Arkansas State press (Little Rock, Ark.), February 7, 1958

AWARD TO PSC FRESHMAN

Thomas E. Quaynor, a Philander Smith college freshman from Ghana, East Africa, was recently awarded a $50.00 United States Savings Bond as second place winner in a nationwide essay contest sponsored by the Thomas Paine Foundation.

The subject of Quaynor’s winning essay was “Did Thomas Paine Author the Declaration of Independence”?

Quaynor, 20, who is majoring in Political Science, plans to remain in the United States until he receives his doctor’s degree, and then return to Ghana to become a politician bent on making his nation a better place in which to live.

The recent essay contest was the seventh annual contest sponsored by the Thomas Paine Foundation.

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TOM PAINE IN MYSTIC

Sources: Charles H. Mallory diary and Haley family history, as told by Lucy Haley Chesebro.

Tom Paine, the man who brought liberty to the new world, who wrote The Age of Reason, The Rights of Man, and Common Sense, once lived in our town.

A little over eighty two years ago, on the 7th of June, there was a funeral in Mystic; Captain Ambrose H. Burrows was buried at the age of eighty-two. In many ways it was an odd sort of funeral. Since the death of his wife three or four years before, the Captain had lived as a recluse in a sequestered place in the woods, a mile from the main road. He had requested that he be buried in his own burial ground beside his wife and his son Ambrose, and that no religious ceremony be performed at his funeral. These requests were strictly complied with. The reason, everyone knew, was that Captain Burrows had been an admirer of Tom Paine and well acquainted with him when he lived in Mystic, and adhered to his religious beliefs, or, as many thought, the lack of them.

While the Captain had died a recluse, in earlier life he had not scorned company, but had endeared himself to all by his charming social qualities. He had entertained his friends with accounts of his service as a privateer and loved to tell how he and his son, Ambrose Jr., had rescued his own ship from pirates in the Pacific, how he had once actually captured and brought to Mystic an English “pirate”. And, of course, he did not have to be urged to talk of his friend and idol, Tom Paine.

To the Haleys of Mystic, the story is family history; for it was Nathan Haley who brought him over in 1802. The Haleys lived on Pistol Point and it was there that Capt. Nathan took him, to the home of his father, Jeremiah. But the house that Tom Paine occupied was a “little” house, it was said, nearby Jeremiah Haley’s. We can only speculate whose house it was but it seems likely it may have been an earlier home of Jeremiah’s, before he built a larger and more pretentious place.

Captain Nathan Haley had been rewarded for his privateering services with the Consulate at Nantes. He married there a French girl and is now buried there beside his wife. While he had no children of his own, his nieces and nephews in America went over to him for long visits and he, himself, came back several times to see his father and mother.

It must have been in 1802 that he brought Paine back to America after an absence of fifteen years, for history tells that Paine arrived in Baltimore October 30th of that year. Carl C. Cutler has dug up the further fact that he came over on the “Neptune”. We have no record that Nathan Haley ever commanded a vessel of that name, but it might have been under the command of some friend of his or at least a passage which had been arranged by Haley. President Jefferson had invited Paine to come over on the U.S. Brig “Maryland” but the public at once set up a howl of protest at the use of the American Navy in this way, and when Paine heard of it he unpacked his bag and refused to come. At any rate, Paine went directly to Washington where he proceeded to get himself in bad grace with almost everybody by writing ungraciously of his benefactor, General Washington; by expressing his unpopular religious views; and by involving himself in political issues, usually on the wrong side. It is easy to imagine the disillusioned hero turning to one place he knew he still had friends–and so he came to Mystic.

The man who had established liberty in the new world, who had been revered by Napoleon, Washington, Franklin and Jefferson, died in 1809 in a cheap lodging house in New York, unhonored, at odds with American respectability. He was buried on the farm which a once grateful government had given him at New Rochelle.

A President of the United States called him a “filthy little atheist” and they said that he was untidy, that he drank heavily and talked religion when he was intoxicated, but no man could question his sincerity or his devotion to his ideals. No man did more to make not only one, but two peoples free and great. Once, when the great Franklin said to him, “Where Liberty is, there is my country”, the fiery Paine replied, “Where Liberty is not, there is mine.”

He it was who first uttered the heart-quickening words “United States of America” and he it was who was finally refused the right to vote in that same United States of America.

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Washington daily news (Washington, D.C.), July 4, 1945

NEW ROCHELLE, N. Y., July 4

Thomas Paine, who gave the United States of America its name and, in some measure, the fighting courage of its convictions, was restored to citizenship in this suburban city today—136 years after his death.

New Rochelle denied Paine the right to vote in 1806, maintaining he had lost American citizenship by becoming an honorary citizen of France.

Today Mayor Church proclaimed:

“I … do reinstate posthumously Thomas Paine, first citizen of America, to full citizenship and the rights thereof in this city from July 4, 1945, onward …”

“Only a few days ago the United Nations Charter was signed,” Church said. “This, in a sense, represents the fulfillment of a plan Thomas Paine projected through the people of America to the world for the organization of a congress of nations to outlaw war.”

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AMONG the interesting new houses in the Larchmont section of Westchester County is that being built by Gerald J. Campbell on Campbell Lane, from plans by Joseph McCoy, New Rochelle architect.

The historic dwelling in New Rochelle formerly occupied by Thomas Paine, American patriot, was the inspiration for the new Larchmont House, of which it will be almost a replica, save for the added wing with garage space on the first floor and maid’s quarters above.

The large living room of the house has three exposures, and connects with the porch just to the right of the front door. The maid’s room may be reached from a stair in the kitchen. There are three other bedrooms on the upper floor, the master room, just above the living room, also having three exposures and an unusual amount of closet space as an added attraction.

Here is the way Mr. McCoy describes the motivating spirit and inspiration behind the plan:

“The similar names, Payne and Paine, seem to have something in common in that they were borne by the owners of two well-known early American homes. John Howard Payne was a diplomat, a writer and author of the beautiful poetic sentiment, ‘Home, Sweet Home.’

“Very fittingly the National Federation of Women’s Clubs reproduced with slight variations the ‘Home, Sweet Home’ house in Washington to stand not only as a tribute to John Howard Payne, but also as an inspiring ideal to those who desire to establish a home that is more than walls, roof and mechanical equipment. Those who are familiar with this house know that there is not a house in our whole land that more perfectly exemplifies the spirit of home.

“Hardly less charmingly quaint is the home of Thomas Paine, the great American patriot, now so well preserved in its original character and furnishings by the Huguenot Historical Association of New Rochelle.

“That homes generally reflect the temperamental characteristics of their owners or occupants is well known and, since there must be different types of people, it therefore follows that homes will always be built after different styles of architecture.

“For instance, very dignified and formal people are likely to select the Georgian style, and if they are very austere their home may be a very severe, unornamental and uncolorful type of English architecture, perhaps of the Tudor period, with high and narrow motifs. Proud social leaders often choose the Southern Colonial, with its high and noble pillars.

“The lover of woods, streams and camping will want a rustic log house with a cobblestone fireplace. Mme. Modiste with her interest in things dainty and petite will doubtless build the doll-house type with plenty of delicate color. The conservative business man, when he builds, is likely to be interested in a house that has a solid, husky, substantial character and he will choose a historical style of architecture because he believes such a home is less likely to depreciate in value than one built in some more popular and less established style.

“The successful inventor will take pleasure in directing and assisting his architect to design a house in an entirely modern style and will go in for all sorts of trick lighting, plain metal doors, windows in the corners, and every sort of mechanical device.

“Then there is that type of home builder who wants a home to live in, yes but always in the back of his mind is a desire to be in a position to give a big party like Jones does and he will be careful not to get his house too low in front, neither will he forget the billiard room and the bar.

“But most of the new houses are built or bought by people under middle-age and as there are generally children it goes for the benefit of these children. The parents wish the house to be a home in the finest sense of the word and it is with this ideal in mind that we planned the Campbell home, use the fine old house of Thomas Paine as the inspiration and model.”

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‘Thomas Paine’ Presented

New Group Has Premiere at Macdougal Street Playhouse.

Thomas Paine, a play in two acts and nine scenes from the German of Hanns Johst, translated by Adolph Klarmann and Helen Schlauch. Staged by Robert Rossen; settings by William Snaith; produced by the New American Theatre. At the Macdougal Street Playhouse.

Christopher Stone ……… Milton E. Goldstein
Greene ……………………… Tommy Page
Joe ………………………….. Ralph Graves
Washington ………………… Jay Rand
Grignan ……………………. Charles Brooks
Laurens ……………………. Cleon Everett
Adams ……………………… Ralph Traeger
Paine ……………………….. Marc Lawrence
Young English officer …….. Martin Haskell
Tornay …………………….. Leonard Jacobson
Chabot …………………….. Martin Friedlander
De Villiers …………………. Joseph Collins
Louis Capet (Louis XVI) ….. Jacques Knapp
French sea captain ……….. Louis Kenneths
American colonel ………….. Jack Oelbaum
Portmaster ………………… Louis Siston

The latest group to take over the Macdougal Street Playhouse ambitiously refers to itself as the New American Theatre. Last night the first production was given, a play from the German about Thomas Paine, the deist and free-thinker who figured in both the American and French Revolutions. The career of this inconoclastic firebrand should be lively and interesting material for the theatre, but even discounting the performance of one of the most hopelessly nonprofessional bands of actors ever assembled on a stage, “Thomas Paine” emerged last night as a singularly dull and declamatory piece of work. There were times, to be sure, when it showed promise of rising above the acting, but for the most part it was treated no worse than it deserved.

The play, with several lapses from historical fact, traces the life of Paine from his first connection with the Pennsylvania Magazine at the outset of the American Revolution. It carries him to Paris, shows him meeting Louis XVI and insists that he spent seventeen years in a French prison. Of his religious beliefs and his “Age of Reason” there was no mention through the eighth episode, when another reporter joined a rapidly departing audience.

The play was acted by an all-male cast. They were amateurs and there is no reason to believe that they are not destined to remain so.

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THOMAS PAINE’S OLD HOUSE 

Place Where the Writer Labored Is in Hands of the Wreckers

THE old Greenwich Village home of Thomas Paine, the rationalist, is to be demolished to make way for a modern building. Nearly a century and a quarter have elapsed since the author of “Common Sense” and “The Age of Reason” took up residence in the wooden house adjacent to Bleecker and Grove Streets that is now about to come down. Diarists of an earlier New York have described with considerable realism the Tom Paine who used to sit writing beside a sunny window of the modest domicile, a pipe in one hand and a flagon on the table beside him.

Paine’s active life during the American Revolution and later in the critical days of the French Revolution, when he was a prisoner in Paris, has often been described. While still a comparatively young man Tom Paine came to America from England, where he had been born of Quaker stock in 1737. Benjamin Franklin, whom he met in London, had given him letters of introduction to friends in Philadelphia, and these letters helped him to his first job. As assistant editor of The Pennsylvania Magazine he received a salary of $250 a year, and his prolific writings while he occupied the editorial chair are still widely quoted. A prominent figure in Colonial affairs during the War of Independence, Paine worked constantly for the cause, accepting no pay for his services.

“In a great affair where the happiness of man is at stake I love to work for nothing,” he said. “I should lose the pleasure, the spirit and the pride of it were I conscious that I looked for reward.”

Paine’s first pamphlet, “Common Sense,” appeared in January, 1776. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Paine in the first number of “The Crisis,” a series of essays, which were later incorporated in the “Common Sense” pamphlet. This pamphlet, according to some students, did more to prepare the popular mind for the Declaration of Independence than any other contemporary paper, speech or document.

After the war Paine received public recognition for his work. Pennsylvania gave him $2,500 for his expenses; New Jersey presented him with a small place at Bordentown, and New York granted him a farm, near New Rochelle, which he kept to the day of his death. From 1783 to 1787 Paine spent most of his time in and near Philadelphia, leading the life of a cultivated gentleman of those days. He was General Washington’s guest at Rocky Creek on several occasions. Always interested in science, he invented about this time an iron bridge with a single arch, and in 1787 he sailed for Havre to lay his bridge model before the French Academy of Science.

But while Paine professed to love science, politics was, when all was said and done, his very life. Paris was on the road to revolution when he arrived in Havre, and the inventor of bridges turned enthusiastically from patents to politics. Paine’s life thereafter in both England and France was stormy. In London he entered into political controversy with the scholarly Edmund Burke and was forced to leave the country. In Paris he fared no better than he did in England. Still writing, arguing and taking active part in all public questions, he came under the eye of public officials. As a member of the Assembly that condemned the King of France to death, Paine was a lonely minority.

“My having voted and spoken extensively, more so than any other member, against the execution of the King, had already fixed a mark upon me. Pen and ink were then of no use to me. No good could be done by writing. My heart was in distress at the fate of my friends, and my harp was hung upon the weeping willows.” Paine knew that he was to be arrested.

When he was in daily expectation of being guillotined he wrote the first part of “The Age of Reason,” a work which gave him the reputation of being a foe to Christianity. He finished it only six hours before he was arrested. He spent more than a year in a French prison and during that time wrote, along with poetry and other prose, the second part of his larger work. His book not only called forth many replies from laymen and clergymen in all parts of the world, but caused an attempt to be made to prosecute its publisher. Paine’s bold manner of exposing what he called “the fallacy of long-established opinions on religious subjects” roused the indignation of the whole order of priesthood.

Tom Paine returned to America in 1802, a sick old man. During the succeeding seven years of his life, he worked spasmodically. He died alienated from many of his earlier friends by reason of his sensitiveness to what he termed unjust criticism. And at his death he was hailed as “the Great Commoner of Mankind.”

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TRIBUTES TO THOMAS PAINE

Historical Association Honors His Memory at a Dinner.

Members of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association attended last night a dinner at the Hotel Martinique in honor of the 190th anniversary of Paine’s birth. Speakers included Professor Nelson Prentiss Mead, of City College; William D. Bosler, lawyer; Horace W. Corey, Vice President of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, and the Rev. Dr. A. Wakefield Slaten, pastor of the West Side Unitarian Church. All of the speakers lauded the part Paine played in shaping public opinion at the time of the American Revolution and declared that he had been misnamed an atheist.

Thomas A. Edison, who is a Vice President of the association, sent a letter which said in part:

“Many efforts have been made, both in Paine’s lifetime and since, to obliterate from the world his name and the eternal truths which he uttered, but the name and the work of a great man like Paine cannot be stamped out at will, and today Paine’s name shines brighter than ever before, and the world has grown stronger and wiser by reading and heeding his rational message.”

The President of the association, William M. Van Der Weyde, presided.

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The gazette (Cleveland, Ohio), January 1, 1927 reprint of The Haldeman-Julius Weekly, Girard, Kansas:

Thomas Paine and the “Negro”

ONE OF OUR EARLIEST FRIENDS

WHO IS THE LEAST KNOWN AND RECOGNIZED OF THEM ALL

The Race Greatly Indebted to Paine His Advice Eighty-Eight Years Before Lincoln’s Emancipation—“Religion” and Slavery—Darrow’s Statement.

We have long known that Thomas Paine is one of the most unappreciated figures in history; with a dishonesty, a deliberate malice of mendacity, possible only to religious fanaticism, the true record of Paine, the Revolutionary hero and liberal thinker and idealist of lofty purpose, has been suppressed; few know or read the books and the historic documents in which the life of the real Paine is shown.

And it was not only as a patriot and a free thinker that Thomas Paine proved his admirable character. He was the friend of just principles, whatever the issue. Among other ideas that he advocated, and which had to wait years for their fulfillment, was that of freedom for the Negro.

It is a Negro, Chas. A. Starks (1724 Highland, Kansas City, Mo.) who writes the following appreciation of Paine, which he regrets is not more fully realized and shared by the members of his race:

“An editor of a lately published volume of Paine’s works observes that ‘the Negro race, not merely in America but the world over, is greatly indebted to Thomas Paine, although a very few Negroes are acquainted with this fact.

Had Paine’s advice been heeded (eighty-eight years before Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation), the American Civil War, with its toll of a half million lives, might have been averted.’

Every word of this is true, and the fact that we know but little about such a great character, and one who especially devoted his intellectual labors in our cause, is a reflection on our claim to gratitude.

The chief cause, however, of our lack of information about Thomas Paine, is the criminal neglect of him in American histories. Add to this the anti-truth propaganda of the church, which attempts to show Paine as a rabid infidel or atheist when in fact he was the very opposite, a faithful deist.

But nothing but our blind conservatism, our trust in the white religionist, who would enslave us even now if he could, has kept us from turning aside and by a little research and investigation learn the truth about our ancient as well as modern friends.

“I often wonder when we will become courageous and intelligent enough to detach ourselves from a religion which apologized for slavery by claiming it to be divine, and which now includes race segregation as the eleventh commandment.

We must begin to read liberal literature with avidity! The Haldeman-Julius publications cover a wide field in this direction. Sinclair Lewis, along with others, should be able to startle us, along with the world, into considering life on a much broader basis than the customary.

Clarence Darrow, who so recently gave us of his legal genius, also told us we had ‘too much religion’; and I might add, not enough of the common sense of Thomas Paine.”

In paraphrasing Darrow, Mr. Starks loses the characteristically sharp, humorous expression of the former’s remark about the Negroes. What Darrow said was that the Negroes “are too bloomin’ pious.”

There is no doubt that the excessive religious zeal of the Negroes has been a great obstacle to their intellectual, cultural and social development. A strong dose of the common sense and liberalism of Thomas Paine would in truth be very useful to the Negro race; and as Paine was one of the earliest friends of the Negro, when the latter was friendless and worse, it surely would be no more than friendly to consider his ideas.

What Mr. Starks says about the relation of the Church to slavery can be given a broader application: no oppressed class, no group whose interests are outraged and whose cause is unpopular, should be supporters of the Church and religion; for the Church’s record is predominantly on the side of established prejudices, interests and classes.

And, on the other hand, the skeptics are more apt to be just and liberal on other questions than simply that of religion.

The Negroes should get busy in great numbers and read Thomas Paine; and, as Mr. Starks urges, they should read more liberal literature of all kinds. It is only free minds that can hope to deserve freedom and progress.

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If There Is Any Evidence at All It Is in Favor of a Life Beyond, He Declares.

WAVERS IN HIS SKEPTICISM

He Urges Religious Teachers to Try to Build Up Proof That Won’t Be Laughed At.

Thomas A. Edison has again experienced a change of conviction on the subject of the immortality of the soul. In an interview with Edward Marshall in the November Forum the inventor says that if there is any evidence bearing one way or another on the question that evidence is in favor of life after death.

The aged inventor speaks vaguely in the interview and never commits himself, but admits that he no longer sees anything incredible in the possibility of the soul’s being immortal. Though he does not admit that evidence of any weight in one direction or the other now exists, he thinks that the indications are favorable to the existence of a soul rather than against it. He urges religious teachers to seek genuine evidence and endeavor to build up proof which the skeptical cannot laugh at.

Worked on Spirit Mechanism.

In earlier interviews Mr. Edison has denied that there is any reason to suppose that the soul is immortal. For years he and the late Luther Burbank were the great luminaries of the Freethinkers’ Society. Some years ago, however, the inventor reconsidered and admitted that the soul might persist. In 1920 he announced in an interview that he was revolving in his mind the plans for a mechanism with which to communicate with the souls of the departed.

In an interview with B. C. Forbes in The American Magazine in 1920 Mr. Edison said that he was working on an apparatus which would intercept and “magnify many times” anything in the nature of a spirit message.

“If this apparatus fails to reveal anything of exceptional interest,” he added, “I am afraid that I shall have lost all faith in the survival of personality as we know it in this existence.”

This engine of communication never developed. For several years Edison parried questions on it. One friend of the inventor said that the whole thing was a hoax. He quoted Edison as saying:

“That man came to see me on one of the coldest days in the year. His nose was blue and his teeth were chattering. I really had nothing to tell him, but I hated to disappoint him, so I thought up this story about communicating with spirits, but it was all a joke.”

Sees Sun as Life’s Source.

In 1924, in an interview with Allan Belson in Hearst’s International Magazine, Mr. Edison said:

“My brain is incapable of conceiving of such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul, but I simply do not believe in it. What a soul may be is beyond my understanding. I believe that the force of energy we call life came from some other planet, or, at any rate, from somewhere in the great spaces beyond us. We know that life could not have been here when the earth was a molten mass. Later, life was here. Was it created here or did it come here? I believe it came here, just as electricity comes to the earth from the sun.”

Last year Edison was one of the leaders in founding the Thomas Paine Memorial Museum at New Rochelle and gave a long interview in defense of the teachings of Paine. In an interview with Edward Marshall printed in The New York Times in 1910 Mr. Edison said:

“Soul? Soul? What do you mean by soul? The brain? There is no more reason to believe that any human brain will be immortal than there is to think one of my phonographic cylinders will be immortal.”

In that interview Mr. Edison described the brain as a “meat mechanism.”

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In His Devotion to That Ideal He Preceded Abraham Lincoln

THOMAS PAINE. By F. J. Gould. (Leonard Parsons, The Roadmaker Series. 1s. 6d.)

By J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.

TOM PAINE, though he has had many able defenders and heralds to proclaim his powers and graces, has somehow never managed to attract the greater public. Yet he was a man who might easily have done so, not merely because of his intellectual gifts and his potent wielding of the pen, but because of his courage and sense of duty where he believed his duty lay.

One must suppose that he was wanting in personal magnetism. He was apt to sneer at men’s mental faults and follies. He was merciless in the exposure of a fallacy or a false argument, and he made his own pleas almost too clear and too transparent in their comprehensibility. Also, he had little or no humor in his writing, though personally he was not without the gift. The result was that, though you might be converted by his writings, there was very little to be said about it by the plain man, except “That’s so.” His merciless exposure of pretence, want of picturesqueness and want of rhetoric all acted as non-conductors of sympathy. There was none of the slyness and spitefulness which delight the readers of Voltaire. Paine, though a hard hitter, did not mock men, nor make amusing grimaces behind their backs, or says pick them up and send them reeling into the gutter. He demolished like an earthquake or a flood, and not by the slap of the Harlequin’s elastic wand.

This lack of personal magnetism in his writing was possibly the cause of his strange marriage history. He was married at the age of thirty-four to Elizabeth Ollive, the daughter of a Quaker; but, as his biographer says, there was a effect of marriage. Though “neither wife nor husband ever revealed why, after three years of marriage at Lewes, they separated for ever.” Mr. Gould, the writer of the just, excellent and highly readable book before me, adds that from that date “Paine never reproached any woman in ungentle terms,” and notes that “the curtain has never been withdrawn from this mystery of his temperament or his physique.”

But, in spite of this want of magnetism, what a wonderful achievement was Paine’s! Born in a poor and humble family and self-educated, he managed to equip his mind so well that he practically never made a mistake in reasoning or argument, and very seldom in taste. As Rickman well said of him, he was “bold, acute and independent in his opinions, and maintained them with ardour, elegance and argument.” Franklin early noted Paine’s great abilities, and when he went to America gave him useful letters of introduction. Paine, like so many men before and after him, began as a schoolmaster and then drifted into a pamphleteer, or, to be more exact, a journalist. Paine’s special gift was to see things clearly and as they are. Because he did this and drew the inevitable conclusions he gained something of the prestige of a prophet. As an example of Paine’s slight take the following, written in 1778, describing the postscript which he had found when he landed in America in 1774.

I happened to come to America a few months before the breaking out of hostilities. I found the disposition of the people such that they might have been led by a thread and governed by a reed. Their suspicion was quick and penetrating, but their attachment to Britain was obstinate, and it was at that time a kind of treason to speak against it. They disliked the Ministry, but they reverenced the nation. Their idea of grievance operated without resentment, and their single object was reconciliation.

All recent researches seem to show the truth of this passage. But in spite of this essential sympathy shown by the people of his Host Country, Paine, knowing the temper of the Mother Country, then saw that it must come to a separation. He, indeed, is said to have been the first to see that was so. It occurs in a cited letter printed in the Pennsylvania Magazine of Oct. 18, 1775. The passage is interesting, partly because sequestered in it is a reference to the next problem for America, though a problem the solution of which was by general agreement postponed to the very last moment—the problem of slavery:

I hesitate not for a moment to believe that the Almighty will finally separate America from Britain. Call it Independence if you will, if it is the cause of God and humanity, it will go on. And when the Almighty shall have blest us, and made us a people dependent only upon Him, then may our first gratitude be shown by an act of Continental legislation, which shall put a stop to the importation of negroes for sale, and soften the hard fate of those already here, and in time procure their freedom.

Very soon Paine began a series of pamphlets which he signed “Common Sense”—pamphlets which, in no rhetorical sense, shook New England and thundered over Europe. It is difficult to imagine any piece of polemical writing framed with greater poignancy and yet with greater dignity and good sense than the first number of the “Crisis,” for which series he soon called.

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 their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and 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.

As will be noticed, the passage begins with one of those short, sharp sayings for which Paine’s work was always notable. Almost as good as “These are the times that try men’s souls” was Paine’s wonderful retort to Burke apropos of the tears of sentiment which he (Burke) shed over poor Marie Antoinette. “He pities the plumage, and forgets the dying bird.” That, of course, was not the final word, as Paine very nearly found out for himself. It was only by an accident that he himself was not pulled out like a feather and thrown under the knife of the guillotine. Indeed, the Terror went very near, not only to plucking off all the plumage of France, but to completely destroying the dying bird. Still, the phrase remains, not only full of life, but also of rhetorical brilliancy. It is endowed with the element of universality. It has been common to mankind in all ages, in all places, and in all controversies to do the thing of which Paine complains.

As an example of Paine’s extraordinary power of piercing to essentials and understanding their importance, I may instance the way in which he pre-discovered that new and great public virtue which Walt Whitman declared was the discovery of Abraham Lincoln—Unionism. The moment the Union was formed Paine seems to have realized that it had become the absolute duty of every American to support it as fundamental, the sine qua non of his political existence. After declaring that, though the Commonwealth had thirteen federal constituents, it had only one “sovereignty,” he continues:

I ever feel myself hurt when I hear the Union, that great palladium of our liberty and safety, the least irreverently spoken of. It is the most sacred thing in the Constitution of America, and that which every man should be most proud and tender of. Our citizenship in the United States is our national character. Our citizenship in any particular State is only our local distinction. By the latter we are known at home, by the former to the world. Our great title is AMERICANS; our inferior one varies with the place.

Paine saw, in fact, what Lincoln saw when, to the astonishment of his fellow-countrymen and the world at large, he put the maintenance of the Union even above the abolition of the crime of slavery.

Though Paine is so much better known to us and appeals so much more to this generation as a political philosopher, we must not forget that in his own time, in this country at least, men thought of him most as a propagandist of what they termed infidelity, blasphemy and atheism. As a matter of fact, Paine was none of these things. He was a very sincere deist. He might perhaps have been described as a rigid upholder of the Divine, and one who would die in defense of his faith. In other words, he was not an agnostic or a lukewarm atheist, but a hard and fast opponent of atheism in every form.

He was an anti-Christian, no doubt, for, oddly enough, though he married a Quaker, he did not seem to think it worth while to take the trouble to consider what Christianity really was and to judge it thereby. Instead, he only knew of official Christianity on the word of the cynical, profligate ecclesiastics of France, or of the religious place-men of England. These he mocked and exposed and opposed, while he made Reason his religion and a very definite belief in a personal God his Credo.

The part played by Paine in the French Revolution was one entirely honorable to him. He began by taking the Revolution at its face value, but soon after he had been elected to the convention as an expert in the science of revolution he began to realize that the plant which sprang from the French soil was very different from the New England growth he admired. He wrote a remarkable letter to Danton, in which the following words occur:

I now despair of seeing the great object of European liberty accomplished; and my despair arises not from the combined foreign powers, nor from the intrigues of aristocracy and priestcraft, but from the tumultuous misconduct with which the internal affairs of the present Revolution are conducted.

The “tumultuous misconduct” which Paine so clearly identified was soon destined to affect him. Having personally had the courage to speak and vote against the execution of the King, he was put into prison himself and only saved from taking his place in the tumbril by the artifice of a friendly doctor.

Before I leave Paine I cannot do better than quote an example of the man’s extraordinary level-headedness, his sense and essential moderation. It is thus that he deals with the problems of the rights of the State, the rights of the individual and their limitations:

The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights. Every man has a right to one vote, and no more, in the choice of representatives. The rich has no more right to exclude the poor from the right of voting, or of electing or being elected, than the poor has to exclude the rich; and wherever it is attempted, or proposed, to be done, it is a question of force and not of right. Who is he that would dare propose the other? That other has a right to exclude him.

It is thus that Paine would not have found himself comfortable in a community which asserts the right of a proletarian minority to rule their fellow-countrymen.

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EXCERPTS FROM LETTERS ON MANY SUBJECTS

The Thomas Paine Home.

MARIAN A. FULTON.

Philadelphia, June 7, 1925.

As a Philadelphian and a life member of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, which your recent Philadelphia correspondent refers to as “the Paine Historical Society,” I should like to correct the very erroneous statements contained in his letter on Thomas Paine.

The reason why the Thomas Paine National Historical Association did not purchase the little home built and occupied by Thomas Paine during his residence in New Rochelle was because the house was not for sale. The then owner, Mr. See, offered it to several persons, I believe, if the house were removed from the space it then occupied in order that Mr. See could build a modern dwelling place.

The President of the Huguenot Association, H. M. Lester, took the former home of Paine and put it on the ground where it now stands. The ground, I believe, is owned by the City of New Rochelle, while the Paine house is owned by the Huguenot Association, a gift from Charles See. Several years ago the Thomas Paine National Historical Association wrote to the present President of the Huguenot Association, offering to purchase the little Paine cottage and was informed that it was not for sale.

The State of New York did not present the little frame cottage to Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine built the cottage himself. Paine’s home at one time in New Rochelle was a former home of the Jay family. This was the stone house presented to him by the State of New York. It burned to the ground while Paine was in Europe. Paine, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson from Paris, speaks of the destruction of his home in New Rochelle.

J. H. Ludwig, a very ardent admirer of not only Paine’s “Rights of Man” but of all of Paine’s writings, did leave a bequest to the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, but not for the purpose described in the communication from Philadelphia. The bequest was left to build a memorial house in honor of the great American patriot. The ground for this house was broken for us at New Rochelle on Memorial Day by Thomas A. Edison, who is our First Vice President.

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EDISON SPEAKS FOR TOM PAINE

Praises Revolutionary Patriot Whose Name Was Long Under a Cloud

By JAMES C. YOUNG.

OF all the men who contributed to the birth of American liberty and helped safeguard the cradle for future ages, Thomas Paine is the least appreciated, the most misunderstood and the object of greatest calumny. Thus Thomas A. Edison summed up the attitude of Paine’s countrymen toward the firebrand of the Revolution.

Sitting in the broad library of his plant in Orange, N. J., the inventor, now in his seventy-ninth year, discussed Paine as a familiar companion of his reading hours. He has taken a sympathetic interest in the erection of a memorial in New Rochelle, near Paine’s old home, and the efforts under way to render honors so long withheld or grudgingly extended. But Mr. Edison maintains the view that truth is eternal and assuredly will rise again, though crushed to earth. He sees in Paine a dominant figure whose service to the nation and mankind must be accorded recognition in something approaching the measure of Paine’s gifts. And he believes that the day of belated honors draws nearer.

“Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen,” said Mr. Edison, tapping the desk with an emphatic finger. “Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, ‘the United States of America.’ But it is hardly strange. Paine’s teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind.

“We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the field were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen. Washington himself appreciated Paine at his true worth. Franklin knew him for a great patriot and clear thinker. He was a friend and confidant of Jefferson, and the two must often have debated the academic and practical phases of liberty.

“I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine’s writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it. Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring. Therefore time must balance the scales.”

Paine and the Constitution.

Mr. Edison paused, with a gesture that suggested he was content to leave Paine in the keeping of Time. This afforded opportunity to ask if he believed Paine to be the author of the Constitution, as is often stated.

“I hardly think that any one man wrote the Constitution,” said the inventor, “but the Declaration and the Constitution expressed in form Paine’s theory of political rights. He worked in Philadelphia at the time that the first document was written, and occupied a position of intimate contact with the nation’s leaders when they framed the Constitution.

“Certainly we may believe that Washington had a considerable voice in the Constitution. We know that Jefferson had much to do with the document. Franklin also had a hand and probably was responsible in even larger measure for the Declaration. But all of these men had communed with Paine. Their views were intimately understood and closely correlated. There is no doubt whatever that the two great documents of American liberty reflect the philosophy of Paine.

“We may look in other directions, where the trace is plainer, easier definitely to establish, for evidences of his influence. Paine, you know, came over to the Colonies after meeting Franklin in London. He had encountered numerous misfortunes, and Franklin gave him letters to friends back home which resulted in his becoming editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine in January of 1775. It is highly interesting that circumstance should have brought him to America at that time and placed him in such a position. Paine had little education, in the school sense of the term, but he had read avidly and written a great deal before meeting Franklin. Once placed at the editor’s desk of a new American periodical, he found time and opportunity exactly suited to his spirit and his genius.

“The Pennsylvania Magazine began to bristle—so much so that its owner, and the cooler heads of Philadelphia, were worried by Paine’s writings. Looking back to those times we cannot, without much reading, clearly gauge the sentiment of the Colonies. Perhaps the larger number of responsible men still hoped for peace with England. They did not even venture to express the matter that way. Few men, indeed, had thought in terms of war.

“Then Paine wrote ‘Common Sense,’ an anonymous tract which immediately stirred the fires of liberty. It flashed from hand to hand throughout the Colonies. One copy reached the New York Assembly, in session at Albany, and a night meeting was voted to answer this unknown writer with his clarion call to liberty. The Assembly met, but could find no suitable answer. Tom Paine had inscribed a document which has not been answered and which never can be, so long as man esteems his priceless possession.

“In ‘Common Sense’ Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again. It must be remembered that ‘Common Sense’ preceded the Declaration and affirmed the very principles that went into the national doctrine of liberty. But that affirmation was made with more vigor, more of the fire of the patriot and was exactly suited to the war. It is possible that we should have had the Revolution without Tom Paine. Certainly it could not be forestalled, once he had spoken.”

Read Paine at 13.

This recital pointed to studious hours with Paine. Mr. Edison admitted his lifelong interest in the patriot.

“My father had a set of Tom Paine’s books on the shelf at home,” he said. “I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.

“I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man. Perhaps he gained strength from the fact that the springs of his wisdom lay within himself, and he spoke so clearly because the man’s spirit yearned to reach other spirits.

“Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters—seldom in any school of writing.

“Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object. Yet he has left us such stirring lines as those of ‘The Crisis,’ where he says: ‘These are the times that try men’s souls. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.’ Even an unappreciative posterity knows that line, but we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration: ‘The world is my country; to do good my religion.’ “

Mr. Edison pointed out that Paine had a progressive genius. Such contributions as “Common Sense” and the papers making up “The Crisis” might have fixed his name securely. But the Revolution safely over, and the young nation assured of its life, Paine grew restless. He entertained a great conception of returning to England and stirring there a revolution which should parallel that in the Colonies. So bold was this design that it frightened some of his old associates.

But the conception beckoned to Paine with an irresistible lure. At a moment when his companions of the council table and field—where he had served as aide-de-camp to General Greene—were ascending to high station, Paine neither sought nor received special honors. He had had difficulties as Secretary to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and lost the place. All of his biographers agree that despite great services he was looked upon as a somewhat erratic man, extremely restless, animated by a great yearning.

The magnet of liberty had drawn the needle of world interest to France. So Paine embarked for Paris, fortified with substantial gifts of money secured in part from Congress through the agency of Washington. Looking back across the years, it would seem even to a casual reader that the strong, calm Washington understood Paine better than did most men of his own time, and endeavored to recompense his services as best he might.

Arriving in Paris, Paine joined the revolutionary spirits of the political clubs and soon had a part in that train of events which was to end in 1793. But Paine departed for England meanwhile, cherishing his great design of a revolution there. He wrote in a fugitive sort of way, without any particular opportunity or success. Then came Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” a document arraigning the whole program of liberty, defending monarchies everywhere, and bringing Burke a certain fame which Romilly termed shameful.

The “Reflections” had another effect. They moved Paine to answer. Once more he dipped his flaming pen in the spring of liberty and produced “The Rights of Man.”

“Again we see the spontaneous genius at work,” observed Mr. Edison, “and that genius busy at his favorite task—liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, ‘The Rights of Man’ compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke’s effort in his ‘Reflections.’

“Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His readers were so great, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him. ‘Tom Paine is quite right,’ said Pitt, the Prime Minister, ‘but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.’

“Here we see the progressive quality of Paine’s genius at its best. ‘The Rights of Man’ amplified and reasserted what already had been said in ‘Common Sense,’ with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France.

“So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre’s enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument.

“But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of ‘The Age of Reason’ and now turned his time to the last part. Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events ‘The Age of Reason’ appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle—a noble gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking.

“Paine suffered then, as now, he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others. He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea which other men often express by the name of deity.

“His Bible was the open face of nature, the broad skies, the green hills. He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds—or on persons devoted to them—have served to darken history, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.

“When Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a dirty little atheist he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with ‘The Rights of Man’ he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But ‘The Age of Reason’ cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen—a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine.”

Extent of Paine’s Genius.

Mr. Edison said that he believed that Paine’s political teachings, and particularly a true estimate of his part in the Revolution, should be taught to all school children, without regard for his religious views. “His real services are not even a matter of common knowledge,” continued Mr. Edison. “The French called him the Washington of the ‘father of republics’ in contrast to our own unthinking word of opprobrium—’atheist.’ If Rousseau in his ‘Contract Social’ laid the foundation, Paine in his ‘Rights of Man’ reared the temple.

“But his contributions to American life are much wider. He was one of the early and stanch advocates of the franchisement of the slaves. He first suggested justice to women, old age pensions, protection for animals, and many other measures bespeaking a warm humanity. These measures included the education of poor children at public expense, something virtually unknown in his day. He advocated the Federal Union of States on the present basis along with many other principles of what is now called enlightened government.

“I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.

“Traduers have said that he spent his days in the tavern in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man, a drunken reprobate. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanimity and sorrow on the shafts of his detractors. These attacks have continued down to our day, with scarcely any abatement, is an indication of how deeply prejudice, once aroused, may become. It has been a custom in some quarters to hold up Paine as an example of something bad.

“The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberties—who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause—can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands.”

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