The Birmingham age-herald (Birmingham, Ala.), June 10, 1917
Rev. Willoughby N. Claybrook Writes Appreciation Of Captain Graves’ Volume And Hopes It Will Lead To Wider Reading Of “Letters Of Junius” And Tom Paine
BY REV. WILLOUGHBY N. CLAYBROOK.
Birmingham, June 8, 1917.
To the Editor of The Age-Herald:
Our fellow townsman, Capt. W. H. Graves, has laid under debt of gratitude all lovers of good literature and especially all students of the political history of modern Anglo-Saxon civilization, in giving to the public his scholarly and delightfully written study of those incomparable political treatises known as the “Letters of Junius.”
The author in a masterly way and with great success seeks to demolish the theory once so widely accepted that Sir Philip Frances was the author of those letters. With great skill, legal acumen and scholarly accuracy, he has established the fact beyond all reasonable doubt that Sir Philip Frances had nothing to do with the authorship of those famous letters. If not with as great success yet with startling cogency, the author seeks to establish the identity of “Junius” with that greatest of all pamphleteers who has ever written in our language—Thomas Paine. Captain Graves has produced a remarkable book, delightful in itself, and worthy of high praise as a work of scholarship and literary merit, even if he has not made good his thesis (and the writer believes he has) that Thomas Paine was “Junius.”
In the evolution of the despotic monarchy of Great Britain into the free and untramelled democracy of modern England, these wonderful “Letters” of Junius have had probably a deeper and more far-reaching influence than all other literary productions of a political nature since the Magna Charta was promulgated in the thirteenth century. “The fullness of time” had come, and God called for a man. That man came forth a “prophet and a genius,” standing under the shadow of a name—“Junius.” He was a prophet because he was the embodiment and the product of those principles of human rights and individual freedom which seem to have been the peculiar gift, and marked characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race from its appearance upon the stage of human history, and which neither the tyrannical influence of the Norman and Angevin monarchy, nor the insidious dead hand of the Latin church had been able to eradicate. Principles of the rights of man, which permeated the heart, conscience and life of the great Alfred; which asserted themselves in the courageous stand of Archbishop Langton and his compatriots, which fired the soul and inspired the life of Simon Montfort and through him restored to England her ancient Saxon free and democratic government by Parliament, which reasserted themselves in the great upheaval of the reformation of the sixteenth century, which were again somewhat extravagantly embodied in the person and government of Cromwell, which again struggled against the tyranny and corruption of the restoration, and produced the revolution under William; principles which had again become submerged and were in great danger of being lost in the ever-increasing political corruption of the detestable reign of George III. These principles, born in the hearts of the rude but virile Anglo-Saxon people of Jutland, and transplanted to British soil, persisted through the vicissitudes of more than 1000 years, surviving inveterate opposition powerfully bulwarked and entrenched in the civilization of the world. The “Letters” of Junius had an immediate and powerful effect upon the government and the political life of England; that influence increased until the principle therein set forth, gradually superseded the eighteenth century idea of “the divine right of might,” and became the working basis and the political goal of the greatest statesmen of the succeeding century. The many and great reforms in social betterment and political freedom attained under the leadership of such men as Peel, Bright, Cobden, and the great Gladstone, and the continuance of the practical application of those principles under Lloyd George—in all this may be traced the potent influence of the “Letters” of Junius.
The same principles set forth in these letters are the acknowledged foundation upon which our American government is builded. It is a fact beyond dispute that Thomas Paine had a greater influence in laying that foundation than any other man. Paine’s “Common Sense,” “The Crisis,” and “The Rights of Man” had more to do with bringing about the American Independence than everything else ever written during that eventful period. Every principle of freedom and the rights of man contained in the “Letters of Junius” are to be found in the above mentioned writings of Paine. The trenchant and clear-cut style and expression of the two is strikingly alike.
Captain Graves has rendered a distinct service, if his book leads any number of his readers to avail themselves of reading the “Letters” or the epoch-making pamphlets of Tom Paine, a man who has never received the general recognition and gratitude of the American people to which he is entitled. I trust that many may read the delightful book of Captain Graves and then read the “Letters of Junius” and the works of Thomas Paine.
It is exceedingly unfortunate that Thomas Paine is only known to a great many people through the unfavorable reputation he won by writing a book entitled “The Age of Reason.” This book has been discredited from every standpoint. Paine in this attempted something entirely beyond the scope of his powers. Consequently he utterly failed. It is to be hoped that the “Age of Reason” will, in the future, be allowed to occupy its place so justly won in the limbo of forgotten things; and that the immortal principles laid down in the brilliant political pamphlets of Thomas Paine and in the matchless “Letters of Junius,” for the vindication of which the whole civilized world is now at war with Germany, may be more widely read and understood until the political rights of man and civil freedom shall be recognized and realized by all the nations of the earth.