Blue-grass blade (Lexington, Ky.), January 26, 1908
PAINE HONORED BY OHIO NEWSBOYS
Commendable Course Taken by Helen M. Lucas to Cause Simple Justice to be Done to the Memory of that Great Patriot
In another column in this issue of the Blade will be found a communication from Helen M. Lucas of Marietta, Ohio, telling of the preparations made to commemorate the name of Thomas Paine upon the anniversary of his birthday this year. Mrs. Lucas is so well known among the Freethinkers of America, especially in Ohio, that it is unnecessary to make any particular comment upon her work. Suffice to say that with her usual courageous devotion to the cause of justice and truth, she has arranged for a “Newsboys” gathering at her home, when with a spread and a feast, the moral lessons, the lessons of virtue and pure patriotism that were taught and promulgated by Paine, will be impressed upon those youthful minds, that in the years to come, when they shall have reached manhood’s estate, they will have cause to remember and know the truth, the real truth, about the man who unfolded Old Glory to the morning breeze.
The folder to which Mrs. Lucas has reference, is a neatly printed card, four pages, folded for convenience in handling, mailing, etc., and while the folder is made up of extracts from Marilla M. Ricker’s “Square Deal,” reproduced some time ago by the Blade from The Philistine, it will do no harm to give it again, especially upon such an occasion as this, and it will better show what Mrs. Lucas is doing for the cause of truth and happiness in her commendable way. The folder is as follows:
MARIETTA NEWSBOYS
January 29th, 1908
GEMS FROM “A SQUARE DEAL”
By Marilla M. Ricker
To me Thomas Paine has been not only a man of destiny, but a man who made destiny. Nothing could induce him to cut one inch from the stature of his manhood. A conviction was as sacred to him as an idol to its worshippers.
He was as democratic as nature, as impartial as rain or sunshine. He wanted a government where those who held office should be no higher than those they served. He wanted every man who was elected to position, high or low, to represent the people, to stand for the people, and to work for the people.
I know of no one who has placed duty to mankind higher than did he. In whatever he did he obliterated self. He sought for no advantage over others, and if a man was endowed by nature with superior ability, he saw in such power only a greater opportunity to bless his race. He never entered the wild race for money; never prostituted the power of his mighty brain; never sold his influence.
Thomas Paine was never a traitor to himself. What did this man hate? Falsehood, wrong, tyranny. What did he love? Justice, truth, right and liberty. The dominating inspiration of Paine’s mind was love of freedom. He cried out wherever he went “Liberty, Liberty, and yet again Liberty!”
In the land where he was born there was no such thing taught as the equality of mankind. All the springs of freedom in Great Britain were dry. The birds could sing of liberty, but man was dumb.
Thomas Paine dreamed the most glorious dream of human freedom that ever enchanted the mind of man; fairer and sweeter than lay under the broken marbles of Greece; brighter and better than was buried with the dead eagles of Rome. We know not what gave birth to this dream in his soul. The atmosphere of his early life has faded from the sky. The key to his youth is lost. He had seen and heard little of the world. He had lived mostly in the hidden realm of thought. How the hope of freedom for all mankind gained entrance to his mind no one can tell; what rivers fed it, what suns nourished it, what stars looked down upon it by night can never be learned. He was a genius of solitude. His mind nursed sustenance from the heart of the universe. The wrongs he read of made him long for justice; the falsehoods he heard turned his heart to truth, the oppression above him kindled liberty within him. His great dream for mankind came from his love of man.
Paine lived in a land where justice was in the grave, where right was led to the scaffold, where liberty had never been born; in a land where honesty went barefoot; and where vice held all the trumps. And yet in this dismal environment, Paine saw a vision of human equality, a country where a king was not wanted, and a pope was not needed; a country where the people were their own rulers, and where manhood was the brightest crown. He saw in America the land of his dream. In October, seventeen hundred and seventy-four, he sailed for these shores and “By his vision splendid was on his way attended.” Thomas Paine did not come to America to look upon some wonderful picture painted by a famous artist, or to see some marvelous figure wrought from a marble block by a sculptor’s genius, or to gaze upon some spot sacred to religious faith, but he came to see if in the American Colonies an altar of freedom could be raised, and if there were a possibility of establishing a government which would protect human rights. He came here to find what he could not find in England, what he could not find in Europe, what he could not find in the Old World—a land which would give to man the liberty to be a man and which would respect manhood more than titles and coronets. He came here to find a new world, to found a new government, to help make a country where all men should be equal, to help found a nation which would be the monarch of the earth, as the eagle is of the air.
When Paine reached our shores he found the people in rebellion against the King. This yeast of discontent was working and the land was preparing to resist oppression. The clay was ready for the hand of the potter. One of the first efforts of Paine was an essay condemning negro slavery and advocating the emancipation of the slave. Before Lexington Green was stained by patriot blood the first American Anti-Slavery Society was formed in Philadelphia. Had Paine’s counsel been heeded, there would have been no slaves in the United States, and civil war would not have dug a grave in our soil or broken a heart in our homes.
The independence of the American Colonies was not sought by the men who emptied British tea into the waters of Boston harbor, nor was that the purpose of the minute men who faced the red-coats in the Concord fight, nor did the hope of independence win the victory of Bunker Hill. Only a few men in seventeen hundred and seventy-five believed that separation from England was probable and no one publicly advocated it. It was at this time that Thomas Paine set to work to show the American people that the hour had come for them to rid the land of monarchy. The bold argument of Paine for national independence could not be answered, and within a few months it had converted a continent. On the fourth of July following its publication the Colonies proclaimed their “Declaration of Independence.” “Common Sense” flashed across the political sky of the New World with a brilliancy that won admiration and wonder from all. No true estimate can be made of the mighty influence which the ideas in this pamphlet have had, and are destined to have upon the human race. Paine stands between two epochs; the epoch of Kings and the epoch of Man. To the King he said, “The night is coming.” To Man he said, “The day is dawning; tyranny must leave the earth, freedom and equality will possess it.”
The tree of liberty had blossomed a thousand times, and the perfume of its flowers filled the air with the glad promise of its ripened fruit, but not until the stars and stripes waved over America’s soil was political freedom a fact. Thomas Paine did more than any other man to put the stars on our flag and to give that flag to the breeze. And what he did was done without expectation of pay. When he had finished “Common Sense,” he did not ask the Colonies to buy it. His strongest convictions were in that work, his dearest hope had been written into its words, and these convictions and those hopes were too precious to be bartered for money.