The Life Of Thomas Paine Volume I Part 23

"My Bridge is arrived and I have engaged a place to erect it in. A little time will determine its fate, but I yet see no cause to doubt of its success, tho' it is very probable that a War, should it break out, will as in all new things prevent its progress so far as regards profits.

"In the part.i.tion in the Box, which contains the Key of the Bastille, I have put up half a dozen Razors, manufactured from Cast-steel made at the Works where the Bridge was constructed, which I request you to accept as a little token from a very grateful heart.

"I received about a week ago a letter from Mr. G. Clymer. It is dated the 4th February, but has been travelling ever since. I request you to acknowledge it for me and that I will answer it when my Bridge is erected. With much affection to all my friends, and many wishes to see them again, I am, etc."

Washington received the Key at New York, along with this last letter, and on August 10, 1790, acknowledges Paine's "agreeable letters."

"It must, I dare say, give you great pleasure to learn by repeated opportunities, that our new government answers its purposes as well as could have been reasonably expected, that we are gradually overcoming the difficulties which presented in its first organization, and that our prospects in general are growing more favorable."

Paine is said by several biographers to have gone to Paris in the May of this year. No doubt he was missed from London, but it was probably because he had gone to Thetford, where his mother died about the middle of May. Gouverneur Morris reports interviews with him August 8th and 15th, in London. The beautiful iron bridge, 110 feet long, had been erected in June at Leasing-Green (now Paddington-Green) at the joint expense of Paine and Peter Whiteside, an American merchant in London.

It was attracting a fair number of visitors, at a shilling each, also favorable press notices, and all promised well.

So Paine was free to run over to Paris, where Carlyle mentions him, this year, as among the English "missionaries."* It was a brief visit, however, for October finds him again in London, drawn probably by intimations of disaster to the interests of his Bridge. Whiteside had failed, and his a.s.signees, finding on his books 620 debited to Paine's Bridge, came upon the inventor for the money; no doubt unfairly, for it seems to have been Whiteside's investment, but Paine, the American merchants Cleggett and Murdoch becoming his bail, sc.r.a.ped together the money and paid it Probably he lost through Whiteside's bankruptcy other moneys, among them the sum he had deposited to supply his mother with her weekly nine shillings. Paine was too much accustomed to straitened means to allow this affair to trouble him much. The Bridge exhibition went on smoothly enough. Country gentlemen, deputations from riverside towns, visited it, and suggested negotiations for utilizing the invention. The snug copyright fortune which the author had sacrificed to the American cause seemed about to be recovered by the inventor.

* "Her Paine; rebellious Staymaker; unkempt; who feels that he, a single needleman, did, by his 'Common Sense' pamphlet, free America;--that he can and will free all this World; perhaps even the other."--French Revolution.

But again the Cause arose before him; he must part from all--patent interests, literary leisure, fine society--and take the hand of Liberty, undowered, but as yet unstained. He must beat his bridge-iron into a Key that shall unlock the British Bastille, whose walls he sees steadily closing around the people.

CHAPTER XX. "THE RIGHTS OF MAN"

Edmund Burke's "Reflexions on the Revolution in France" appeared about November 1, 1790 Paine was staying at the Angel inn, Islington, and there immediately began his reply. With his sentiment for anniversaries, he may have begun his work on November 4th, in honor of the English Revolution, whose centenary celebration he had witnessed three years before. In a hundred years all that had been turned into a more secure lease of monarchy. Burke's pamphlet founded on that Revolution a claim that the throne represented a perpetual popular franchise. Paine might have heard under his window the boys, with their

"Please to remember The fifth of November,"

and seen their effigy of Guy Fawkes, which in two years his own effigy was to replace. But no misgivings of that kind haunted him. For his eyes the omens hung over the dark Past; on the horizon a new day was breaking in morning stars and stripes. With the inspiration of perfect faith, born of the sacrifices that had ended so triumphantly in America, Paine wrote the book which, coming from such deep, the deeps answered.

Although Paine had been revising his religion, much of the orthodox temper survived in him; notably, he still required some kind of Satan to bring out his full energy. In America it had been George III., duly hoofed and horned, at whom his inkstand was hurled; now it is Burke, who appeared with all the seductive brilliancy of a fallen Lucifer. No man had been more idealized by Paine than Burke. Not only because of his magnificent defence of American patriots, but because of his far-reaching exposures of despotism, then creeping, snake-like, from one skin to another. At the very time that Paine was writing "Common Sense,"

Burke was pointing out that "the power of the crown, almost dead and rotten as prerogative, has grown up anew, with much more strength and far less odium, under the name of influence." He had given liberalism the sentence: "The forms of a free and the ends of an arbitrary government are things not altogether incompatible." He had been the intimate friend of Priestley and other liberals, and when Paine arrived in 1787 had taken him to his heart and home. Paine maintained his faith in Burke after Priestley and Price had remarked a change. In the winter of 1789, when the enthusiastic author was sending out jubilant missives to Washington and others, announcing the glorious transformation of France, he sent one to Burke, who might even then have been preparing the attack on France, delivered early in the Parliament of 1790. When, soon after his return from Paris, Paine mingled with the mourners for their lost leader, he was informed that Burke had for some time been a "masked pensioner," to the extent of 1,500 per annum. This rumor Paine mentioned, and it was not denied, whether because true, or because Burke was looking forward to his subsequent pension of 2,500, is doubtful.

Burke's book preceded the events in France which caused reaction in the minds of Wordsworth and other thinkers in England and America.

The French were then engaged in adapting their government to the free principles of which Burke himself had long been the eloquent advocate.

It was not without justice that Erskine charged him with having challenged a Revolution in England, by claiming that its hereditary monarchy was bound on the people by a compact of the previous century, and that, good or bad, they had no power to alter it. The power of Burke's pamphlet lay largely in his deftness with the methods of those he a.s.sailed. He had courted their company, familiarized himself with their ideas, received their confidences. This had been especially the case with Paine. So there seemed to be a _soupcon_ of treachery in his subtleties and his disclosures.

But after all he did not know Paine. He had not imagined the completeness with which the struggle in America had trained this man in every art of controversy. Grappling with Philadelphia Tories, Quakers, reactionists, with aristocrats on the one hand and anarchists on the other, Paine had been familiarized beyond all men with every deep and by-way of the subject on which Burke had ventured. Where Burke had dabbled Paine had dived. Never did man reputed wise go beyond his depth in such a bowl as when Burke appealed to a revolution of 1688 as authoritative. If one revolution could be authoritative, why not another? How did the seventeenth century secure a monopoly in revolution? If a revolution in one century could transfer the throne from one family to another, why might not the same power in another transfer it to an elective monarch, or a president, or leave it vacant?

To demolish Burke was the least part of Paine's task. Burke was, indeed, already answered by the government established in America, presided over by a man to whom the world paid homage. To Washington, Paine's work was dedicated. His real design was to write a Const.i.tution for the English nation. And to-day the student of political history may find in Burke's pamphlet the fossilized, and in Paine's (potentially) the living, Const.i.tution of Great Britain.

{1791}

For adequacy to a purpose Paine's "Common Sense" and his "Rights of Man" have never been surpa.s.sed. Washington p.r.o.nounced the former unanswerable, and Burke pa.s.sed the like verdict on the latter when he said that the refutation it deserved was "that of criminal justice."

There was not the slightest confusion of ideas and aim in this book.

In laying down first principles of human government, Paine imports no preference of his own for one form or another. The people have the right to establish any government they choose, be it democracy or monarchy,--if not hereditary. He explains with nicety of consecutive statement that a real Const.i.tution must be of the people, and for the people. That is, for the people who make it; they have no right, by any hereditary principle, to bind another people, unborn. His principle of the rights of man was founded in the religious axiom of his age that all men derived existence from a divine maker. To say men are born equal means that they are created equal. Precedent contradicts precedent, authority is against authority, in all our appeals to antiquity, until we reach the time when man came from the hands of his maker. "What was he then? Man. Man was his high and only t.i.tle, and a higher cannot be given him." "G.o.d said Let us make man in our own image." No distinction between men is pointed out. All histories, all traditions, of the creation agree as to the unity of man. Generation being the mode by which creation is carried forward, every child derives its existence from G.o.d. "The world is as new to him as it was to the first man that existed, and his natural right to it is of the same kind." On these natural rights Paine founds man's civil rights. To secure his natural rights the individual deposits some of them--e.g. the right to judge in his own cause--in the common stock of society.

Paine next proceeds to distinguish governments which have arisen out of this social compact from those which have not. Governments are cla.s.sified as founded on--(1) superst.i.tion; (2) power; (3) the common interests of society, and the common rights of man: that is, on priestcraft, on conquest, on reason. A national const.i.tution is the act of the people antecedent to government; a government cannot therefore determine or alter the organic law it temporarily represents. Pitt's bill to reform Parliament involves the absurdity of trusting an admittedly vitiated body to reform itself. The judges are to sit in their own case. "The right of reform is in the nation in its original character, and the const.i.tutional method would be by a general convention elected for the purpose." The organization of the aggregate of rights which individuals concede to society, for the security of all rights, makes the Republic. So far as the rights have been surrendered to extraneous authority, as of priest-craft, hereditary power, or conquest,--it is Despotism.

To set forth these general principles was Paine's first design. His next aim was to put on record the true and exact history of events in France up to the year 1791. This history, partly that of an eyewitness, partly obtained from the best men in France--Lafayette, Danton, Brissot, and others,--and by mingling with the ma.s.ses, const.i.tutes the most fresh and important existing contribution to our knowledge of the movement in its early stages. The majority of histories of the French Revolution, Carlyle's especially, are vitiated by reason of their inadequate attention to Paine's narrative. There had been then few serious outbreaks of the mob, but of these Burke had made the most Paine contends that the outrages can no more be charged against the French than the London riots of 1780 against the English nation; then retorts that mobs are the inevitable consequence of mis-government.

"It is by distortedly exalting some men, that others are distortedly debased. A vast ma.s.s of mankind are degradedly thrown into the background of the human picture, to bring forward, with greater glare, the puppet show of state and aristocracy. In the commencement of a revolution, those men are rather followers of the camp than of the standard of liberty, and have yet to be instructed how to use it."

Part I. of "The Rights of Man" was printed by Johnson in time for the opening of Parliament (February), but this publisher became frightened, and only a few copies bearing his name found their way into private hands,--one of these being in the British Museum. J. S. Jordan, 166 Fleet Street, consented to publish it, and Paine, entrusting it to a committee of his friends--William G.o.dwin, Thomas Holcroft, and Thomas Brand Hollis--took his departure for Paris.* From that city he sent a brief preface which appeared with Jordan's first edition, March 13, 1791. Oldys (Chalmers) a.s.serts that the work was altered by Jordan. This a.s.sertion, in its sweeping form, is disproved not only by Holcroft's note to G.o.dwin, but by a comparison of the "Johnson" and "Jordan "volumes in the British Museum."**

* "I have got it--If this do not cure my cough it is a d.a.m.ned 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 G.o.d and J. S. Jordan!) can I discover--Hey for the New Jerusalem! The Millennium! And peace and eternal beat.i.tude be unto the soul of Thomas Paine!"--C. Kegan Paul's "William G.o.dwin." In supposing that Paine may have gone to Paris before his book appeared (March 13th), I have followed Rickman, who says the work was written "partly at the Angel, at Islington, partly in Harding Street, Fetter Lane, and finished at Versailles." He adds that "many hundred thousand more copies were rapidly sold." But I have no certain trace of Paine in Paris in 1791 earlier than April 8th.

** This comparison was made for me by a careful writer, Mr.

J. M. Wheeler, of London, who finds, with a few corrections in spelling, but one case of softening: "P. 60, in Johnson Paine wrote 'Everything in the English government appears to me the reverse of what it ought to be' which in Jordan is modified to 'Many things,' etc."

The preface to which Holcroft alludes is of biographical interest both as regards Paine and Burke. As it does not appear in the American edition it is here inserted:

"From the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind; and as our acquaintance commenced on that ground, it would have been more agreeable to me to have had cause to continue in that opinion, than to change it.

"At the time Mr. Burke made his violent speech last winter in the English Parliament against the French Revolution and the National a.s.sembly, I was in Paris, and had written him, but a short time before, to inform him how prosperously matters were going on. Soon after this I saw his advertis.e.m.e.nt of the Pamphlet he intended to publish. As the attack was to be made in a language but little studied, and less understood, in France, and as everything suffers by translation, I promised some of the friends of the Revolution in that country, that whenever Mr. Burke's Pamphlet came forth, I would answer it. This appeared to me the more necessary to be done, when I saw the flagrant misrepresentations which Mr. Burke's Pamphlet contains; and that while it is an outrageous abuse of the French Revolution, and the principles of Liberty, it is an imposition on the rest of the world.

"I am the more astonished and disappointed at this conduct in Mr. Burke, as (from the circ.u.mstance I am going to mention) I had formed other expectations.

"I had seen enough of the miseries of war, to wish it might never more have existence in the world, and that some other mode might be found out to settle the differences that should occasionally arise in the neighbourhood of nations. This certainly might be done if Courts were disposed to set honestly about it, or if countries were enlightened enough not to be made the dupes of Courts. The people of America had been bred up in the same prejudices against France, which at that time characterized the people of England; but experience and an acquaintance with the French Nation have most effectually shown to the Americans the falsehood of those prejudices; and I do not believe that a more cordial and confidential intercourse exists between any two countries than between America and France.

"When I came to France in the spring of 1787, the Archbishop of Thoulouse was then Minister, and at that time highly esteemed. I became much acquainted with the private Secretary of that Minister, a man of an enlarged benevolent heart; and found that his sentiments and my own perfectly agreed with respect to the madness of war, and the wretched impolicy of two nations, like England and France, continually worrying each other, to no other end than that of a mutual increase of burdens and taxes. That I might be a.s.sured I had not misunderstood him, nor he me, I put the substance of our opinions into writing, and sent it to him; subjoining a request, that if I should see among the people of England any disposition to cultivate a better understanding between the two nations than had hitherto prevailed, how far I might be authorised to say that the same disposition prevailed on the part of France? He answered me by letter in the most unreserved manner, and that not for himself only, but for the Minister, with whose knowledge the letter was declared to be written.

"I put this letter into the hands of Mr. Burke almost three years ago, and left it with him, where it still remains, hoping, and at the same time naturally expecting, from the opinion I had conceived of him, that he would find some opportunity of making a good use of it, for the purpose of removing those errors and prejudices which two neighbouring nations, from the want of knowing each other, had entertained, to the injury of both.

"When the French Revolution broke out, it certainly afforded to Mr.

Burke an opportunity of doing some good, had he been disposed to it; instead of which, no sooner did he see the old prejudices wearing away, than he immediately began sowing the seeds of a new inveteracy, as if he were afraid that England and France would cease to be enemies. That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord, and cultivate prejudices between Nations, it becomes the more unpardonable.

"With respect to a paragraph in this work alluding to Mr. Burke's having a pension, the report has been some time in circulation, at least two months; and as a person is often the last to hear what concerns him the most to know, I have mentioned it, that Mr. Burke may have an opportunity of contradicting the rumour, if he thinks proper."

"The Rights of Man" produced a great impression from the first. It powerfully reinforced the "Const.i.tutional Society," formed seven years before, which Paine had joined. The book was adopted as their new _Magna Charta_. Their enthusiasm was poured forth on March 23d in resolutions which Daniel Williams, secretary, is directed to transmit "to all our corresponding Const.i.tutional Societies in England, Scotland, and France." In Ireland the work was widely welcomed. I find a note that "at a numerous meeting of the Whigs of the Capital [Dublin] on Tuesday the 5th of April, Hugh Crothers in the chair," a committee was appointed to consider the most effectual mode of disseminating Mr. Paine's pamphlet on "The Rights of Man."

In order to be uniform with Burke's pamphlet the earlier editions of "The Rights of Man," were in the three-shilling style. The proceeds enriched the Society for Const.i.tutional Information, though Paine had been drained of funds by the failure of Whiteside. Gouverneur Morris, as appears by the subjoined extracts from his diary, is disgusted with Paine's "wretched apartments" in Paris, in which, however, the reader may see something finer than the diarist's luxury, which the author might have rivalled with the means devoted to his Cause. This was perhaps what Morris and Paine s friend Hodges agreed in deeming a sort of lunacy.

"April 8. Return home, and read the answer of Paine to Burke's book; there are good things in the answer as well as in the book. Paine calls on me. He says that he found great difficulty in prevailing on any bookseller to publish his book; that it is extremely popular in England, and, of course, the writer, which he considers as one of the many uncommon revolutions of this age. He turns the conversation on times of yore, and as he mentions me among those who were his enemies, I frankly acknowledge that I urged his dismissal from the office he held of secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs."

"April 16. This morning I visit Paine and Mr. Hodges. The former is abroad, the latter is in the wretched apartments they occupy. He speaks of Paine as being a little mad, which is not improbable."

"April 25. This morning Paine calls and tells me that the Marquis de Lafayette has accepted the position of head of the National Guards."

"May 1. Dine with Montmorin. Bouinville is here. He is just returned from England. He tells me that Paine's book works mightily in England."

Up to this point Paine had, indeed, carried England with him,--for England was at heart with Fox and the Opposition. When Burke made his first attack on the French Revolution (February 9, 1790), he was repeatedly called to order; and Fox--with tears, for their long friendship was breaking forever--overwhelmed Burke with his rebuke.

Even Pitt did not say a word for him. His pamphlet nine months later was ascribed to inspiration of the King, from whom he expected favors; and although the madmen under whom the French Revolution fell presently came to the support of his case.

Burke personally never recovered his place in the esteem of England.

That the popular instinct was true, and that Burke was playing a deeper game than appeared, was afterwards revealed in the archives of England and France.*

* "Thirty thousand copies of Burke's book were circulated in all the courts and among the European aristocracy as so many lighted brands to set Europe in flames. During this time the author, by his secret correspondence, excited Queen Marie- Antoinette, the court, the foreigners, to conspire against the Revolution. 'No compromises with rebels!' he wrote; 'appeal to sovereign neighbors; above all trust to the support of foreign armies.'"--"Histoire de France," par Henri Martin, i., p. 151.