. Robinet quotes from a pamphlet presently noticed, partly written in Paris during this summer. Although it was Paine's grievous destiny soon to be once more a revolutionary figure, it is certain that he had returned to Europe as an apostle of peace and good-will. While the engineers were considering his daring scheme of an iron arch of five hundred feet, he was devising with the Cardinal Minister, De Brienne, a bridge of friendship across the Channel.

* For this letter I am indebted to Mr. Curtis Guild, of Boston. The letter goes on to describe, with drawings, the famous bridge at Schaffhausen, built by Grubenmann, an uneducated carpenter, the model being shown Paine by the King's architect, Perronet. The Academy's committee presently made its report, which was even more favorable than Paine had antic.i.p.ated.

** "Danton Emigre," p. 7. Paine wrote a brief archaeological treatise on freemasonry, but I have not met with the statement that he was a freemason except in Dr. Robinet's volume,--certainly high authority.

He drew up a paper in this sense, on which the Minister wrote and signed his approval. The bridge-model approved by the Academy he sent to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society; the proposal for friendship between France and England, approved by the Cardinal Minister, he carried by his own hand to Edmund Burke.

On his arrival in London Paine gave to the printer a ma.n.u.script on which he had been engaged, and straightway went to Thetford.* His father had died the year before.2 His mother, now in her ninety-first year, he found in the comfort his remittances had supplied. The house, with its large garden, stands in Guildhall (then Heathen-man) Street. I was politely shown through it by its present occupant, Mr. Brett Mr. Stephen Old-man, Sr., who went to school in the house, told me that it was identified by "old Jack Whistler," a barber, as the place where he went to shave Paine, in 1787. At this time Paine settled on his mother an allowance of nine shillings per week, which in the Thetford of that period was ample for her comfort. During this autumn with his mother he rarely left her side. As she lived to be ninety-four it may be that he sat beside her in the Quaker meeting-house, to which she had become attached in her latter years.

* The exact time of his arrival in England is doubtful.

Oldys says: "He arrived at the White Bear, Picadilly, on the 3d of September, 1787, just thirteen years after his departure for Philadelphia." Writing in 1803 Paine also says it was in September. But his "Rubicon" pamphlet is dated "York Street, St. James's Square, 20th August, 1787."

Possibly the ma.n.u.script was dated in Paris and forwarded to the London printer with the address at which he wished to find proof on his arrival.

** St. Cuthbert's Register: "Burials, 1786. Joseph Payne (a Quaker) aged 78 years. November 14th."

Eloquent and pathetic must have been the silence around the gray man when, after so many tempests, he sat once more in the little meeting-house where his childhood was nurtured. From this, his spiritual cradle, he had borne away a beautiful theory, in ignorance of the contrasted actuality. Theoretically the Society of Friends is a theocracy; the Spirit alone rules and directs, effacing all distinctions of rank or s.e.x. As a matter of fact, one old Quaker, or the clerk of a meeting, often overrules the "inner lights" of hundreds. Of the practical working of Quaker government Paine had no experience; he had nothing to check his ideal formed in boyhood. His whole political system is explicable only by his theocratic Quakerism. His first essay, the plea for negro emanc.i.p.ation, was brought from Thetford meeting-house.

His "Common Sense," a new-world scripture, is a "testimony" against the proud who raised their paltry dignities above the divine presence in the lowliest "But where, say some, is the King of America? I 'll tell you, friend, he reigns above." Paine's love of his adopted country was not mere patriotism; he beheld in it the land of promise for all mankind, seen from afar while on his Thetford Pisgah. Therefore he made so much of the various races in America.

"The mere independence of America, were it to have been followed by a system of government modelled after the corrupt system of the English government, would not have interested me with the unabated ardour that it did. It was to bring forward and establish the representative system of government that was the leading principle with me."

So he spake to Congress, and to its president he said that he would have done the same for any country as for America. The religious basis of his political system has a droll ill.u.s.tration in an anecdote of his early life told by himself. While bowling with friends at Lewes, Mr. Verril remarked that Frederick of Prussia "was the best fellow in the world for a king; he had so much of the devil in him." It struck Paine that "if it were necessary for a king to have so much of the devil in him, kings might very beneficially be dispensed with." From this time he seems to have developed a theory of human rights based on theocracy; and so genuinely that in America, while the Bible was still to him the word of G.o.d, he solemnly proposed, in the beginning of the Revolution, that a crown should be publicly laid on that book, to signify to the world that "in America the Law is King."

While in America the States were discussing the Const.i.tution proposed by the Convention, Paine sat in the silent meeting at Thetford dreaming of the Parliament of Man, and federation of the world. In America the dawn of the new nation was a splendor, but it paled the ideals that had shone through the night of struggle. The principles of the Declaration, which would have freed every slave,--representation proportionate to population, so essential to equality, the sovereignty of justice instead of majorities or of States,--had become "glittering generalities." The first to affirm the principles of the Declaration, Paine awaited the unsummoned Convention that would not compromise any of them away. For politicians these lofty ideas might be extinguished by the rising of a national sun; but in Paine there remained the deep Quaker well where the stars shone on through the garish day.*

Seated in the Quaker meeting-house beside his mother, and beside his father's fresh grave, Paine revises the past while revising the proofs of his pamphlet. The glamor of war, even of the American Revolution, fades; the shudder with which he saw in childhood soldiers reeking from the ma.s.sacres of Culloden and Inverness returns; he begins his new career in the old world with a "testimony" against war.**

* "In wells where truth in secret lay He saw the midnight stars by day."--W. D. Howells.

** "Prospects on the Rubicon; or, An Investigation into the Causes and Consequences of the Politics to be Agitated at the Meeting of Parliament." London, 1787. Pp. 68.

"When we consider, for the feelings of Nature cannot be dismissed, the calamities of war and the miseries it inflicts upon the human species, the thousands and tens of thousands of every age and s.e.x who are rendered wretched by the event, surely there is something in the heart of man that calls upon him to think! Surely there is some tender chord, tuned by the hand of the Creator, that still struggles to emit in the hearing of the soul a note of sorrowing sympathy. Let it then be heard, and let man learn to feel that the true greatness of a nation is founded on principles of humanity.... War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circ.u.mstances, such a combination of foreign matters, that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.... I defend the cause of the poor, of the manufacturer, of the tradesman, of the farmer, and of all those on whom the real burthen of taxes fall--but above all, I defend the cause of humanity."

So little did Paine contemplate or desire revolution in England or France. His exhortation to young Pitt is to avoid war with Holland, to be friendly with France, to shun alliances involving aid in war, and to build up the wealth and liberties of England by uniting the people with the throne. He has discovered that this healthy change is going on in France. The French people are allying "the Majesty of the Sovereign with the Majesty of the Nation." "Of all alliances this is infinitely the strongest and the safest to be trusted to, because the interest so formed and operating against external enemies can never be divided."

Freedom doubles the value of the subject to the government When the desire of freedom becomes universal among the people, then, "and not before, is the important moment for the most effectual consolidation of national strength and greatness." The government must not be frightened by disturbances incidental to beneficent changes. "The creation we enjoy arose out of a chaos."*

* The pamphlet was reprinted in London in 1793 under the t.i.tle: "Prospects on the War, and Paper Currency. The second edition, corrected." Advertis.e.m.e.nt (June 20th): "This pamphlet was written by Mr. Paine in the year 1787, on one of Mr. Pitt's armaments, namely, that against Holland. His object was to prevent the people of England from being seduced into a war, by stating clearly to them the consequences which would inevitably befall the credit of this country should such a calamity take place. The minister has at length, however, succeeded in his great project, after three expensive armaments within the s.p.a.ce of seven years; and the event has proved how well founded were the predictions of Mr. Paine. The person who has authority to bring forward this pamphlet in its present shape, thinks his doing so a duty which he owes both to Mr. P------ and the people of England, in order that the latter may judge what credit is due to (what a great judge calls) the wild theories of Mr. Paine."

Paine had seen a good deal of Jefferson in Paris, and no doubt their conversation often related to struggles in the Const.i.tutional Convention at Philadelphia. Jefferson wished the Const.i.tution to include a Declaration of Rights, and wrote Paine some comments on the argument of James Wilson (afterward of the Supreme Court), maintaining that such a Declaration was unnecessary in a government without any powers not definitely granted, and that such a Declaration might be construed to imply some degree of power over the matters it defined. Wilson's speeches, powerfully a.n.a.lyzing the principles of liberty and federation, were delivered on October 6th and November 24th, and it will appear by the subjoined paper that they were more in accord with Paine's than with Jefferson's principles. The ma.n.u.script, which is among Jefferson's papers, bears no date, but was no doubt written at Thetford early in the year 1788.

{1788}

"After I got home, being alone and wanting amus.e.m.e.nt, I sat down to explain to myself (for there is such a thing) my ideas of national and civil rights, and the distinction between them. I send them to you to see how nearly we agree.

"Suppose twenty persons, strangers to each other, to meet in a country not before inhabited. Each would be a Sovereign in his own natural right. His will would be his law, but his power, in many cases, inadequate to his right; and the consequence would be that each might be exposed, not only to each other, but to the other nineteen. It would then occur to them that their condition would be much improved, if a way could be devised to exchange that quant.i.ty of danger into so much protection; so that each individual should possess the strength of the whole number. As all their rights in the first case are natural rights, and the exercise of those rights supported only by their own natural individual power, they would begin by distinguishing between those rights they could individually exercise, fully and perfectly, and those they could not. Of the first kind are the rights of thinking, speaking, forming and giving opinions, and perhaps are those which can be fully exercised by the individual without the aid of exterior a.s.sistance; or in other words, rights of personal competency. Of the second kind are those of personal protection, of acquiring and possessing property, in the exercise of which the individual natural power is less than the natural right.

"Having drawn this line they agree to retain individually the first cla.s.s of Rights, or those of personal competency; and to detach from their personal possession the second cla.s.s, or those of defective power, and to accept in lieu thereof a right to the whole power produced by a condensation of all the parts. These I conceive to be civil rights, or rights of compact, and are distinguishable from natural rights because in the one we act wholly in our own person, in the other we agree not to do so, but act under the guarantee of society.

"It therefore follows that the more of those imperfect natural rights or rights of imperfect power we give up, and thus exchange, the more security we possess; and as the word liberty is often mistakenly put for security, Mr. Wilson has confused his argument by confounding the terms.

But it does not follow that the more natural rights of _every kind_ we a.s.sign the more security we possess, because if we resign those of the first cla.s.s we may suffer much by the exchange; for where the right and the power are equal with each other in the individual, naturally, they ought to rest there.

"Mr. Wilson must have some allusion to this distinction, or his position would be subject to the inference you draw from it.

"I consider the individual sovereignty of the States retained under the act of confederation to be of the second cla.s.s of right. It becomes dangerous because it is defective in the power necessary to support it.

It answers the pride and purpose of a few men in each State, but the State collectively is injured by it."

The paper just quoted may be of importance to those students of Yale College who shall compete for the Ten Eyck prize of 1892, on the interesting subject, "Thomas Paine: Deism and Democracy in the Days of the American Revolution." There was no nearer approach to democracy, in Paine's theory, than that of this paper sent to Jefferson. The Const.i.tutional Convention represented to him the contracting People, all the individuals being parties to a Compact whereby every majority pledges itself to protect the minority in matters not essential to the security of all. In representative government thus limited by compact he recognized the guaranty of individual freedom and influence by which the ma.s.s could be steadily enlightened. Royall Tyler considered some of his views on these subjects "whimsical paradoxes"; but they are not so "unaccountable" as he supposed. Tyler's portraiture of Paine in London, though somewhat adapted to prejudices anent "The Age of Reason," is graphic, and Paine's anti-democratic paradox wittily described.

"I met this interesting personage at the lodgings of the son of a late patriotic American governour [Trumbull]... He was dressed in a snuff-coloured coat, olive velvet vest, drab breeches, coa.r.s.e hose. His shoe buckles of the size of a half dollar. A bob tailed wig covered that head which worked such mickle woe to courts and kings. If I should attempt to describe it, it would be in the same stile and principle with which the veteran soldier bepraiseth an old standard: the more tattered, the more glorious. It is probable that this was the same identical wig under the shadow of whose curls he wrote Common Sense, in America, many years before. He was a spare man, rather under size; subject to the extreme of low, and highly exhilirating spirits; often sat reserved in company; seldom mingled in common chit chat: But when a man of sense and elocution was present, and the company numerous, he delighted in advancing the most unaccountable, and often the most whimsical paradoxes; which he defended in his own plausible manner. If encouraged by success, or the applause of the company, his countenance was animated with an expression of feature which, on ordinary occasions one would look for in vain, in a man so much celebrated for acuteness of thought; but if interrupted by extraneous observation, by the inattention of his auditory, or in an irritable moment, even by the accidental fall of the poker, he would retire into himself, and no persuasion could induce him to proceed upon the most favourite topic.... I heard Thomas Paine once a.s.sert in the presence of Mr. Wolcott, better known, in this country, by the facetious name of Peter Pindar, that the minority, in all deliberative bodies, ought, in all cases, to govern the majority. Peter smiled. You must grant me, said Uncommon Sense, that the proportion of men of sense, to the ignorant among mankind, is at least as twenty, thirty, or even forty-nine, to an hundred. The majority of mankind are consequently most p.r.o.ne to errour; and if we atchieve the right, the minority ought in all cases to govern. Peter continued to smile archly."*

* "The Algerine Captive," 1797. (Paine's shoe-buckles in the National Museum, Washington, are of the fashionable kind.)