By Gary Berton 

Part Two of Two Parts – See part one here.

Thomas Paine’s first principles built the structure of democracy. The mechanisms central to Paine’s political theories are rooted in his ideology of first principles. The basic foundation of these principles is equality, and as a direct result, justice. If equality is practiced, then people share equal justice. 

“Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation,” he wrote in Common Sense, “the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance.” 

“When a people agree to form themselves into a republic (for the word REPUBLIC means the PUBLIC GOOD, or the good of the whole, in contradistinction to the despotic form, which makes the good of the sovereign, or of one man, the only object of the government) when, I say, they agree to do this, it is to be understood, that they mutually resolve and pledge themselves to each other, rich and poor alike, to support and maintain this rule of equal justice among them. They therefore renounce not only the despotic form, but the despotic principle, as well of governing as of being governed by mere Will and Power, and substitute in its place a government of justice.” (Dissertations on Government, 1786) 

The structure of his democratic theory is like a house: the foundation of that house is equality and justice; everything else rests upon it. If this principle is compromised and weakened, the whole structure is vulnerable to corruption and oppression.

Inherent in the equality/justice principle are rights. both natural and civil — civil rights arising from natural rights. Natural rights are inherent and received upon birth, without exception. Defending these rights is the object of democratic government. 

Resting on this foundation of rights are four support pillars constructing the structure of democracy. (1) Rejection of precedent, (2) No one should live worse than in the state of nature. (3) Recognition of the natural sociability of humanity. (4) Enlightenment and reason solve problems. A few thoughts on each:

1. Rejection of precedent 

Precedent got us into the problems of government. They represent the failures to ensure equality and justice. Precedent is the “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution; it’s the way things were always done, which is the excuse to maintain “tradition.” Precedent is the wall preventing people from building the democratic structures of a better world, Precedent reinforces structures that promote elitism, privilege, and injustice. 

2 No one should live worse than in the state of nature. 

If civilization has progressed, why are masses of the people worse off than if they lived in small groups in nature? That is not progress. The wellbeing of every person is what democracy insists upon. If many or most people live worse off than as small groups in nature, civilization is not progressing; it’s regressing. Why is another discussion for another day. 

3. Recognize the natural sociability of humanity. 

Humans evolved as social animals. The human mind, Paine wrote, is “unfitted for perpetual solitude.” That natural sociability is the basis of democracy. Building upon it is fundamental to democracy.

4. Enlightenment and reason solve problems 

Knowing and using the real world around us must be the basis for knowledge, and applying that knowledge to solve problems. Anything else is invented to manipulate and confuse the people in their decision-making, which is anti-democratic. 

Atop the pillars is a roof protecting the structure of government from outside elements. The roof consists of constitutions with democratic structures and laws. 

Building the opposite structure is the bizarro world of Edmund Burke, whose political theory is oligarchy. His foundation is order, not equality. Burke’s pillars are “defending historical precedent,” following “tradition,” (not the Enlightenment ideals Paine advocated). Burke sought continuity, not change for the better. Burke saw humanity as a collection of “disconnected individuals.” His roof atop government is prescriptive for elite rule, not democratic order, government by the people. 

Paine challenged and changed the entire philosophical structure of government, not just for the people in the 18th century, but for everyone in the world today.

The post Thomas Paine: Founder of Modern Democracy: Part 2  appeared first on .

By Daniel Gomes de Carvalho

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the specificity of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1795) in the context of the relations between liberalism and democracy in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. The objective is to explain how Paine—as an English revolutionary and an actor, witness, and interpreter of the Age of Revolutions—developed a democratic vision during the period of the Convention initiated on 9 Thermidor (1794-1795) that distanced him from both Jacobin formulations and practices, and from legislations and speeches by Thermidorian deputies. To this end, we will also investigate other texts and letters by the author, and demonstrate his profound changes in relation to previous texts, such as Common Sense and Rights of Man. With this in mind, this text intends to open new perspectives regarding Paine’s work and its place in the history of political thought.¹

“The pomp of courts and pride of kings 

I prize above all earthly things; 

I love my country; the king 

Above all men his praise I sing:

The royal banners are displayed, 

And may success the standard aid. 

I fain would banish far from hence, 

The Rights of Man and Common Sense; 

Confusion to his odious reign,

That foe to princes, Thomas Paine! 

Defeat and ruin seize the cause 

Of France, its liberties and laws”.² 

– Arthur O’Connell

Written and published in July 1795, the Dissertation on the First Principles of Government was the culmination of Thomas Paine’s (1737–1809) democratic theory, in which he advocates for universal (“non-census,” though still restricted to men) suffrage and criticizes its absence in the Thermidorian French Constitution, the third of the revolutionary period, enacted that same year. 

At this point, Paine was a prominent figure in the Atlantic world through various writings, especially Common Sense (1776), the main pamphlet of the American Revolution, and Rights of Man (1791), a defense of the French Revolution against Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. 

No foreigner took part in the French Revolution as decisively and for such a prolonged period as Paine. Elected deputy for Pas-de-Calais, he was imprisoned by the Jacobin government in December 1793, along with deputy Anacharsis Cloots (of Prussian origin and Dutch descent), both under the justification of being foreigners. With the help of the American ambassador and future U.S. president James Monroe, Paine was released in November 1794. The unspoken reason for his imprisonment was his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI (although he was a republican, Paine was against the death penalty and advocated for the exile of the Bourbon king) and his closeness to Brissot and the Girondins. 

After being released from prison and once again serving as a deputy, Paine distanced himself from the former Girondins (many of whom were now Thermidorians) by advocating for universal suffrage. Paine’s opposition to them was not new: it is worth noting his defense of the Republic in 1790, even before Robespierre. However, such criticism eased during the Jacobin period—resisting the Terror and the de-Christianization movement became paramount. Once the Jacobins were overthrown, the divide between Paine and the Thermidorians gained momentum, a decisive factor in his return to the United States in September 1802. 

BEGINNINGS 

Paine had first sailed to North America in 1775 with a political stance that was unclear, which we could describe as leveling (a reference to the Levellers during the English Civil War of 1642–1649) and censitary, whereby only those with leisure and financial autonomy could vote.⁴ 4 In 1778, Paine wrote: 

Likewise all servants in families; because their interest is in their master, and depending upon him in sickness and in health, and voluntarily withdrawing from taxation and public service of all kinds, they stand detached by choice from the common floor. 

In that same letter, Paine, judging by Foner’s complete works, used the word democracy and democratical for the first time. At this point, however, he still viewed democracy in the pejorative sense commonly held, i.e., as a degenerate form of government: “Such a State will not only become impoverished, but defenceless, a temptation to its neighbors, and a sure prize to an invader.”⁵ This use, in the context of the debate over the independence of the 13 colonies, was intended to defend a constitutional government. 

In the context of the French Revolution, Paine began to condemn property qualifications for voting. In Rights of Man (1791), a response to Edmund Burke’s text, Paine argued that voting should be as universal as taxation, a radical proposal in the English context, where nearly all adult men paid some form of indirect tax. Only in 1795, in the Dissertation on the First Principles of Government, did he openly defend universal suffrage. For this reason, Moncure Conway, who wrote the first well-founded biography of the author, stated that few pamphlets by Paine deserve more study.⁷ 

By the way, Rights of Man represented the second time—again, according to Foner’s complete works—that Paine used the words democracy and democratical, but this time in a positive sense: now, the notion of “democracy” was equivalent to a desirable, equal, representative government, one that was taking shape in the United States and France. The Dissertation, in turn, was the third and final time that the author used the term in his texts; in this case, although the idea of democracy is bolder, the word’s use is more restrained (it appears only twice in the text), as the author prefers the term “representative government” to refer to male universal suffrage, equality before the law, checks and balances, and human rights (between the two texts, there were Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, which, as we will see, likely explains the different uses and notions). 

The terms “liberal” and “illiberal” appear much more frequently in Paine’s works (“liberalism,” in turn, is a term from the 19th century, as will be discussed). In most of Paine’s writings, the term appears in its common sense, referring to generosity (“my intentions were liberal, they were friendly.”⁸ Paine also described friendliness (the terms liberality and liberal sentiments are also frequent), or a specific type of education (such as liberal arts and sciences). 

However, as we will see below, according to some recent studies, the term “liberal” underwent transformations in 18th-century Anglo-Scottish enlightenment thought. Paine’s works seem to follow this movement. The term began to appear in his works in a compound form—such as liberal ground, liberal cast, and liberal thinking—and was related to forms of noninterference and non-oppression.⁹ For example, in a letter to George Washington, Paine stated that trade between North America and France was founded on “most liberal principles, and calculated to give the greatest encouragement to the infant commerce of America.”¹⁰ Another letter of Paine’s, concerning the Constitution of Pennsylvania, expresses this transformation of the term well, as here the word liberal can be understood as “generosity,” but at the same time as “non-interference” and “non-oppression”:

It is the nature of freedom to be free… Freedom is the associate of innocence, not the companion of suspicion. She only requires to be cherished, not to be caged, and to be beloved, is, to her, to be protected. Her residence is in the undistinguished multitude of rich and poor, and a partisan to neither is the patroness of all (…) To engross her is to affront her, for, liberal herself, she must be liberally dealt with.¹¹

Having made these preliminary observations, it is important to note that Dissertation on the First Principles of Government has never received the attention it deserves from historians. This absence is particularly evident among classic Paine scholars. Foner merely emphasized that the pamphlet addresses the issue of suffrage. Aldridge merely noted that he wrote the pamphlet in light of the “new constitution.”¹² Vincent only highlighted Paine’s defense of bicameralism.¹³ Paine biographers John Keane and Craig Nelson simply stated that Paine defended universal suffrage.¹⁴ Mark Philp and Gregory Claeys, the two historians who have best studied Paine’s thought, were brief: the former surprisingly qualifies it as “a summary of Rights of Man (1791).”¹⁵ The latter merely notes its limited reception. Modesto Florenzano pointed out the pivotal place of the text in the discussion about liberalism and democracy; however, his study, as it is more concerned with other aspects of Paine’s life and work, did not focus on an in-depth analysis of this pamphlet.¹⁶ 

Currently, the English revolutionary has received a substantial amount of study, both for his role as an Atlantic revolutionary and for his position neither strictly Jacobin nor exactly Girondin. However, the Dissertation remains secondary in the most recent studies on the author. Mario Feit cites the text only three times to address the relationship between time and rights in Paine.¹⁷ J.C.D. Clark claims that it “has little to say about France.”¹⁸ Thus, Dissertation, a “milestone in Paine’s career,” has never received the attention it deserves.¹⁹ However, in addition to filling an important gap, its analysis will reveal significant shifts in relation to Paine’s more well-known texts Common Sense and Rights of Man, and, as a result, will showcase facets of the author that have been little discussed, which may strengthen Paine’s place as a political thinker and, contrary to what Clark stated, an interpreter of the French Revolution.

To fulfill this purpose, this text will be structured in three parts: first, we will examine the publication of Dissertation within its context; second, we will analyze its fundamental ideas; and finally, the pamphlet will be considered within the political/philosophical debates of its time. The text, like all of Paine’s political works, is deeply intertwined with the revolutionary axis of London-Paris-Philadelphia, and can only be understood within these dialogues (although it also holds importance in other spaces such as Ireland and the Netherlands). 

THE THERMIDORIAN LIBERALISM 

Paine began writing Dissertation with the Dutch Republic in mind. However, after the fall of the Jacobin government on July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor), the text was directed at the Thermidorian National Convention, as it discussed the Constitution of Year III. The Thermidorian Convention, which followed the Jacobin government, lasted fifteen months, until October 1795, when it gave way to the Directory. The day after 9 Thermidor, the deputies opposed the old slogan, “Terror on the agenda,” with a new counter-slogan, “Justice on the agenda!”²⁰ There was a new rallying cry, “restore social order in place of the chaos of revolutions.”²¹ Therefore, it was a government that sought to end the Revolution and justified itself negatively: neither Terror nor monarchy. 

The new declaration of rights replaced “men are born free and equal” with “equality consists in the law being the same for all,” just as the right to property, which had not been defined in 1789, was specified: “property is the right to enjoy and dispose of one’s goods, income, the fruits of one’s labor, and industry.”²² While still considering the Caribbean world, the Convention maintained the abolition of slavery and guaranteed citizenship to Haitians.

After the occupation of the Convention by representatives of the sections linked to the sansculottes, demanding bread and freedom, the Assembly appointed, in April 1795, an eleven-member commission to draft a new Constitution. The report was delivered on June 23. A well-known speech by the reporter Boissy d’Anglais is illustrative:

We must be governed by the best men; and these are the most educated and the most interested in maintaining the law. However, with few exceptions, such men can only be found among the holders of property who, consequently, are tied to their country, the laws that protect their property, and the social peace that preserves them. A country governed by men of property is an authentically civil society; a country where men without property govern is in a state of nature.²³

On June 6, 1795, Paine, alarmed by the direction the Convention was taking, wrote to Deputy Thibaudeau emphasizing that reverting to a censitary system would justify new rebellions: “How could we imagine that recruits willing to die for the cause of equality tomorrow would agree to sacrifice their lives for a government that had stripped them of their fundamental natural rights?”²⁴ Paine then published the pamphlet Dissertation on First Principles of Government on July 4, 1795. Three days later, for the first time since the fall of the Jacobins and the last time in his life, Paine took the floor at the Convention. The brief speech at the French National Convention is transcribed in The Constitution of 1795.

[the] Constitution which has been presented to you is not consistent with the grand object of the Revolution, nor congenial to the sentiments of the individuals who accomplished it…The first article, for instance, of the political state of citizens (v. Title ii. of the Constitution), says: ‘Every man born and resident in France, who, being twenty-one Years of age, has inscribed his name on the civic register of his canton, and who has lived afterwards one year on the territory of the Republic, and who pays any direct contribution whatever, real or personal, is a French citizen.’ 

I might here ask, if those only who come under the above description are to be considered as citizens, what designation do you mean to give the rest of the people ? I allude to that portion of the people on whom the principal part of the labor falls, and on whom the weight of indirect taxation will in the event chiefly press. In the structure of the social fabric this class of people are infinitely superior to that privileged order whose only qualification is their wealth or territorial possessions. For what is trade without merchants? What is land without cultivation? And what is the produce of the land without manufactures?²⁵

One of the more opportunistic traits of this Constitution was the “two-thirds decree,” which aimed to prevent monarchists (encouraged by the self-proclaimed Louis XVIII) from forming a majority in the assembly: in the first elections, two-thirds of the future deputies had to be chosen from among the convention members whose mandates were about to expire. Despite the fall of the Jacobins, the “logic of public salvation” remained, according to which the Revolution should be defended, even at the cost of transgressing its principles.²⁶ By the way, two important leaders, the former supporters of the Jacobin government, Tallien and Billayd-Varenne, openly spoke of maintaining terror against traitors.²⁷ 

On October 26, the Convention dissolved itself and, according to Sieyés’s proposal for the new Constitution, was replaced by the Council of Five Hundred (tasked with drafting laws) and the Council of Ancients (tasked with voting on them, being half as numerous, with members having to be over forty years old). The executive power (the five members of the Directory) was elected by the two branches of the legislature: unlike the other two revolutionary constitutions, bicameralism was established here, under strong American influence.²⁸ The Directory would dismiss local administration members without appeal, direct diplomacy, and could issue orders for arrests; in these respects, the Consulate was not a rupture but an intensification of the previous government.²⁹ In October, the election of the Directory took place; Paine, who never ran again, became an ordinary citizen.

That said, it is essential to acknowledge that, during the Thermidorian period, a version of French liberalism emerged, which we will call Thermidorian liberalism.³⁰ This version consisted of the idea that it was impossible to reconcile the participation of the population in the political process (democratic principles) with the protection of individual rights and liberties (liberal principles) in the post-Jacobin context. Therefore, in his speech of July 20, 1795, Sieyès criticized “the unlimited sovereignty that the Montagnards had attributed to the people, based on the model of the sovereignty of the king in the Old Regime”—he refers, incidentally, to the Jacobin regime as ré-totale, in contrast to ré-publique.³¹ It is clear that the tension between individual freedoms and democracy—frequently associated with the 1820s— was already present in the Thermidorian Convention. 

With these considerations in mind, it is possible to highlight the problem that is at the heart of this text, which is to explain how Paine, a Thermidorian deputy openly anti-Jacobin and concerned with individual liberties and the limits of the state, positioned himself at this moment. 

DISSERTATION ON THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT 

The pamphlet Dissertation on the First Principles of Government presents a clear and well-structured argument, aiming to introduce the author’s most radical point: private property cannot be a natural right that overrides others and, therefore, should not be used as a criterion for voting rights. The pamphlet is divided into five parts: in the first, Paine expresses his belief in the centrality of politics; in the second, he presents three arguments against hereditary governments, discussing his conceptions of nation, social contract, and popular sovereignty; in the third, he addresses representative government, emphasizing the irrationality of property-based voting; in the fourth, he defends bicameralism (a significant shift from his ideas in Common Sense and a departure from the antifederalists ), explains the role of the executive power and the rotation of power, and reaffirms the importance of education; finally, he concludes with a defense of tolerance.³² 

Paine begins by stating that there is no “subject more interesting to every man than the subjects of government. His security, be he rich or poor, and in a great measure his prosperity, are connected therewith.”³³ His goal, therefore, is to study and perfect what he calls the “science of government,” which, of all things, is the least mysterious and the easiest to understand.³⁴ From there, he moves away from classical subdivisions and proposes that: 

The primary divisions are but two: First, government by election and representation. Secondly, government by hereditary succession. 

(…) As to that equivocal thing called mixed government, such as the late Government of Holland, and the present Government of England, it does not make an exception to the general rule, because the parts separately considered are either representative or hereditary.³⁵

The revolutions spreading across Europe are, ultimately, “a conflict between the representative system founded on the rights of the people, and the hereditary system founded in usurpation.”³⁶ Thus, aristocracy, oligarchy, and monarchy are distinct expressions of the same hereditary system, which must be rejected. Paine also rejects “simple democracy” (direct democracy), considering it impractical: “the only system of government consistent with principle, where simple democracy is impracticable, is the representative system.”³⁷ 

Paine was a key figure in the Thirteen Colonies, transforming republicanism from an ethical ideal and “way of life,” as it was seen in the mid-1700s, into a practicable and desirable political regime.³⁸ At this point, he reaffirms his well-known departure from part of the 18th-century republican language by conceiving the English government not as mixed and balanced, but as aristocratic: “It is certain,” Paine wrote to Condorcet, “that certain places, such as Holland, Bern, Genoa, Venice, etc., which are called republics, do not deserve such a designation (…) for they are in a condition of absolute servitude to aristocracy.”³⁹ 

Thus, Paine proceeds to discuss hereditary governments: “there is not a problem in Euclid more mathematically true than that hereditary government has not a right to exist.”⁴⁰ He then lists three arguments against hereditary rule, all of a temporal nature: the first concerns the succession of governments; the second, their origins; and the third, the eternity of rights. 

Hereditary government is contrary to reason because, by its nature, it is susceptible to falling into the hands of a minor or a fool.⁴¹ If the uncertainty of succession speaks against hereditary governments, the same can be said about their origins: hereditary government cannot begin because no man or family is above others. “If it had no right to begin,” Paine says, “it had no right to continue,” for:

The right which any man or any family had to set itself up at first to govern a nation, and to establish itself hereditarily, was no other than the right which Robespierre had to do the same thing in France. If he had none, they had none. If they had any, he had as much; for it is impossible to discover superiority of right in any family, by virtue of which hereditary government could begin. The Capets, the Guelphs, the Robespierres, the Marats, are all on the same standing as to the question of right. It belongs exclusively to none.⁴²

In this regard, Robespierre’s power resembles the despotism of the Old Regime more than democracy. Unlike many liberals of the early 19th century, Paine did not see Jacobinism as an inherent danger to the egalitarian impulse of democracy, nor did he conceive liberty as an aristocratic stronghold, but precisely the opposite. 

Hereditary government is also inconsistent in considering the relationship between time and rights: even if a government began illegitimately, would its usurpation become a right through the authority of time? The answer is negative in both directions: the present generations have no duty to submit to the men of the past (as he had already stated in Rights of Man), nor do they have the right to subjugate future generations. Rights are timeless and meta-historical and, therefore, universal in time and space: “Time with respect to principles is an eternal now: it has no operation upon them: it changes nothing of their nature and qualities.”⁴³ It is up to the living to make politics, so the injustice that began a thousand years ago is as unjust as if it began today; and the right that originates today is as just as if it had been sanctioned a thousand years ago.

The notion that time does not create any form of right, reason, or authority is what definitively separates Paine from the ideas of Burke and those known as British conservatives. The historian Anthony Quinton describes, British conservatism in the 18th and 19th centuries as aiming to preserve the historical arrangement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, which encompassed three doctrines: the belief that political wisdom is historical and collective, residing in time (traditionalism); the belief that society is a whole, not just the sum of its parts (organicism); and the distrust of theory when applied to public life (political skepticism).⁴⁴ 

For Paine, on the other hand, any nation that enacts an irrevocable law or tradition would be betraying, at once, the right of every minor in the nation and the rights of future generations: “The rights of minors are as sacred as the rights of the aged.”⁴⁵ Thus, since minors and future generations are bearers of rights, any law that violates these groups is illegitimate. Legal authority (that is, the power to elect representatives and formulate laws), for Paine, rests on the consent of living men over 21 years of age; however, groups deprived of legal authority are not deprived of rights: “A nation, though continually existing, is continually in a state of renewal and succession. It is never stationary. Every day produces new births, carries minors forward to maturity, and old persons from the stage.⁴⁶ In this ever running flood of generations there is no part superior in authority to another.”⁴⁷ 

Thus, if it is evident that when a family establishes itself in power, we have a form of unquestionable despotism, it would be equally despotic when a nation consents to establish a regime with hereditary powers. The principle of consent as a source of legitimacy is taken to its ultimate consequences and extended to minors and those yet to be born: If the current generation, or any other, is willing to be enslaved, that does not diminish the right of the next generation to be free. 

For Paine, including minors and future generations in the concept of the people and, consequently, protecting them by law, would prevent democracy from turning into tyranny; and, therefore, in Paine, “the subject of democracy must be understood as a subject that is both juridical (the people of citizenvoters) and historical (the nation that binds the memory and promise of a shared future).”48 However, democracy is historical precisely because it encompasses timeless human values and rights—the commitment to future generations and freedom from past generations is due to this unbreakable bond that would unite the living and the dead, which, contrary to what Burke and conservatives think, is not historical. 

That said, democracy in Paine is a prolonged exercise of commitment, often tacit. It is not, therefore, a plebiscitary democracy in the sense of consulting the people on all decisions, or a “permanent revolution,” in the sense of a clean slate of political organization and a total reformulation of institutions, laws, and customs with each generation; but, as he stated in Rights of Man, the idea that “A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non-repealing passes for consent.”⁴⁹ Therefore, Himmelfarb seems to exaggerate when she says that: “The political revolution called for in Rights of Man was a genuine revolution that required the abolition of all the heritage of the past (..,) and inaugurated a kind of ‘permanent revolution’in which each generation would create its own laws and institutions.”⁵⁰

However, it is important to note that, in the text, the author does not envision the possibility of granting women the right to vote, whose exclusion is not even discussed. In contrast to hereditary government, in representative government (in Rights of Man, he had already observed that direct democracy would only be feasible in small territories), there is no problem of origins, as it is not anchored in conquest or usurpation, but in natural rights: “Man is himself the origin and the evidence of the right. It appertains to him in right of his existence, and his person is the title deed.”⁵¹ 

Property-based voting, therefore, would produce a new kind of aristocracy, as a despotism installed within representative government. Private property, when used to strip others of their rights, becomes a privilege and becomes illegitimate:

“Personal rights, of which the right of voting for representatives is one, are a species of property of the most sacred kind: and he that would employ his pecuniary property, or presume upon the influence it gives him, to dispossess or rob another of his property or rights, uses that pecuniary property as he would use fire-arms, and merits to have it taken from him.”⁵²

If, in nature, “all men are equal in rights, but they are not equal in power,” the institution of civil society aims at an “equalization of powers that shall be parallel to, and a guarantee of, the equality of rights.”⁵³ While nature and civil society are spaces of inequality, political society is the space of equality; thus, democracy, inseparable from the idea of rights, guarantees a field of negotiation and compromise, creating the possibility of defending the poor against the rich and everyone against the state.

The inequality of rights is created by a maneuver of one part of the community to deprive the other part of its rights. Every time an article of a Constitution or a law is created in which the right to elect or be elected belongs exclusively to people who own property, whether small or large, it is a maneuver by those who possess such property to exclude those who do not: “it is dangerous and impolitic, sometimes ridiculous, and always unjust to make property the criterion of the right of voting.”⁵⁴ 

Subjugating the freedom to vote to property relegates the right to choose representatives to irrelevance. Hence the absurdity of subordinating the freedom to vote to property, which, in the end, ties the right to things or animals:

“When a broodmare shall fortunately produce a foal or a mule that, by being worth the sum in question, shall convey to its owner the right of voting, or by its death take it from him, in whom does the origin of such a right exist? Is it in the man, or in the mule? When we consider how many ways property may be acquired without merit, and lost without crime, we ought to spurn the idea of making it a criterion of rights.”⁵⁵

Property-based suffrage, moreover, can link voting to crime, since, as the author reminds us, it is possible to acquire income through theft; in this sense, a crime could create rights. Furthermore, since, in a democracy, one can only lose their rights through a crime, the exclusion of the right to vote would create a “stigma” on those who do not own property, as if they were delinquents: Wealth is not proof of moral character, nor is poverty proof of its absence. “On the contrary, wealth is often the presumptive evidence of dishonesty; and poverty the negative evidence of innocence.”⁵⁶

The worst kind of government, Paine argues, is one in which deliberations and decisions are subject to the passion of a single individual. When the legislature is concentrated in one body, it resembles such an individual. Therefore, representation should be divided into two elected bodies, separated by lot. Such separation of powers did not actually occur in England, as the House of Lords, lacking representativeness, relates to the legislative power as a “member of the human body and an ulcerated wen.”⁵⁷ 

The executive and judicial powers, on the other hand, would both exercise a mechanical function: “The former [the legislative] corresponds to the intellectual faculties of the human mind which reasons and determines what shall be done; the second [the executive and judicial], to the mechanical powers of the human body that puts that determination into practise.”⁵⁸ Magistrates, thus, are mere delegates, “for it is impossible to conceive the idea of two sovereignties, a sovereignty to will and a sovereignty to act.”⁵⁹ Nevertheless, the defense of the separation of powers remains intact to the unity of sovereignty. 

Similarly, Paine continues, power should never be left in the hands of someone for too long, as the “inconveniences that may be supposed to accompany frequent changes are less to be feared than the danger that arises from long continuance.”⁶⁰ 

It is precisely these checks and balances that faded during the Jacobin period. Paine, then, distinguishes the methods used “to defeat despotism” and the procedures “to be employed after the defeat of despotism,” which are the “means to preserve liberty.”⁶¹ 

In the first case, necessity predominates, calling for insurrection and violence, since, in a despotic regime, legal means for change are barred. In the second case, respect, pacifism, and debate predominate, so that: “Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced [of the importance of rights have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.”⁶² 

Therefore, the government following a revolution should not be a revolutionary government. By revolutionary government, Paine means—and this is the heart of his interpretation of Jacobinism—a regime that maintains the use of the means that were necessary to overthrow the previous regime:

“Had a constitution been established two years ago (as ought to have been done), the violences that have since desolated France and injured the character of the Revolution, would, in my opinion, have been prevented. The nation would then have had a bond of union, and Every individual would have known the line of conduct he was to follow. But, instead of this, a revolutionary government, a thing without either principle or authority, was substituted in its place; virtue and crime depended upon accident; and that which was patriotism one day became treason the next (…) But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party party governs principle.⁶³

In summary, Paine aligns himself with the predominant concern of the Thermidorian deputies, namely, to “end the Revolution.” However, the Thermidorians, by removing the right to vote from the population, resemble the Jacobins in despotism and end up justifying new rebellions. In a way, although Paine rejects, as we have seen, British conservatism and the Thermidorian anti-democratic perspective, he does not fail to aspire to a kind of liberal-democratic status quo that institutionalizes revolutionary measures and ideas, abolishing the revolutionary government and leaving no other path for change but legal means. Thus, he concludes his pamphlet with one of his most expressive phrases:

“An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”⁶⁴

However, a note is in order: democracy, to Paine, will be incomplete if we think only of its political dimension. Its religious and social dimensions remain. At the time of the Dissertation, Paine wrote, in 1793, The Age of Reason, in which he presented revealed religions as anti-democratic, as they reinforced the authority of institutions and excluded the illiterate (who could not read the Scriptures) and those who had no opportunity to come into contact with the true religion from Truth and Salvation. Thus, deism would be the truly democratic religion, equally accessible to all human beings, regardless of where they were born or their level of education. In this text, Paine also discussed the importance of religions protecting animals other than humans. In 1797, he published Agrarian Justice, in which he argued that democracy would only be realized when everyone had minimum social conditions of existence and basic opportunities guaranteed—hence his idea of a state-guaranteed income for all citizens from a fund constituted by a universal tax on inheritances (at a rate of ten percent), a reform proposal that should serve as an alternative to the Agrarian Law. A treatment of these other dimensions of democracy in Paine will be done on another occasion. It is noteworthy, however, that Paine is far from reducing the democratic ideal to voting or mere political institutional mechanisms. 

In the meantime, a question arises: does Paine’s discourse, by defining itself as democratic, align in any way with the Robespierrist projects? There are several convergences between Paine and Robespierre: both converge in their critique of the Agrarian Law and in their defense of some form of Progressive Tax. The most glaring divergences between Paine and Robespierre occur, in this sense, in the political field. It should be noted that the Jacobin group did not have a ready-made program, as is sometimes assumed (moreover, there were no political parties as we understand them today), but an ideology always modified by revolutionary circumstances and which can only be qualified based on its speeches and practices. The same happened, by the way, with Robespierre himself, who oscillated in his defense of direct democracy (1789-1792), representative government (from the end of 1792), the importance of primary assemblies (changes of opinion are verified in September 1792), and the Constitution of 1791.⁶⁵ 

In this sense, we refer here to Robespierre during the months he was part of the collegium of the Committee of Public Safety. At first glance, Robespierre agreed with Paine, stating that property-based voting would create a new aristocracy, that of “the rich.”⁶⁶ However, although the Jacobin Constitution guaranteed universal suffrage, it did not put it into practice, as he stated in February 1794, it is necessary to “end the war of liberty against tyranny.”⁶⁷ To understand such measures, Robespierre said, one only needed to “consult the circumstances,” a thesis reproduced both by the Jacobins and by part of historiography in the 19th and 20th centuries.⁶⁸

Robespierre then accused those who called themselves moderates of being traitors (seen by him, in fact, as “moderantists”), for they desired a revolution “subordinated to pre-existing norms.”⁶⁹ Similarly, although Robespierre philosophically opposed the death penalty, he emphasized that a revolutionary government would require extreme measures: “The government owes the good citizens all national protection; to the enemies of the people, it owes nothing but death.”⁷⁰ Therefore, the opposition to the idea of a revolutionary government, as seen in the analysis of the Dissertation, is the crux of the disagreement between Paine and Robespierre—the tension “necessity/liberty,” capable of turning democracy into despotism, is rejected by the English thinker.⁷¹ 

It should be noted that, while Paine distances himself from the “thesis of circumstances” (usually associated with Marxist or Jacobin historiography), he also does not align with the notion, defended by a certain “liberal” historiography, that the terror was a logical conclusion of the Revolution, as suggested by Furet and Ozouf, or that violence was “the driving force” of the revolutionary process.⁷² The place of the Dissertation in the early interpretations of Jacobinism, therefore, lies in the reading of the terror as a deviation from the Revolution and a reminiscence of the despotism of the Old Regime (I hope that, thus, it is demonstrated that Paine’s text, contrary to what Clark pointed out, has something to tell us about the French Revolution). 

A DEMOCRATIC LIBERALISM 

In this sense, the moderate stance and the “preexisting norms” referred to by Robespierre touch precisely on what can be seen, from a certain perspective, as the liberal character of Paine’s thought—a key element that separates the positions of the two protagonists.

The earliest uses of the word liberal in reference to the ideas embodied in the revolutions of 1776- 1848 — no longer in relation to a specific education or vague idea of amicability (Simpkin, Weiner and Proffitt, 1989) — date back to early 19th century Spain. In the context of the Cádiz Constitution, the liberales referred to those opposed to representative government and the Constitution as serviles (servants). For example, in the magazine El Español, in 1811, Blanco White referred to the constitutionalists as liberales in reference to the impact of the French Revolution on Europe. In a letter to Jovellanos in 1809, the French general Sebastiani referred to “vuestras ideas liberales” (your liberal ideas) in speaking of the ideas of tolerance and equality that should lead the Spanish to ally with Napoleon against the Spanish monarchy.⁷³ In 1813, in the Diario Militar, Politico y Mercantil de Tarragona, we find the first known use of the word liberalismo: “if liberalism is (…) to desacralize a people, I detest being a liberal.”⁷⁴ 

That being said, it should be noted that in the realm of political ideas, the emergence of a specific denomination may not be understood exactly as an act of foundation, but as a gain in awareness (which is also a form of producing new meanings and possibilities for thought) regarding a situation that already possesses some degree of crystallization. In the case of liberalism, this crystallization process in the decades preceding 1820 is well-documented, as recent studies show. However, it is equally true that, in the absence of such a denomination, there is a risk of seeing in what has been established earlier a degree of coherence that might not actually exist.⁷⁵

In this sense—and considering the enormous variety of liberalisms throughout history—rather than thinking of liberalism as a doctrine, it seems more appropriate to see it as a field, or a vast space of thought with some identifiable degree of kinship, within which there is room for the creation and proposal of the most varied positions. As a space of thought, liberalism has limits, which defines the objective existence of this field and at the same time distances us from overly essentialist, dogmatic, or normative positions. 

Starting from these premises, we support the possibility of agreeing on the existence of a classical liberal language in the second half of the 18th century, prior to the actual emergence of the term liberalism, but which would share degrees of kinship with 19th century ideas. The elements and limits of this language would include, namely, the defense of natural rights, contractarianism, opposition to traditional privileges and corporate monopolies, the idea of a state of nature, and the defense of checks and balances against the excesses of the state and society. 

It is important to note, however, that such elements are often scattered (after all, it is only the emergence of the word liberalism that would attempt to create some unity and coherence) and do not appear uncontested in any one author. Likewise, they are sensitive to other discourses, especially republican ones. 

That said, to what extent is it plausible to say that classical liberalism is democratic? In other words, how did authors of the time deal with the issue of limiting and distributing power at the same time? 

The word democracy in the 18th century was rarely used in a favorable sense. Marquis d’Argenson (1694- 1757), in his Considérations sur le gouvernement de la France (1764), was one of the first to use it referring to political equality and rights (thus favored by the monarchy), rather than self-government. However, the terms Démocrat and Aristocrate did not appear in France and America before the revolutions—its first uses date back to the Dutch Revolution (1784-1787) and the Belgian Revolution (1789-1791). 

Throughout the Age of Revolutions, the term gained greater circulation, being associated with equal rights, popular government, or the primacy of local assemblies. For instance, Barnave referred to an “era of democratic revolutions” to characterize the period in which he lived. The uses indicate a fundamental transformation: in addition to being a form of government (democracy), the term also referred to agency (democrat), adjectivation (democratic), and actions (democratize). Thus, democracy meant both a form of government and a practice aimed at greater equality. 

Indeed, the three most frequent and favorable uses of the word democracy during the period were made by Robespierre (which, by the way, would later be a key reason for the word having a negative connotation in the following decades), by the bishop of Imola and future Pope Pius VII, and, of course, by Thomas Paine. The first time Paine explicitly used the term was, as seen, in the second half of Rights of Man, where he referred to democracy as a form, as well as a public principle of government, advocating for representation as a means of its realization. 

Nevertheless, at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, the field we call classical liberalism and democratic language in both Europe and North America were mismatched. The dominant position excluded from voting workers, salaried individuals, beggars, as well as women and children, as they were assumed to depend on the will of others. Property was understood by many as the means to link self-interest with societal interest, thereby ensuring access to political power.⁷⁶ Even in the 17th century, Locke, a highly influential author for this generation, believed that non-property owners lacked “full interest” in the benefit of society and should, therefore, be excluded from voting.⁷⁷ Jefferson, although reflecting critically on land and inheritance, viewed the condition for the existence of democracy as a society in which everyone was economically independent; like the Federalists Jay, Madison, and Hamilton, he linked voting to property.⁷⁸ Burke believed that society could not be governed by an “abstract principle” like popular voting.⁷⁹ Madame de Stäel, who attacked the Dissertation defended a more limited suffrage than that of the 1795 Constitution.⁸⁰ Benjamin Constant argued that “only property grants men the capacity to exercise democratic rights.”⁸¹ After the French Revolution, the so-called doctrinaire liberals concerned with the “tyranny of the majority” argued, as Tocqueville would later, for the need for firm dams against the democratic flood. 

Macpherson argued that the utilitarians Bentham and James Mill, the father of Stuart Mill, were the first democratic liberals. However, Bentham, in 1817, said that certain exclusions should be made, at least for a certain time and for the purposes of gradual experimentation.⁸² James Mill, in turn, argued that it would be prudent to exclude women, men under 40, and the poorer classes from voting. Stuart Mill, a proponent of women’s suffrage in Parliament, excluded from the franchise those who did not pay taxes, lived off charity, and argued that the more enlightened should have the right to plural voting.⁸³ 

A more recent historiography of liberalism brings new light to Paine’s work. In Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction, Michael Freeden reaffirms that until the 19th century, liberalism and democracy were disconnected for two correlated reasons: fear of the “tyranny of the majority” and the “ignorance of the people” (themes that were addressed by Paine).⁸⁴ In addition, three recent handbooks on the history of liberalism bear mention. First is Edmund Fawcett’s Liberalism.⁸⁴ Fawcett’s text does not reference Paine’s work, but James Traub’s What Was Liberalism briefly mentions Paine as someone who endorsed the revolutionary violence of the crowd.⁸⁵ After this characterization, Traub credits Madison with a view closer to ours on liberalism for considering the solution to the tyranny of the majority within, and not outside, democracy.⁸⁶ 

However, Madison’s democracy, as shown, was less inclusive in social and political terms than Paine’s. In The Federalist (No. 10, 1787), the Virginian, contrary to Paine, made an effort to dissociate republic and democracy: “democracies have always been the scene of disturbances and controversies, have proven incapable of ensuring personal security or property rights, and in general, have been as brief in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”⁸⁷ Finally, Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism refers to Paine in the chapter discussing the relationships between liberalism and the French Revolution.⁸⁸ The author makes an observation, which we believe is correct about Paine, arguing that, for him, the problem was not whether an individual or group was liberal, but whether the fundamental principles of a nation were. This observation is based on the distinction between “people” and “principles” made in Rights of Man, in his debate with Edmund Burke. 

Thus, it is possible to affirm that Thomas Paine was one of the first to present the formula of democratic liberalism, advocating a specific notion of equality and a broader suffrage than was common at the time, while still maintaining the foundation of natural rights, contract theory, free trade, and checks and balances. This combination, as seen, can only be understood in light of the history of the French Revolution and sets him apart from many of the positions that were overlooked by historians.

In Paine, the remedy for the ills of democracy and the protection of individual liberties does not lie in limited suffrage or repression, but in the refinement of democracy, understood as a limit to authoritarianism and greater political participation, coupled with a broader enlightenment of the population. The way to avoid the tyranny of the majority is not through restricting the vote, but by incorporating the lesser groups and future generations into the notion of the people, thus expanding the notion of popular sovereignty. The richness of these discussions in which Paine’s thought is embedded is, finally, symptomatic of the great laboratory of political experiments and ideas that constituted the Age of Revolutions. 

CONCLUSION 

The Dissertation is a seminal text in understanding the changes in Paine’s thought throughout the French Revolution and enlightening in regard to the problems and debates raised during the Thermidorian period, which became fundamental in the first half of the 19th century. The little attention the text has received from Paine is unfortunate. The text thus expresses two lesser-known facets of Paine: on one hand, his concern with the excesses of central power and the possibilities of a majority dictatorship, contrary to what was emphasized in most of his earlier texts; on the other hand, an openly democratic stance, which, although underlying texts such as Rights of Man, takes its most expressive form in this pamphlet—therefore, at once, a more democratic Paine, but also concerned with the potential excesses of such democracy, a rather distinct image from the Paine of Common Sense, who supported unicameralism and was hesitant about universal suffrage. The formulation of property undoubtedly as a right, but as a right less important than life or liberty, lies at the heart of his insubordination against inequalities. These changes, as attempted to be shown, are strongly linked to the Jacobin phenomenon itself and the practices of the Thermidorian government, which reveals the relevance of Paine studies for understanding the period.

Nevertheless, it is clear that Paine had his own contradictions. What, for some, is an ideological inconsistency and, for others, true political realism (since the enemies did not act within the rules of the democratic game and had international connections), he supported the coup of 18 Fructidor of Year IV, September 4, 1797, when the Directory annulled the March elections that had given the realists a majority. The Fructidor coup reinforced an authoritarian path that culminated in the 18 Brumaire coup of 1799. Although he rejected Robespierre’s “principle of circumstances” and “the logic of Public Salvation,” Paine did not, therefore, refrain from using the same tactic. In any case, Paine never denied the need for revolutionary violence, as expressed in his well-known break with the Quakers in 1776—only that, in the Jacobin period, he did not see such a need. The author also encouraged the Directory to invade Great Britain and, along with Bonaparte, devised a detailed plan for the French troops’ entry into the island and launched the idea of a vast popular subscription to finance the operation.⁸⁹ 

Moreover, the ^Dissertation occupies a fundamental place in the history of liberal thought, as I have attempted to show. I believe that today, the liberal field faces three primary challenges, namely: how to prevent inequality, in its most acute forms, from being harmful to life and liberty without resorting to authoritarian solutions? How to ensure that the purported universalism of liberty and human rights coexists with the contradictory diversity of thoughts, beliefs, and forms of existence? How, without resorting to some form of elitist dirigisme, to prevent men, by their own disposition, from renouncing democracy in favor of dictatorial regimes? The discussions about these issues can be enriched if Paine’s perspectives are considered.

1. This paper was originally published in 2021 in the Revista de História of University of São Paulo (USP) under the title “Thomas Paine e a Revolução Francesa: Entre o Liberalismo e a Democracia (1794-1795).” The generosity of the Revista de História in allowing the publication of this text in English is greatly appreciated. 
2. This poem was distributed by the Irishman Arthur O’Connell in 1798. Apparently, it was a rebuttal to Thomas Paine. However, if the first verse of the first stanza is interwoven with the first verse of the second stanza, as well as the second, the third, and so on, the result would be a subversive pamphlet, which was O’Connell’s real objective. Paine was an honorary member of the Society of United Irishmen, which advocated for parliamentary reform (Hitchens, 2007).
4. On the leveling position, see Crawford Brough Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973, and more recently, Taylor; Tapsell, 2013. 
5. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, I, (New York: The Citadel Press, 1945), 287. 
6. Foner, The Complete Writings, 277 
7. Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 161-162. 
8. Foner, The Complete Writings, 1238
9. Foner, The Complete Writings, 61, 127, 237. 
10. Foner, The Complete Writings, 715. 
11. Foner, The Complete Writings, 284. 
12. Alfred Owen Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine, (New York: J. P. Lippincott Company, 1959). 225. 
13. Bernard Vincent, Thomas Paine: O Revolucionário da Liberdade. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1989. 
14. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life. London: Bloomsbury, 1995; and Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution and the Birth of Modern Nations, (New York: Viking Penguin, 2006
15. Philp, Mark. Paine. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 21; and Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought, (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 
16. Modesto Florenzano, Começar o mundo de novo: Thomas Paine e outros estudos. Tese (livre-docência:Universidade de São Paulo, 1999). 
17. J.C.D. Clark, Thomas Paine: Britain, America, and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) 359-362. 
18. Modesto Florenzano, Começar o mundo de novo: Thomas Paine e outros estudos. Tese (livre-docência:Universidade de São Paulo, 1999). 
19. Carine Lounissi, Thomas Paine and the French Revolution. (Cham: Springer, 2018), 235
20. Bronislaw Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur, (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 421. 
21. Albert Soboul, A Revolução Francesa. (São Paulo: Difel, 2003), 108. 
22. Jean-Clément Martin, La Revolución Francesa: Una Nueva Historia. (Barcelona: Crítica, 2019), 447. 
23. Jeremy Popkin, A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution,(London: Hachette UK, 2019), 448. 21 Foner, II, pg. 968. 
24. Bernard Vincent, Thomas Paine: O Revolucionário da Liberdade. (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1989), 258.
25. Foner, The Complete Writings, 590. 
26. François Furet, e Mona Ozouf, eds. Dicionário Crítico da Revolução Francesa. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1988), 50. 
27. Richard Bienvenu, The Ninth of Thermidor: The Fall of Robespierre. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 
28. Nora citation is missing, 1988. 
29. Soubel, A Revolução Francesa.
30. Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur, 429. 
31. Popkin, A New World Begins, 420, 450. 
32. It is important to remember that, at the time of the publication of Common Sense, John Adams stated that Paine’s pamphlet was “o democratical, without any restraint or even an Attempt at any Equilibrium or Counterpoise, that it must produce confusion and every Evil Work” (Bailyn, 2003, p. 262). During the French Revolution, in a text likely written in 1791, Paine wrote an interesting and little-known pamphlet, organized around questions and answers, called Answer to Four Questions on the Legislative and Executive Powers. The first of the four questions (which by itself is representative of the urgency of the issue) concerns the possible abuses of the executive and legislative powers. Paine is then emphatic in stating that, “If the legislative and executive powers be regarded as springing from the same source, the nation, and as having as their object the nation’s weal by such a distribution of its authority, it will be difficult to foresee any contingency in which one power could derive advantage from overbalancing the other” (Foner, 1945, p. 522). Therefore, there is an important shift in Paine’s thinking, which occurs in light of the Jacobin practices, namely, the greater importance of checks and balances in political structures. 
33. Foner, The Complete Writings, 571. 
34. Foner, The Complete Writings, 571. 
35. Foner, The Complete Writings, 571-572
36. Foner, The Complete Writings, 572. 
37. Foner, The Complete Writings, 584. 
38. Franco Venturi, Utopia e reforma no Iluminismo. (São Paulo: Edusc, 2003). 
39. Jonathan Israel, A Revolução das Luzes: O Iluminismo Radical e as Origens Intelectuais da Democracia Moderna. São Paulo: Edipro, 2013. 
40. Foner, The Complete Writings, 572-573. 
41. Foner, The Complete Writings, 573. 
42. Foner, The Complete Writings, 574. 
43. Foner, The Complete Writings, 574.
44. Anthony Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott. (London: Faber, 1978). 
45. Foner, The Complete Writings, 574. 
46. Foner, The Complete Writings, 575. 
47. Foner, The Complete Writings, 575. 
48. Pierre Rosanvallon, El momento Guizot: el liberalismo doctrinario entre la Restauración y la Revolución de 1848/Le moment Guizot, (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2015), 90. 
49. Foner, The Complete Writings, 254 
50. Gertrude Himmelfarb, La Idea de Pobreza: Inglaterra a Principios de la Era Industrial, (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 116.
51. Foner, The Complete Writings, 577. 
52. Foner, The Complete Writings, 577. 
53. Foner, The Complete Writings, 583. 
54. Foner, The Complete Writings, 579 
55. Foner, The Complete Writings, 579 
56. Foner, The Complete Writings, 579
57. Foner, The Complete Writings, 586. 
58. Foner, The Complete Writings, 586. 
59. Foner, The Complete Writings, 586. 
60. Foner, The Complete Writings, 587 
61. Foner, The Complete Writings, 587 
62. Foner, The Complete Writings, 587 
63. Foner, The Complete Writings, 587-588
64. Foner, The Complete Writings, 588. 
65. Furet, François, e Mona Ozouf, eds. Dicionário Crítico da Revolução Francesa. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1988), 320. 
66. Žižek, Slavoj. Robespierre: Virtude e Terror. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Zahar, 2007), 53. 
67. Žižek, Robespierre, 144. 
68. Žižek, Robespierre, 146
69. Žižek, Robespierre, 12. 
70. Žižek, Robespierre, 12. 
71. Ruy Fausto, “Em torno da pré-história intelectual do totalitarismo igualitarista.” Lua Nova, no. 75 (2008): 143–98. 
72. Schama, Simon. Cidadãos: Uma Crônica da Revolução Francesa. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989)689. 
73. Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos, Obras Completas, Vol 1, (Madrid: Atlas, 1963), 590-591. 
74. Vicente Lloréns, “Sobre la aparición de liberal.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 12, no. 1 (1958): 53–58. 
75. Daniel Klein showed how, in English the word “liberal” underwent a dual transformation in the second half of the 18th century: both quantitative, as the word began to appear more frequently after 1760; and qualitative, as it started to appear in compound forms (“liberal policy,” “liberal views,” and “liberal ideas.” It was associated with the idea of free action, free trade, and non-intervention. The change was not drastic, and as seen in Paine’s work, the term displays clear polysemy. For example, Dugald Stewart, in the 1790s, presented Adam Smith as a representative of the liberal system and as someone who thought of “freedom of trade” as distinct from “political freedom” (the latter, for him, being typical of the French Revolution). See Rothschild, 2003; Klein, 2014; and the text by Robertson in Clark, 2003
76. Rothschild, Emma. Sentimentos econômicos: Adam Smith, Condorcet, e o iluminismo. (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2003.) 
77. Crawford Brough Macpherson, A Teoria Política do Individualismo Possessivo: De Hobbes até Locke. (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1979).
78. Arendt, Hannah. Da Revolução. (Brasília: Editora Universidade de Brasília, 1988). 
79. Burke, Edmund. Reflexões sobre a Revolução na França. (São Paulo: Edipro, 2014), 36. 
80. Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël, Des circonstances actuelles et autres essais politiques sous la Révolution. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009). 
81. Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements. (Paris: Hachette, 1997), 113. 
82. Macpherson, A Teoria Política do Individualismo Possessivo, 40. 
83. John Stuart Mill, Considerações Sobre o Governo Representativo. (Brasília: Editora da Universidade de Brasília, 1981). 
84. Michael Freedon, Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 84 Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 
85. James Traub, What Was Liberalism?: The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea. (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 18. 
86. Traub, What Was Liberalism,? 23. 
87. Modesto Florenzano, Começar o mundo de novo: Thomas Paine e outros estudos. (Tese livre-docência:Universidade de São Paulo, 1999), 10. 
88. Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 47.
89. Daniel Gomes de Carvalho, O pensamento radical de Thomas Paine (1793-1797): artífice e obra da Revolução Francesa. Tese de doutorado, Universidade de São Paulo, 2017. https://doi.org/10.11606/T.8.2018.tde-12062018-135137. Acesso em 15 de fevereiro de 2020.

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Dr. Polin is Professor Emeritus of Government and Politics, St. John’s University, New York, and Mrs. Polin is his co-reseorcher and co-author of a work nearing completion on American political thought.

Quo warranto?

By what warrant, right, or authority may a government perform such acts and functions as make law, tax, regulate industry and education, try, fine, imprison, and even execute; and such additional duties as maintain armed forces, enter into treaties, make war and peace, set standards of measurement, license medical practice, erect roads and bridges, control the traffic that travels over them or through the air, conduct elections, and grant or recognize citizenship?

A simple answer that states the encompassing principle that can legitimate a government’s exercise of such numerous and varied powers was penned by Thomas Jefferson in the dictum in the Declaration of Independence that, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The means of giving consent in a proper way for a government to have widely known, proper powers, limitations, and duties is Thomas Paine’s concern in his treatment of constitutions. Paine purposed to realize for every individual, as much as possible, the God-given natural rights and liberty of mankind. Such a goal for any nation, Paine believed, is best and most easily accomplished through the agency of a constitution that by its sequence of adoption and substantive content accorded with what he advocated in Rights of Man (1791-92).

Paine takes care to eliminate from consideration, therefore, any consideration that a governmental contract could be the basis of a valid constitution or legitimate government. A governmental contract was one that followed the rationale of a feudal relationship contract: between unequals and often entered into under duress; Paine argued especially against its usual provision of translatio: translation or permanent alienation (transfer from) of a title (i.e., legal ownership of a property). Here Paine was reaffirming that our God-given natural rights and liberty cannot be alienated from us. Paine therefore responds energetically to Edmund Burke’s obsequiouslv employed illustration in his Reflections on the Revolution in France ( 1790) that recounted use of translatio (permanent and unlimited transfer) to vest the British monarch with assertions of sovereignty in a declaration by Parliament to William of Orange and Mary in 1688:

“The Lords Spirirual and Temporal, do, in the name of the people aforesaid.- (meaning the people of England then living) “most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities for EVER.” He also quotes a clause of another act of Parliament made in the same reign, the terms of which, he says, “bind us,” (meaning the people of that day) “our heirs and posterity, to them, their heirs and posterity, to the end of time.”

Paine indignantly retorts:

“Every age and government must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.”

What Thomas Paine favors as the basis of a constitution is a social contract, an agreement among “We, the People” as equals, to set up an arrangement or constitution that is limited in kinds and duration of grant of power: i.e., it is predicated on the principle of concessio (concession of limited extent of power that is conditional and therefore withdrawable when performance is not satisfactory). Paine regarded the recent American state and Federal constitutions as examples of social compacts and proper constitutions that enabled their governments to exercise their powers justly because limited in substance and as to due process, including method of amendment.

Paine stipulated prior adoption by the people-not the government – as a necessary authorization for institution or alteration of a constitution. Thus, he agreed with Alexander Hamilton’s statement in Federalist No. 22 that, “The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.” Paine presented the same idea but required the sequence of popular action beforehand:

A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting a government.

Paine reiterates: “A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution, is power without a right.”

For Paine, a constitution should provide the fundamental rules according to which the government is organized and operates as it decides on policies, maintains public order and safety, and protects liberty. He succinctly states: “The American Constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax.”

Paine’s definition of a constitution, is not as inclusive, flexible, or authoritative as the standard one by Lord Bolingbroke (Viscount Henry St. John) in his 1733 work, A Dissertation upon Parties. Bolingbroke properly allowed for traditional, unwritten, or partially written, constitutions as well as written ones of the type Paine demanded. Paine, instead, was a more tendentious polemicist who wanted to show that the British monarchical government was exercising unconsented-to power in ways dangerous to her own and other peoples; and he also wished there to be an order of procedure that would be more likely to produce: (1) the consent of the people as a whole to a constitution; and(2) a definite, widely known description of the limits as well as powers of the government, so that the people would be more secure from and better served by it.

We should not conclude without asking when would Thomas Paine have been satisfied with a constitution? Paine himself gives us an answer:

When it shall be said in any country in the world, “My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness” – when these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and its government.

Finally, we should ask what most motivated Thomas Paine in developing his socio-politico-economic agenda? Clearly, the goals he set in his statement about the kind of constitution and country he wanted, were understood by him not to be fully achievable in his lifetime; but he felt compelled to declare them in order to encourage mankind to persist in the brave new era of the Enlightenment to make a better world by following deistic-Quaker religious principles. The central purpose of these teachings was to help one another, especially when in need.

In a footnote to his “Observations on the Declaration of Rights” (1791), Paine writes of an original pactum divinum (“a covenant with the Lord”) that antedates and outranks all other pacts and authority of government: “a compact between God and man, from the beginning of time.” In accordance with this covenant, we are commanded by God to love and serve one another and to keep also God’s other commandments. Thus, the much misrepresented Paine, although by no means saintly in attitude or behavior, was in fact sincerely devout in the best sense of the word: doing God’s will. Paine’s political thought and life of action should therefore be understood as deriving mostly from his religious faith and faithfulness to the word of God as he was taught and perceived it:

It is time that because of his wise words and brave deeds, Thomas Paine should be regarded as “a son of the commandments” that constitute “a covenant with the Lord.”

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2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the greatest works of modern British history, E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. While a celebration of the emergence of collective class consciousness, this magnificent study is not without key personalities and individual inspirational figures, not least Thomas Paine of Thetford, an inveterate pamphleteer and veritable ‘citizen of the world’. 

Paine is the key individual catalyst instigating Thompson’s narrative. It was his great gift for communication his ‘intellectual vernacular prose’ – which broke through the elite and gentlemanly conventions of 18th political debate to render the message of natural rights and rational republicanism accessible to ‘members unlimited’, the strapline of the new Corresponding Societies of the 1790s (whose membership extended to those designated by Edmund Burke, Paine’s protagonist, as the ‘swinish multitude’). A great communicator rather than original thinker, it was citizen Paine who opened up the prospect of a new age of reason in which universal and natural rights (at least for men) would no longer be denied by privilege and the past, by spurious argument premised on dubious history, bogus constitutionalism, invented tradition or inherited superstition. 

Thompson’s interpretation underlined Paine’s importance in what was labelled by historians as the ‘Atlantic-Democratic Revolution’. In the 1960s, my undergraduate days, this exercise in comparative history breaking through the constraints of nation state historiography was as fashionable as Thompson’s history from below. In light of events in Syria which have prompted the US to remember France as its ‘oldest ally’, the Atlantic Democratic Revolution might come back into fashion again. 

Paine traversed the Atlantic world, personifying, as it were, the democratic revolution with its universal message, a motif which informed ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’, the alternative national anthem, as it were, of British republicans. Here, for example, are the first and fourth verses: God save great Thomas Paine, 

God save great Thomas Paine, 

His ‘Rights of Man’ explain 

To every soul. 

He makes the blind to see What dupes and slaves they be, 

And points out liberty, 

From pole to pole. Why should despotic pride Usurp on every side? 

Let us be free: 

Grant Freedom’s arms success, 

And all her efforts bless, 

Plant through the universe 

Liberty’s Tree. 

Having been apprenticed to his father’s trade of corset-making, he tried a number of other occupations (most notably serving as an exciseman in Lewes) before sailing for America in 1774, having recently separated from his second wife. Here he made his name with a pamphlet, Common Sense(1776) which, in advocating complete independence for the American colonies, argued for republicanism as the sole rational means of government the mostly widely distributed pamphlet of the American War of Independence, it has the strongest claim, the Dictionary of National Biography notes, to have made independence seem both desirable and attainable to the wavering colonists. Relishing the freedom of the new world (and its potential for commercial progress) Paine readily cast aside the restrictive and gentlemanly conventions of British politics, not least the exclusive tone of Whig ‘republicanism’, a form of ‘civic humanism’, premised on glorified models of classical antiquity and selective memories of seventeenth century constitutional struggles. Far from democratic, ‘republicanism’ of this order accorded political primacy to independent landowners. Guardians of the constitution, it was their duty to resist imbalance and corruption in the polity through civic virtue, by active participation in political affairs. Paine, however, was altogether more democratic and inclusive. Looking beyond the trivia of piecemeal constitutional renovation, he sought an end to executive tyranny and what we would now call ‘sleaze’ through the ‘virtue’ and common good of representative democratic republican government. Hence his enthusiastic response to the French Revolution, by which time he had returned to England. 

His democratic natural rights republicanism reached its most influential expression in his two-part Rights of Man (1791-2), prompted by the need to refute Edmund Burke’s critical Reflections on the Revolution in France. This was a publication sensation- on the most conservative estimate between 100,000 and 200,000 copies were sold in the first three years after publication. In the frenzied atmosphere of the early 1790s, Paine’s writings rendered a fundamental division between the gentlemanly ‘Friends of the People’ and the plebeian ‘Friends of Liberty’. His insistence on natural – as opposed to historicist or constitutional – rights broke through elite constraints, not least the identification of political rights with property rights. Indeed, his democratic republicanism mediated a genuinely radical value-system, oppositional in all its aspects. In calling for a national convention to elicit the general will and establish a republican constitution, he sought a decisive break from the conventional ways and means of reformers such as petitioning. Regarded as a highly dangerous figure, he was forced to flee to France to avoid arrest for treason in 1792. Having been accorded honorary French citizenship, he gained election to the French National Convention but ceased to attend after opposing (to some surprise) the execution of Louis XVI and the fall of the Girondins, after which he himself soon fell victim of the Terror. During imprisonment, he began work on his Age of Reason (two parts, 1794-5), an ill- timed deist attack on organized religion. 

Thereafter his fame and fortunes declined. According to most accounts, he died in miserable circumstances in New York in 1809, having spent his last years in America often depressed, drunk and diseased – although some responses to my BBC history piece suggest otherwise. Ken Burchell contacted me from an email address, Paineite@gmail, to inform me that Paine’s financial worth at time of death was in the region of $15,000, that with a consumption of a quart of brandy per week he drank far less than either Washington or Jefferson and that he was no more depressed than any other elderly dying person. The fact is, Mr Burchell insisted, ‘prudish, evangelical, pro-temperance and most of all Federalist writers attacked Paine’s personal character in order to blunt his personal influence … just as they do today’. Paine’s legacy has certainly proved controversial and contested. 

Within my working life as an historian, there has been considerable change. There was a marked decline in his historiographical standing as the radical 1960s receded. By the time of Thatcherite Britain, mainstream historians were dismissing Paine and his autodidact artisan audiences in the Corresponding and radical societies as an insignificant minority, accorded disproportionately tendentious attention by Thompson and other ‘marxisant’ practitioners of ‘history from below’, ideologically predisposed to ignore the beer-swilling, male chauvinist, xenophobic, beer-swilling, flag-waving majority. Furthermore, the historical establishment insisted, ‘Painophobia’ the reaction proved by Paine – proved stronger than the radicalism he excited. Compelled to answer the democratic Jacobin challenge, conservative opponents of reform developed a convincing defence of the existing order: indeed, it was the conservatives who won the unprecedented battle for the popular mind in the 1790s, although here it was conceded that rhetorical strategy and propaganda device took precedence over ideology and intellectual argument. Burke had already set the tone, recapturing the language of nationalism for the conservative cause in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Vindicated by the subsequent course of events in France, Burke’s prescient pronouncements duly confirmed the supremacy of the accumulated wisdom of precedent and prescription over the wild (and un- English) fanaticism of Paineite abstract reason. Two particular aspects of Paine’s un-English fanaticism were seized upon by the conservative spin doctors of the time to telling effect: levelling and infidelism. 

While extolling Paine as a popular communicator, Thompson had also insisted that he provided the programme as well as the language to attract working people to politics. Paine provided the missing link between parliamentary reform and social and economic progress, drawing distressed workers away from spontaneous rioting into organized political agitation. As Thompson saw it, this was the great achievement of Part Two of The Rights of Man, published in February 1792, a volume which confirmed that Paine was much more than a talented populariser of advanced ideas, a megaphone for the enlightenment project against kingcraft, lordcraft and priestcraft. An original thinker far ahead of his time, he sought to redress poverty (seemingly endemic in advanced European societies) through an interventionist programme of welfare redistribution, including old age pensions, marriage allowances and maternity benefits. 

Stopping short of socialism, Paine transformed jurisprudential notions of social obligation the ‘soft’ right to charity into a theory of ‘positive liberty’ the ‘hard’ right to welfare, guaranteed by government and financed by redistributive taxation (a programme expanded in his later pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, 1796). Judged over the long term, Thompson was correct: Paine made a decisive contribution to the politicisation of discontent. At the time, however, it was the misrepresentation of his ideas rather than the inspiration they provided – which mattered more. The charge of ‘levelling’ or economic equality, promptly emerged as the crucial factor in the loyalist triumph over the radicals. Where Burke looked back to gothic feudalism and past glories, loyalist popular propagandists celebrated Britain’s commercial progress, the contemporary wealth of the nation threatened by the spoliation and anarchy of republican egalitarianism. In defending inequality and hierarchy, loyalists stood forward to save Britain from the pre-commercial ‘primitivism’ of natural rights republicanism. 

Paine’s inopportune avowal of deism in his Age of Reason (1794-5) enabled loyalists to add infidelism to the charges of primitivism and levelling. Here the propaganda victory of the loyalists over the godless republican levellers should not be attributed to superior argument but to what sociologists call ‘resource mobilisation’. Where loyalists triumphed was in quantity not quality. Untroubled by the authorities or lack of funds, loyalists deployed every medium and resource to spread the patriotic conservative message in popular and homiletic form among the lower orders, from parish pulpit to national organisation – Reeves Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers was the largest political organisation in the country. Many of the corresponding societies fell victim to this conservative onslaught, given physical form by Church and King mobs. The surviving societies judiciously excised the offending Paineite vocabulary of rational republicanism with its alien and revolutionary stigma. The violence directed against the radicals was recorded in the second verse of ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’: 

Thousands cry ‘Church and King’ 

That well deserve to swing, 

All must allow: 

Birmingham blush for shame, 

Manchester do the same, 

Infamous is your name, Patriots vow. 

While radicals struggled to retain a public presence, loyalists chose to treat the crowds to an increasing number of patriotic demonstrations to celebrate royal anniversaries and victories over the French. The success of these free holidays and licensed street festivals at which effigies of Paine were often burnt – was not without irony, as I noted by way of conclusion in my BBC piece. In confronting Paineite democracy through such popular nationalist participation, loyalists had established what the radicals had failed fully to achieve, the extension of politics to a mass public. As subsequent events were to show, this public expressed its loyalty to the nation, not necessarily to the status quo. Patriotism indeed was soon to acquire a radical inflexion, upholding the rights of the freeborn Englishman. 

After the polarization of political rhetoric in the 1790s, the opening decade of the 19th century was a time of considerable flux and confusion as war, patriotism and reform were all reassessed and redefined. Once Napoleon’s imperial ambitions became apparent, the character of the war effort changed. Having previously opposed the war – an aggressive conflict against a neighbouring country which simply wanted to reform its internal system of government – radicals now came forward as ardent patriots at the head of recruiting and volunteering drives. 

Having redefined their role as guardians of national virtue, radicals began to attract a wide audience as a series of scandals suggested a connection between military incompetence and parliamentary corruption. Disaffected loyalists joined the radicals in condemnation of the depredations of the fiscal-military state. Among such converts were William Cobbett, the most prolific and influential radical journalist of the early 19th century, and Henry Hunt, the Wiltshire gentleman farmer turned radical orator. Defiantly independent, these former loyalists injected a mood of impatience and intransigence, insisting on the right of all to engage in constitutional protest, to attend meetings, sign petitions and demand nothing less than universal suffrage, annual parliaments and the ballot. While refusing to compromise their new radical principles in subservience either to the Whigs or to commercial interests, they studiously avoided adherence to Paineite rational republicanism. 

In typically English pragmatic and eclectic manner, natural rights arguments were subsumed or concealed within a patriotic appeal to history and precedent. Major Cartwright devoted a lifetime of study to uncover hallowed Saxon principles and practices of popular sovereignty, an original purity defiled by the ‘Norman Yoke’. Open and inclusive in procedure and programme, the mass platform which emerged after 1815 amidst the transition from war to peace without plenty, deliberately exploited ambiguities in the law and constitution, drawing upon the emotive rhetoric of popular constitutionalism and ‘people’s history’ in demanding restoration of the people’s rights. Radicals proudly claimed descent from ‘that patriotic band who broke the ruffian arm of arbitrary power, and dyed the field and scaffold with their pure and precious blood, for the liberties of the country’. The appeal to the rights of the freeborn Englishman was perhaps best expressed in poetic form: 

Shall Englishmen o’ercome each foe 

And now at home those rights forgo 

Enjoy’d by none beside? 

Degenerate race! Ah! then in vain 

Your birthrights sacred to maintain 

HAMPDEN and SYDNEY died! 

The great hero of the mass platform and advocate of ‘the cause of truth’, Orator Hunt was hailed in the north of England as ‘the intrepid champion of the people’s rights’. ‘The good old character of an independent country Gentleman was surely there in him’, a correspondent wrote to the Manchester Observer. 

I had almost compared him to an English Baron in the time of Magna Charta, but that Mr Hunt’s motives were so much more praiseworthy: he was not there as they met that worthless King at Runnimede, to advocate the rights of a few, but of all. 

Mobilised by Hunt, those without the political nation stood forward to demand radical reform in open constitutional manner and in Sunday best clothes, relying on the proud and disciplined display of numbers (marshalled by demobilised ex-servicemen) to coerce the otherwise inexorable government ‘peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must. The popular format introduced by Hunt constitutional mass pressure from without for the constitutional democratic rights of all continued to inform radical agitation throughout the age of the Chartists. Radicals – renovators as they were initially called – looked to the mass petitioning platform to reclaim their rights, ignoring Paine’s key tactical prescription of a national convention to elicit the general will and establish a republican constitution. 

My work on Hunt and the mass platform thus led me to question Thompson’s claims about Paine and his breakthrough language of universal rational republicanism. As my research demonstrated, natural rights republicanism and conventions of the type prescribed by Paine did not feature in early 19th century radicalism. Instead, the crowds rallied to a populist platform of mass petitioning justified by history, the constitution and the rule of law, a potent blend of patriotic and national notions. While querying Thompson on the language of radicalism, I am not seeking to belittle Paine. Like Thompson, I recognise him as a seminal influence in English radicalism, the inspirational figure in the politicization of discontent. As Thompson noted, it was Paine who supplied the missing link, underlining the importance of politics to those enduring economic hardship. Thanks to Paine, spontaneous, backward-looking rioting was steadily replaced by forward-looking political agitation, a great advance which William Cobbett opined, the nation should acknowledge. 

The implacable opponent of ‘Old Corruption’, Cobbett gained much of his political education about The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance from Paine’s critical insights into the operation of the ‘system’ (or ‘the Thing’ as Cobbett himself called it) which produced lucrative profits for political peculators and financial speculators at the expense of an intolerable and demand-stifling tax burden on the poor. To honour his mentor, Cobbett reclaimed Paine’s bones from their American grave and brought them back to England (they have since disappeared). 

Educated by Paine, later by Cobbett, 19th century radicals persisted in explaining inequality and exploitation in political terms even as the industrial revolution continued apace. Just as the war-inflated ‘funding system’ had been built on the base of political monopoly so it was political power that underpinned the capitalist system and denied the worker the right to the whole produce of his labour. The ranks of radical demonology grew throughout the age of the Chartists: alongside fundholders, sinecurists, pensioners and other tax-gorgers, there now sat cotton lords, millocrats (note the significant political terminology) and other capitalists, parasitic middlemen whose privileged and tyrannical position of unequal exchange stemmed from their monopoly of political and legal power. Whether directed against tax- eaters and/or capitalists, the radical demand was always the same: an end to the system which left labour alone unprotected and at the mercy of those who monopolized the state and the law. 

Paine’s influence was thus fundamental, albeit not in the way that we might suppose. There were periodic attempts to impose his rational republican formula in purist form, by those disillusioned by the cyclical pattern of mobilisation and collapse of the mass platform, with its vacillating crowds, blustering orators and populist idioms. One such was Richard Carlile, an incorruptible Paineite ideologue who in the aftermath of Peterloo and the collapse of the post-war mass platform subjected himself to a regime of ideological purification and physical Puritanism with comprehensive counter- cultural rigour. A trenchant critic of the empty bluster and personalized style of Hunt’s ‘charismatic’ leadership, Carlile subsequently displayed the worst faults of an ‘ideological’ leader, provoking innumerable schisms among the votaries with his dictatorial pronouncements on doctrine, so different in tone from the eclectic and undogmatic nature of popular radical argument. He insisted on strict conformity to the infidel-Republican Paineite formulary, the exegesis of which (at different times desist, atheist and spiritualist) he reserved for himself alone. In this intensely sectarian and ideological form, rational republicanism failed to engage with the general gut republicanism — the irreverence, scepticism and anti-authoritarianism — which often ran deep in working-class culture. 

No longer committed to the platform, mass agitation and volatile crowds, Carlile looked to the freedom of the press to promote the ‘march of infidelity’, the progress of scientific materialism against superstition, myth and ignorance, but here he found himself in unwelcome alliance with commercial pornographers and the like. Unlike the pornographers, however, Carlile and his ‘corps’ of supporters were libertarians not libertines. In the sanctity of their ‘temples of reason’, these votaries of Paineite republicanism, ‘zetetics’ as they were called, advocated contraception, female equality and free love, a programme of sexual radicalism articulated in the language of the liberal Enlightenment, of individual freedom and moral responsibility. Infidel, republican and sexual radical, Carlile, the doctrinaire individualist, was also the proselyte of orthodox political economy. His pioneer advocacy of birth control was motivated by Malthusianism as much as by feminism, by his conviction that distress was caused by the people themselves through bad and improvident habits and the ‘excess of their numbers in relation to the supply of labour that can employ them’. ‘You cannot be free, you can find no reform, until you begin it with yourselves… abstain from gin and the gin-shop, from gospel and the gospel-shop, from sin and silly salvation’. By the end of the 1820s Carlile stood widely divorced from popular radicalism, culture and experience, a lone opponent of collective endeavour. Interpreted – or rather misinterpreted in this way, Paine plays no part in the making of the English working class. 

Eschewing ideological schisms and the like, mainstream popular radicals never denied the inspiration provided by ‘immortal’ Thomas Paine, but they ensured that his memory was preserved within a patriotic pantheon in which the universal rights of man were subsumed within the historic and constitutional rights of the freeborn Englishman, the charter of the land. The citizens of the world was honoured as British patriot.

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La Pensee Politique de Thomas Paine en Contexte: Theorie at Pratique. Carine Lounissi. 894pp. Paris Honore Champion 2012. ISBN: 978 —2-7453-2359-0. £139.06. 

This fundamental contribution to Paine’s political thought, based on a Ph. D thesis at the Sorbonne, deserves to be translated into English so that it becomes available to all Anglophones interested in the subject. Dr Lounissi places his writings in context by examining the literature on which he apparently drew for inspiration, and also by discussing the often hostile reactions that they provoked. 

One can only say that previous political thinkers appear to have influenced Paine because he notoriously cited very few authorities in his publications and insisted that his ideas were original. Thus when critics dismissed Common Sense as being derived from John Locke he denied that he had ever read Two Treatises of Government. There were contemporaries who took him at his word that his political thought was homespun. Edmund Burke declined directly responding to the Rights of Man claiming that Paine had ‘not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learned the instrumental part of literature, a style, and a method of disposing his ideas, without having ever made a previous preparation of study or thinking—for the use of it’. 

Notwithstanding this, commentators on Paine’s political philosophy have sought to trace it back to previous philosophers. Thus despite his own disclaimer some have insisted that he was influenced by Locke since, even if he did not read his works, Lockean ideas were ‘in the air’, or he absorbed them ‘by osmosis’. Lounissi concludes that, while at first sight Paine’s thought often seems Lockean, on a deeper comparison between them differences emerge. For example both place the origins of government in a contract in which individuals agreed to set one up. Superficially these are similar if not identical models. But on closer examination they have significant differences. Locke accepted any government which was established by the contract — monarchy, aristocracy, democracy or, as he claimed was the case in England, a mixture of these. Paine by contrast denied that the original contract could set up any hereditary form of government since it could not bind future generations. Only a polity in which the people had a voice was legitimate. 

Despite her scepticism Lounissi concludes that Paine’s contractual theory was sown in a Lockean soil. She also finds echoes in Paine of the contractual theories of Algernon Sidney and Rousseau. On the latter she is on firmer ground as Rousseau was one of the writers whom Paine did cite, along with Montesquieu, Voltaire and other philosophes, in Rights of Man. One of Paine’s hostile critics lamented that France had been a ‘generous and gallant nation’ before it was ‘unhappily sophisticated by the late — forged philosophy of ingenious, immoral vagabonds, such as Rousseau and Paine’ As with all direct quotations from English authors Lounissi commendably translates this into French in the text but quotes the original in her footnote on page 185. 

The footnote cites the original in the edition of Political Writings of the 1790s edited by Gregory Claeys, in eight volumes published by Pickering and Chatto in 1995. These publishers have rendered a great service to students of Paine with this publication and also that of Thomas Paine and America 1776 — 1809, published in six volumes in 2009 of which Kenneth Burchell is editor. In her discussion of the reception of Paine’s works Lounissi draws frequently on these collections of contemporary works. 

It might be expected that a French scholar would be more informed about Paine’s career in France than about his activities in America. Dr Lounissi, however, is a specialist in the civilisation of the United States at the University of Rouen, with a particular interest in the history of the early Republic. Her book demonstrates familiarity with politics and political theory on both sides of the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century. Thus she points out that the constitutional arrangements for the United States outlined in Common Sense owed much to Benjamin Franklin’s plan for a union of the colonies spelled out at the Albany Congress of 1754. 

Although his proposals were sketchy, leading some to argue that Paine was more concerned with the negative task of bringing down governments rather than the positive problem of replacing them, Lounissi shows that in America he did contribute to the constitutional debates of the revolutionary era. He was not directly involved in the drafting of the radical constitution for Pennsylvania in 1776. This did not prevent his critics, led by John Adams, from associating him with its provisions for a unicameral legislature elected annually by universal adult male suffrage. He certainly supported it, at least initially, in several publications. Again he had no part in the deliberations at Philadelphia in 1787 which resulted in the American Constitution, being overseas in England at the time. But he did approve it to the point of recommending its adoption by the British. 

Paine did have a direct input into the drafting of the abortive French constitution of 1793, being appointed to the committee chaired by Condorcet charged with drawing it up. Unfortunately, as Lounissi points out, it is impossible to discern precisely what his role in the process was, though she does deduce that parts of the document were influenced by passages in Rights of Man, while the prefatory declaration of rights owed much to Paine too. He also had a say in the debates which resulted in the setting up of the Directory in 1795. Although his contribution to them, mainly objecting to the restriction of the franchise, has been long known, Lounissi’s familiarity with the French sources adds details not available elsewhere. 

She also demonstrates a formidable knowledge of English sources. For example, she places discussion of the welfare proposals in the second part of Rights of Man and in Agrarian Justice in the context of the debate on the poor laws in the late eighteenth century. Her research unearthed an anecdote about Paine unknown to his biographers. Thomas Ruggles, in The History of the Poor published in 1793, recounted how he had recently sat next to Paine at a dinner, who informed him that, when his grandfather was an overseer of the poor at Thetford fifty years before, the poor rate was under £40. Now it was between £300 and £400. “In a short time if this evil is not stopped the friends of liberty will, with the greatest ease, walk over the ruins of the boasted constitution; its fall wants no acceleration from the friends of Gallic freedom.’ To this a gentleman instantly replied ‘Thomas, thy wish is father to the thought’.” 

After discussing Paine’s ideas on poverty and property Lounissi proceeds to investigate his republicanism. She concludes that he was not a republican in the eighteenth — century tradition of the commonwealthmen. These, also known as classical republicans, argued that governments always sought to reduce the liberty of their subjects and that it was the duty of the virtuous citizen to be constantly vigilant to detect attempts to do so and resist them. One method rulers employed to distract citizens from their machinations was to corrupt them, for instance by encouraging trade in luxury goods, which allegedly reduced their will to defend their rights. Classical republicans were therefore opposed to commercial expansion. Paine by contrast welcomed commerce and industry, not only because they stimulated economic growth but also because he believed free trade helped to disseminate ideas of liberty in other areas of human activity. 

Lounissi also investigates Paine’s credentials as a historian. He announced his intention of writing a three – volume history of the American Revolution and then of giving an historical account of the French Revolution. Neither of these ambitious projects was ever realised. As she observes, Paine had a certain talent for missing rendezvous with historiography. His only major contribution to the history of the American Revolution was an open Letter to Abbe Rayne! objecting to his interpretation of it. Raynal put the quarrel between Britain and the colonies down to a dispute about the right to raise taxes. Paine insisted that the British government all along plotted to provoke the Americans into violent resistance to its measures in order to deprive them of their liberties. 

Paine absorbed what he had so far written on the Revolution in France into the first part of Rights of Man. Just as his account of the American conflict was written to correct Raynal, as Lounissi observes, so that of the French was to put Burke right. She checks Paine’s account of the events he describes and demonstrates that he frequently got them wrong. In summing up his accounts of the two revolutions she concludes that he was more a theorist than a historian of them. 

Paine’s second sojourn in America, following his return from France, is a period of his life that has been frequently skipped over quickly. Yet during his last few years Paine continued to publish quite prolifically. Lounissi and another French scholar, Marc Belissa, are now doing justice to his later works. For as Lounissi points out, even if these publications did not necessarily add new aspects to his thought, they are nevertheless important. Thus his political writings against the Federalists led by John Adams contributed to the debate over whether the ideals of the American Revolution were in danger until they were rescued by Thomas Jefferson. 

After dealing with Paine’s last years Lounissi ends the book with another account of his political activities in France. Thus she goes into detail on his role in the trial of Louis XVI, and publishes three appendices of contributions he made in the debates on the king’s fate. Two of them have not previously appeared in any collection of his writings, while only inaccurate versions of the third were ever published. 

This exhaustive investigation of Paine’s political thought, which covers all his speculative writings except those on religion, is a colossal achievement. Its range is indicated by the bibliography, which takes up sixty five pages. It is a pity that the index is confined to the names of people mentioned in the text, and even then omits some. But a comprehensive index would have made an already lengthy book unwieldy and more expensive. 

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When I joined the ranks of His Majesty’s Customs & Excise in 1946, I was quickly made aware of the department’s historic literary tradition, led by Geoffrey Chaucer, Adam Smith, Robert Bums and Thomas Paine. But even after nearly 200 years there seemed to be a question mark over the last of these famous men. Paine had twice been dismissed from the service, and was subsequently charged with sedition, prompting his escape to France. Bums, by contrast, appeared to be revered without reserve, though I eventually discovered that during his Excise years he too had found himself in hot water, when some of his writing and activities had called his political loyalty into question. But the two men had much more in common than their time in the service of the Crown. 

There is a substantial academic literature about both Bums and Paine (in the latter case, some of it hostile). Biographies include splendid modem works by Robert Crawford (Bums) and John Keane (Paine), along with a forensic analysis of Burns’ radical tendencies by Liam Mcllvanney. But although both lives have been well chronicled (albeit separately), I hope there may be merit in a short selective account of the most salient features of the common radical ground shared by the two great writers, and its inspiration, a comparison that has attracted scant attention. I will not attempt condensed biographies outside that narrow focus: that would neither be possible, nor necessary. 

Parallels can first be found in their origins and upbringing. Both had working class roots in rural surroundings, environments and experience that inevitably conditioned their views. It is unsurprising that both found resonance in the religious and political dissent of the 18th century. 

Paine’s childhood home was close to Thetford gallows and within the purview of the ruling Grafton family. He could not have failed to be aware of the rough justice handed down to the rural poor and the contrasting privilege and power enjoyed by the landed gentry. In Scotland, Bums knew from his own painful experience the penalties of toil and labour, made futile by poverty. Drudgery and hunger racked his body, but they could not vanquish his spirit, his humour, or his innate genius. The result was, to quote Barke, that “his sympathies were for the poor, the oppressed… He hated all manner of cruelty, oppression and the arrogance of privilege and mere wealth.” 

Likewise, both men, as children, were exposed to religious ideology. In Paine’s case direct evidence is limited, but we know at least that his parents belonged to different branches of the Christian faith – his mother to the established church, his father to the dissenting Quaker sect – and that he had regular contact with the teaching of both traditions. Although never an atheist, it appears from his later writings that he was not persuaded by either theology. He said in The Age of Reason: “from the time I was capable of conceiving an idea, and acting upon it by reflection, I either doubted the truth of the Christian system or thought it to be a strange affair.” But more important than the influence of parental indoctrination is the evidence of Paine’s voluntary association with Methodism. There is a record that he heard John Wesley preach on one of his several visits to Thetford. Later, as a 21 year-old, he is said to have preached as a Methodist in both Dover and Sandwich. Eight years later, while in London waiting for an Excise vacancy, he is said to have again turned to occasional preaching. There is even a suggestion in the Oldys biography (repeated by Conway) that Paine sought from the Baptist minister Daniel Noble an introduction to the Bishop of London with a view to ordination. It is certainly reasonable to think that Methodism appealed to Paine. Its preachers were enthusiastic and able to reach out to the common people. They emphasised that Christ died for all, and their message, although concerned with spiritual salvation, was in tune with the 18th century radical aspiration towards equality. Notwithstanding Paine’s later assault upon organised religion and his repudiation of the Bible, Keane’s view “that his moral capacities ultimately had religious roots” is very persuasive. 

Bums was baptized and brought up in the Christian faith. His father William, a strict Calvinist, was committed to his sons’ religious education, though the tone of it was somewhat tempered by the preaching of his parish minister. William Dalrymple was of the Presbyterian persuasion: a moderate, liberal man, antagonistic to divisive sectarianism, zealotry and hypocrisy, concerned to reach out to the poor, and an advocate of amity and love. Although Bums later strayed from his father’s model of piety and virtue 

(particularly in his sexual inclinations: according to Berke he had passionate relationships with many women, productive of fifteen children, six out of wedlock) this early teaching was later reflected in many of his poems. And despite his departure from the constraints of Presbyterian theology, he never relinquished his belief in God. Crawford notices a manual written by Bums’s father addressing some of the fundamental questions of religious belief. One of these not only conditioned his children but, as I will mention later, was also very much in line with Paine’s thinking: 

Q. How shall I evidence to myself that there is a God? 

A. By the works of Creation; for nothing can make itself and this fabrick of nature demonstrates its creator to be possessed of all possible perfection, and for that cause we owe all that we have to him.

Similar parallels apply to the relatively brief formal education of the two writers. At the age of seven, Paine was fortunate to gain a place at Thetford Grammar School, but left when only twelve to serve for the next seven years as an apprentice in his father’s business as a maker of stays. But as a young man, over time, he cultivated the friendship of a number of distinguished men: the Scottish astronomer and instrument maker, James Ferguson, destined to become a Fellow of the Royal Society; the well-known lexicographer and optical instrument maker, Benjamin Martin; the celebrated astronomer and Fellow of the Royal Society, Dr. John Bevis; the writer, Oliver Goldsmith, and crucially the influential Benjamin Franklin, whose support helped Paine to establish himself in America. During his time in London he extended his reading, and met like-minded people who were challenging orthodox theology and the concept of top-down government. He was introduced, as Keane puts it, “to a new culture of political radicalism that rejected throne and altar”, and experienced a long- term conversion to republican democracy.” 

Burns’s first formal education was even shorter, spent between the ages of six and nine in a local school at Alloway Mill, before having to leave to help on his father’s isolated farm at Mount Oliphant. He was, however, fortunate through those years in having a young, inspirational teacher, John Murdoch, who before his departure to Dumfries imparted a thorough grounding in the technicalities of language, with an expectation far wider than was customary for children of such tender years. This, combined with Bums’s voracious and wide-ranging reading, established a literary disposition that would prosper against the grain of physical labour and frugal living on the land. Much credit for that is also due to Bums’s father. Despite the necessity of setting his sons to farming, William Burnes contrived to continue their education at home, conversing with them as adults, and procuring books for them designed both to nurture their faith and spur their imaginations. It was fortunate, too, that in 1772 Murdoch returned to teach at another school in Ayr and was concerned enough to find time to sustain intermittent contact with the Bums brothers in pursuit of their development. Unlike Paine, Bums could not yet add personal acquaintance with leading intellectuals, but he did so at second- hand, gleaning counsel from literature, not least Arthur Masson’s Collection of English Prose and Verse and John Newbury’s anthology of letter-writers of distinguished merit. 

In 1777 the family moved to Lochlea. There, although still committed to hard labour in the fields, Bums was not without friends. As he reached manhood he found particular inspiration among the Masons of Tarbolton, warming to their principles of friendship, benevolence and religious toleration. But the final shaping of Burns’s muse was forged in the depths of adversity. His problems during 1782 to 1784 have been well documented: a business venture that literally disappeared in flames; a breakdown of mind and body; the failing family farm, with the prospect of utter destitution; his father’s legal struggle in the face of a writ of sequestration. Bums’s response, as Crawford puts it, was to write his way out of it. Surrounded by deep recession and gloom across rural Scotland, he fixed upon ideals that would underpin his later poetry: dignity in poverty and admiration for men of independent minds, prepared to reject the lure of wealth and position. In 1783 he began his ‘Commonplace Book’, and gradually his identity as a ploughman gave way to that of a poet and the emergence of his distinctive style and language. By the following year he had come to think that he might be capable of exposing his work to a wider public. And among many strands of his eager imagination were political ideas drawn from his harsh, personal experience that were pointedly radical in their day. 

The legal action against Bums’s father was decided in his favour in January 1784. By then, however, he was exhausted and ill, dying a few weeks later. Throughout the travails of their lives at Lochlea, Bums and his brother had respected their father dearly. But his death and release from debt, allowed a move to Mossgiel, a new beginning, a freer lifestyle and the burgeoning of Robert’s romantic poetry. 

Quite when Paine moved from personal conviction to written advocacy remains unclear. More than once he insisted that he wrote nothing in England, though appearances suggest otherwise. What is certain is that in January 1775, having overcome a serious illness picked up on the voyage to America, he was taken on as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. Articles and poems in this new periodical and in William Bradford’s earlier Pennsylvania Journal appeared anonymously or under pseudonyms, but it is generally accepted that Paine was the author of a number of them, including a broadside against slavery, an exposure of cruelty to animals, and a plea for women’s rights. The battle of Lexington in April 1775 stirred him to give vent to increasingly radical views about British tyranny, and to consider the necessity of using force to secure human liberty. In July 1775 he penned a song Liberty Tree, the final verses of which were unequivocal in their call for revolution: 

But hear, 0 ye swains (`tis a tale most profane).

How all the tyrannical pow’rs,

King, Commons, and Lords, are uniting amain’

To cut down this guardian of ours;

From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms,

Through the land let the sound of it flee:

Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer,

In defense of our Liberty Tree.

In the Journal of October 1775, Paine (as Humanus) followed this with an article headed A Serious Thought in which he reflected on the barbarities wrought by Britain, particularly the importation of negroes for sale. He declared that he would “hesitate not for a moment to believe that the Almighty will finally separate America from Britain”. 

His direct, terse and incisive prose appealed to the common citizen, and found its most positive expression with the publication, in January 1776, of his seminal pamphlet Common Sense. I need not recapitulate the arguments of this famous text, save to notice that its opening pages drew on ingrained tenets of English radicalism, with an insistence on natural rights to liberty and a vision of a new world order. Its impact was, of course, dramatic and a major factor in setting the course in favour of the war of independence. 

Chronologically, Burn’s literary debut came ten years later, with the publication in July 1786 of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (the so-called Kilmarnock edition). Bums was then only 27, some ten years younger than Paine had been at the time of his first Pennsylvania articles. The collection was a chosen, wide-ranging miscellany of 36 poems, verses, songs, odes and dirges, previously written alongside his farming at Mossgiel. One reviewer thought the love poems “execrable”, and most critics regretted that they were written in some measure in “an unknown tongue” which limited their audience to a small circle. But there was general recognition of Bums as “a native genius”. He was seen as the ‘ploughman poet; a phenomenon bursting from the obscurity of poverty and the obstructions of laborious life”. Yet in all this, only two reviewers briefly mentioned occasional “libertine” tendencies, dismissed as regrettable but excusable in the light of his origins. 

In fact, the edition contained three overtly political poems, written shortly before publication: The Twa Dogs, A Dream, and The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer. Like all the other pieces, they pre-dated Burns’s Excise service, and, according to his Preface, had not been “composed with a view to the press°. Nevertheless, one can perhaps detect a note of caution in Bums’s approach. He commonly made a virtue of his low social standing and used the paradox of a simple bard appealing to a refined audience. 

The Twa Dogs is a gem. Briefly, the dogs are represented as friendly observers of the lives of their keepers: one a local dignitary, the other a ploughman. The poem, masterly crafted, contrasts the pleasure-seeking, self-interest and dissipation of the gentry (leaving aside “some exceptions”) with the destitution and toil faced by the poor, who nevertheless, in their respite from labour, find joy in the simple, frugal, common recreations of rural life: 

A countra fellow at the pleugh,

His acre’s till’d, he’s right enough;

A countra girl at her wheel,

Her dizzen’s done, she’s unco weel;

But gentlemen, an’ ladies warst,

Wi’ ev’n down want o’work are curst

They loiter, lounging, lank an’ lazy;

Though deil-haet ails them, yet uneasy:

Their days insipid, dull an’ tasteless;

Their nights unquiet, lang an restless.

A Dream began with a vindicatory preamble:

Thoughts, words and deeds, the Statute blames with reason; But

surely Dreams were ne’re indicted Treason.

Bums went on to pretend that he had fallen asleep after reading Thomas Warton’s Laureate’s Ode for His Majesty’s Birthday, 4 June 1786, and in his dreaming fancy had imagined his own, alternative address. It was a daring device, for whereas Warton’s ode had lavishly flattered George III, Bums’ satire made it clear that he would do no such thing, but instead addressed the king with mock reverence, feigning loyalty while favouring defection, reminding him of the embarrassment of the loss of the American colonies and the failures of his ministers. He hoped that the King might wring corruption’s neck, and reduce the burden of taxation: levied till ‘old Britain’ was fleeced until she had ‘scarce a tester’ (an old Scots silver coin of small value). A cloak of pretended adulation and a representation of being but a humble poet might not normally have been enough to escape dire retribution, but Bums destiny appears somehow to have been charmed. 

The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer was addressed to the Right Honourable and Honourable Scotch representatives in the House of Commons. Bums again began with mock deference: To you a simple Bardie’s prayers are humbly sent. But thereafter his 25 stanzas and postscript of a further seven were unmistakably critical: an ironic blast against the 45 Scottish members, apparently supine in the face of legislation to increase the duties on whisky:

In gath’rin votes you were na slack;

Now stand as tightly by your tack:

Ne’er claw your lug, an’ fidge your back,

An’ hum and haw;

But raise your arm, an’ tell your crack

Before them a’.

He followed this with a swipe at those whose ranks he would shortly join: 

“damn’d excisemen in a bustle”! 

But his main thrust was aimed at the liaison of Scottish and English members, which he clearly saw as an unholy alliance: 

Yon mixtie-maxtie, queer hotch-potch, The Coalition.

An opinion that, albeit in a different context, has a certain resonance today. 

In 1787, though written in 1784, a further political offering appeared in a second expanded edition of Bums’s poems, published in Edinburgh. This was a ballad conveying his thoughts on the American Revolution. Aware that it might be thought “rather heretical”, he had decided not to publish it in the Kilmarnock edition, but later, with the advice of Lord Glencaim and Henry Erskine, caused it to be included in the new edition. Whereas Paine, in 1776, had fomented the war of independence, and throughout had continued to support it in eight issues of The Crisis (the last in April 1783), Bums now reflected, after its conclusion, on the tide of events. Though the facts were no doubt gleaned from other sources, it remains a brilliant and witty summary of the hapless record of Britain’s generals and politicians, remarkable for having been constructed alongside the drudgery of Bums’s ordinary occupation. 

For some years Bums added almost nothing to his political output. To make ends meet, he joined the Excise service as a common gauger, receiving his commission in 1788 and starting work in September 1789. Like myself, a condition of appointment required a pledge of allegiance to the monarch. While his poetic output was undiminished, he was now on the whole careful either to avoid contentious political issues or to try to ensure that controversial material did not appear over his name. 

Not so Paine, who was in Paris during the winter of 1789-90, seeing for himself and documenting the beginnings of the popular revolution. In January 1790 he wrote enthusiastically to his friend Edmund Burke, intimating that the French Revolution was “certainly a forerunner to other revolutions in Europe”. The reaction from Burke, a supporter of the American Revolution, was unexpected. We now know that he had already been mightily disturbed by Dr Richard Price’s address A Discourse of the Love of Our Country, given at the London Revolution Society on 4 November 1789. Rather than welcoming the new revolutionary movement, Burke denounced it in his vitriolic Reflections on the Revolution in France, published on 1 November1790. This drew from Paine his famous response, Rights of Man, published in two parts, brought together in February 1792, drawing inspiration from France and making the case for the government of the people. Despite huge sales (in Britain alone, 200,000 by 1793), public opinion was divided. Those who ached for reform saw the French National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens as a most desirable model for Britain; many had found in the American Revolution a prospect for change, and in the French uprising a hope that a new politics might flourish in Europe. Whereas Burke, along with the government and entrenched conservative opinion, viewed the events across the Channel with alarm, dreading the possibility of civil resistance and copycat disturbances; the more so as violence and vengeance escalated in Paris. In May 1792 George III issued a Royal Proclamation against sedition, subversion and riot. In September, Paine, indicted to stand trial on a charge of promulgating seditious libel, and under constant harassment, escaped to France. He was, of course, later tried in his absence, found guilty, and vilified by the ruling establishment. 

Burns was undoubtedly aware of the furore created by Paine’s pamphlet, and sympathetic to the reformist view; but also acutely conscious that as a government officer, needing the salary that went with the job, he must not parade his sentiments. He was careful to require that his poems should bear his name only with his agreement. However, on 30 October 1792 this show of neutrality was severely tested. In the newly opened Theatre Royal at Dumfries, with friends, he was in the pit for a performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, also attended by some of Scotland’s elite. When at the end of the play God Save the King was called for, there were shouts from the pit for ca ira, the song of the French revolutionaries. Scuffles accompanied the singing of the national anthem, through all of which Exciseman Burns remained in his seat. 

There could be no real doubt as to where Bums’s heart lay. Four weeks later he wrote to Louise Fontenelle, a touring London actress he admired, offering her an ‘occasional address’ to use on her benefit night on 26 November. The Rights of Woman, published anonymously in The Edinburgh Gazetter on 30 November, all too obviously echoed that of Paine’s notorious, inspirational text. Harmlessly, Burns extolled female rights as those of protection, decorum and admiration; far more interesting, however, are the lines with which he topped and tailed his thoughts:

While Europe’s eye is ftx’d on mighty things,

The fate of empires and the fall of kings;

While quacks of State must each produce his plan,

And even children lisp the Rights of Man;

Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,

The Rights of Woman merit some attention.

When awful Beauty joins with all her charms,

Who is so rash as rise in rebel arms?

But truce with kings, and truce with constitutions,

With bloody armaments and revolutions,

Let Majesty your first attention summon:

Ah! Ca ira! The Majesty of Woman!

As the year drew to its close, and Burns became more confident of what he believed to be the impending triumph of the British reform movement, he was quite unable to restrain his feelings, giving vent to a ballad, Here’s a Health to Them That’s Awa. This unreservedly raised a series of toasts to reformers over the border. Its message was undisguised:

May Liberty meet wi’ success’

May Prudence protect her frae evil!

May tyrants and Tyranny tine i’ the mist

And wander their way to the Devil!

Here’s freedom to them that wad read,

Here’s freedom to them that would write!

There’s nane ever fear’d that the truth should be heard

But they whom the truth would indite!

And wha wad betray old Albion’s right,

May they never eat of her bread!

Sadly, Burns’s optimism was misplaced. Doubts about his loyalty had been brought to the notice of the Excise Commissioners, who promptly launched an inquiry. Learning of the Board’s misgivings, and fearful of the consequences, Burns wrote on 31 December 1792 to one of the Excise commissioners, Robert Graham of Fintry, to assure him that any such allegation was unfounded, in that he was devoutly attached to the British Constitution “on Revolution principles [i.e the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’], next after his God”. Remarkably, Graham promptly responded on 5 January to reassure Bums that his job was safe. And, by return, Bums then replied to the specific allegations, admitting that he had at first been an `senthusiastic votary” of the French Revolution, but had altered his sentiments when France came to show her old avidity for conquest. Some writers have judged that the tone of Bums’ letters was contrite, even abject; that effectively he renunciated his reformist stance. This is certainly the feeling they convey on first reading; but Mcllvanney makes a convincing case that on closer analysis there was no apostasy and no apology. 

Yet the detail of all this is perhaps beside the point: it seems obvious that what kept Bums in his job was his high artistic reputation and good standing, based on the fame his poetry, then as now largely focused on its sentimental, urbane and apolitical content. He was fortunate to have a number of friends and supporters in high places, not least Graham; a relationship that may fairly be judged from a ballad of 1790, which opens with the lines: 

Fintry, my stay in worldly strife, 

Friend o’ my Muse, friend o’ my life, 

The brush with authority has attracted microscopic attention, and certainly made Bums anxious for his future. But it must also be seen in the context of explicit violent agitation in France, where, exactly at this time, Paine was in Paris, passionately — but unsuccessfully – seeking to convince his fellow deputies of the National Convention that Louis XVI should be spared the guillotine. 

The Excise inquiry reminded Bums of the dangerous ground of radical poetry. Indeed, with the execution of Louis on the 21 January 1793 and the French declaration of war on Britain on 1 February, the reform movement as a whole was forced to wake up to the perils of open defiance. For the time being the State’s policy was one of such severe repression as to drive radical opposition into hiding. But at the time of the dramatic Scottish sedition trials of August 1793, Bums could no longer contain his feelings. He ventured three poems, based on the legendary heroics of Robert Bruce, all of which carried parallels, for those who could see them, to the then contemporary challenges to Scottish liberty; as Mcllvanney puts it “the tendency to view one struggle for liberty through the optic of another.” The most famous of the three, sent to trusted friends and published anonymously in The Morning Chronicle on 8 May 1794, is Scots Wha Hae, with its stark call to resist “chains and slavery° Unambiguously, through the words of Bruce, it brings the challenge into Burns’ own time – “Now’s the day, and now’s the hour”- and ends with the appeal from the lips of Bruce: 

Lay the proud usurpers lowl 

Tyrants fall in every foe! 

Liberty’s in every blow! 

Let us do, or die! 

Bums followed this up with an Ode for George Washington’s Birthday, comparing the liberty achieved in America with the political suppression imposed from London. Although he could not then openly publicise his views, this clarion call now reveals the strength of his true feelings: 

But come, ye sons of Liberty, 

Columbia’s offspring, brave as free, 

In danger’s hour still flaming in the van, 

Ye know, and dare maintain, the Royalty of Man! 

Here Bums is no longer the humble bard; there can be no mistaking the contemporary relevance of his historical allusions. 

By this time, Paine had written the first part of his passionate but controversial essay The Age of Reason: being an investigation of true and fabulous theology. The astonishing story of how he took up the subject while fearing for his life is too well known to need repetition; indeed the prefaces to the first and second parts of the eventual book, separated by his incarceration in the Luxembourg prison, largely describe the perilous circumstances that attended its completion and survival. The French Revolution had turned sour. The libertarian principles that had marked its beginning had given way to bloody retribution. Paine, whose name was on the death list, had for many years intended to express his opinions on religion, and felt that he now had no time to lose. Part one appeared during February 1794, and part two, expanding his first thoughts, came out in October 1795. Together they presented the reader with a double paradox: firstly, the essays unequivocally repudiated belief in the Bible as the authentic ‘Word of God’, but by no means repudiated God; secondly, though despising the purveyors and apparatus of organised religion, there was also a recognition that the eradication of Christianity in favour of a revolutionary dogma of equality and liberty could lead the French state towards atheism. As Paine explained at the beginning of his first essay: 

The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true. 

As usual, Paine wrote with clarity and raw honesty, appealing to reason. He saw the Old Testament as “a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales”, and the so-called ‘New’ Testament as being of doubtful provenance, lacking authenticity, heaping hearsay upon hearsay, and replete with irrational, fabulous inventions and contradictions. While not doubting the existence of Jesus Christ, he regarded him as merely “a virtuous and an amiable man”. On a questionable base of “wild and visionary doctrine”, the church had “set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears…a religion of pomp and revenue, in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.” Nor was this type of construction limited to Christianity. Every national church or religion “had established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals”, each with books which they call ‘revelation’, or the word of God. 

Paine’s own belief was simpler. He believed “in one God, and no more” and hoped for happiness beyond this life. He expressed belief in the equality of man, and argued that religious duties consisted of doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy. He saw God as the compassionate creator, evidenced by creation, whose choicest gift was the gift of reason. In the first part of the essay there is a particularly interesting passage: 

That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology. 

Paine’s polemic excited huge interest, reinforcing those of a radical persuasion, but surely making more enemies than friends. Crucially, in Britain, those in gilded positions in the liaison of established church and state chose to see it only as an assault on cherished beliefs and values, a threat to good order and their own positions. Some, who cannot have read the essays, dubbed Paine an atheist. This he emphatically was not, but he undoubtedly provided his opponents with ammunition to confirm in their eyes his reputation as a disreputable trouble-maker. 

Those who had welcomed the French Revolution as the dawn of a new age clung tenaciously to its original thinking in pursuit of liberty. In 1795, Bums, though still employed in the Excise (acting- up as supervisor at Dumfries), and having felt duty-bound to enlist in the Royal Dumfries Volunteers, nevertheless contrived to write his most celebrated political song. Popularly known as A Man’s a Man for a’ that, it first appeared anonymously in the Glasgow Magazine of August 1795. James Barke, in his edition of Bums’ poems and songs, has aptly described it as “the Marseillaise of humanity”. Disparaging the ‘tinsel show” of rank and title, Bums extols the merits of the honest man of independent mind. As others have noticed, the short verses echo the sentiments of Paine’s Rights of Man, while Marilyn Butler has pointed out that the closing lines closely follow the letter and spirit of the revolutionary song ca Ira!: 

Then let us pray that come it may 

(As come it will for a’ that) 

That Sense and Worth o’er a’ the earth 

Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that! 

For a’ that, an’ a’ that, It’s comin yet for a’ that, 

That man to man the world o’er 

Shall brothers be for a’ that 

Paine struggled on until 1809, adding a number of less well-known studies to his archive, and at the last declining an attempt to have him accept Christ as the Son of God. Bums, like Paine, never surrendered his belief in a benevolent God. He died in 1796, still impoverished but a radical exciseman to the last. There is nothing to suggest that the two men ever met, but there may yet be one unremarked final parallel. Another version of The Liberty Tree, although never quite proved to be the work of Bums, bears the hallmarks of his style. Here then, to close, are the last two verses of eleven:

Wi’ plenty o’ sic trees, I trow

The wand would live in peace, man.

The sword would help to mak’ a plough,

The din o’ war wad cease, man,

Like brethren in a common cause,

We’d on each other smile, man:

And equal rights and equal laws

Wad gladden every isle, man.

Wae worth the loon wha wadna eat

Sic halesome, dainty cheer, man!

I’d gie the shoon frae aff my feet

To taste the fruit o’t here, man!

Syne let us pray, Auld England may

Sure plant this far-famed tree, man:

And blythe we’ll sing, and herald the day

That gives us liberty, man.

Sources:

• James Barke (ed.): Poems and Songs of Robert Bums (Collins, 1960)
• James A Mackay: A Biography of Robert Burns (Mainstream, 1992)
• Robert Crawford: The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography (Pimlico, 2009)
• Liam Mcllvanney: Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth Century Scotland (Tuckwell Press, 2002)
• And, of course, the works of Paine and Burns referred to in the text.

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Introduction. 

Putting the world to rights: The presumptuous audacity of Thomas Paine. 

How dared Thomas Paine, a man whose formal education had ended at thirteen (Gilbert Wakefield, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, would call him ‘the greatest ignoramus in nature’), a man who had failed as a skilled craftsman, as a teacher, as a shopkeeper, as a street preacher, as a petty customs official in the Excise, dismissed more than once and a sometime debtor and bankrupt, how dared such a nobody, such a non-achiever even dare to think about the ends and means of government, about the basis of a just society, about the meaning we can give life? Some of the fundamental questions that Paine pondered and tried to answer were: 

Are humans essentially anti-social animals, whose lives are, in the philosopher Hobbes’ words, just ‘nasty, brutish and short’? 

Do we have to be ruled by some absolute, hereditary, hierarchical authority backed by force? 

Is humanity capable of instituting an alternative to war? 

Is Christianity the only true religion? 

Is any religion true? 

But Thomas Paine did not merely articulate such fundamental questions in his secret thoughts, he also talked about them and dared to write about them. Think of his audacity when he, an almost penniless, recently very sick, immigrant Englishman, not long off the boat, started telling the people of North America in print what they should all now do, first in relation to slavery (they should abolish it) and then in relation to Britain. He called on Americans to revolt against his own country, and even called it just ‘Common Sense’ for them to do so. 

Or think how Paine, a few years later, dared to take on Edmund Burke, Burke, the graduate of Trinity College Dublin, former barrister at the Middle Temple, former Private Secretary to the Secretary for Ireland, and then Private Secretary to the Prime Minister and himself an MP. Paine told Burke that his reactionary championing of the ancient regimes of Europe after the fall of the Bastille was wrong. His answer to Burke in Rights of Man was a trumpet call to ‘begin the world anew’: the British should abolish the hereditary principle of monarchy and aristocracy and substitute a just redistribution of wealth through graduated income tax. 

Paine did not engage only Burke but also with many other dominant spirits of his age, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, General Lafayette, Danton, Condorcet, Marat, even Napoleon. In his dedication of the first part of Rights of Man to George Washington, Paine hoped that its principles of freedom would soon become universal. In his Dedication of the second part of his Rights of Man to General Lafayette, he urged the latter to export the French Revolution to the whole world – above all to the despotism of Prussia. 

Finally, in his Age of Reason, Paine took on God Himself and denied the divinity of Christ whom he called simply ‘a virtuous and amiable man’: ‘I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church’. 

Mocked and caricatured in his own day as presumptuous little ‘Tommy Paine’, where on earth did Paine get this unexampled, defiant audacity from? But it was not unexampled. Paine did have exemplars for ‘speaking Truth to Power’. Ultimately, behind Thomas Paine, I suggest, there lies the Epistle of James: the most radical, angry exhortation to social justice in the whole New Testament. Let me remind you: 

…[Be] ye doers of the word, and not hearers only… My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ… with respect of persons. 

If there come into your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come also a poor man in vile raiment and ye have no respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool: 

Are ye not then partial in yourselves,… [Ye have despised the poor…[If] ye have respect to persons ye commit sin;… What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, poor…[If] ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin;… What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him? And if a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not these things which are needful to the body; what do it profit? Even so faith if it hath not works, is dead … For, as the body without spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also… 

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you… Ye have heaped up treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth, and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth’. 

That had been written, perhaps by Jesus’s brother, 1,700 years before Paine’s birth but was available to him of course as a young child and a young man, in the Authorised version of the King James English Bible. The Epistle of James would resonate repeatedly among the early Quakers and in Paine’s own writings. 

Much nearer to Paine, both in place and time, as exemplars, were these early English Quakers – the Quakers of the recent persecution period 1650-1690. Moncure Conway, Paine’s first serious, sympathetic biographer wrote Iliad] there no Quakerism there would have been no Paine.¹ Was he right? 

Part One 

Who were the Quakers? 

Had there been no Civil War, or ‘Revolution’ as Paine himself called it, in England between1642 and 1651 there would have been no Quakerism, which began as a collective movement in 1652. The world had just been ‘turned upside down’ in Britain by that very recent war in which people had been asking – and killing each other over – fundamental questions about how to be a Christian and what kind of society Britain should be. The Parliamentarian ‘Roundheads’ believed they were fighting against royal tyranny and ungodliness; the monarchist Cavaliers believed they were fighting against mob anarchy and against hypocrites out to usurp power under the fig leaf of religion. 

Each side, of course, believed very sincerely that God was on their side. And this English Civil War, called ‘The Great Rebellion’ by the royalist Cavaliers, and ‘The Good Old Cause’ by their Puritan Roundhead opponents, had actually been the English Revolution – culminating in the trial and execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1645 and of King Charles 1 – only very recently, in 1649. The men and women who would be convinced and converted to Quakerism just three years later at the beginning of the 1650s had sympathised with the Puritan, Roundhead side.

Some (though not George Fox), had even fought for Cromwell and Parliament against the king. They saw themselves in the tradition of the Protestant Martyrs burned at the stake under ‘Bloody Mary’ a century earlier – for instance Margaret Fell, ‘the Mother of Quakerism’, born Margaret Askew, was believed by some, mistakenly, to be actually descended from the famous Protestant martyr Anne Askew. During the Civil War they had often called themselves ‘independents’. Once the war had been won by Cromwell’s New Model Army and the Parliamentarians, many of these self- styled ‘Independent’ men and women remained restless ‘Seekers’, looking for spiritual leadership that might help them towards personal and social salvation. They would walk or ride many miles to hear a preacher who, they had heard, was a true man of God. Hence that great assembly of about a thousand or more Westmoreland Seekers at Firbank Fell, above Brigflatts, near Sedbergh, in Whitson, 1652, who heard George Fox tell them: ‘Let your lives speak’. He told them they had no need of a church or parish priest, but that they should all live their Christianity, emulating the earliest ‘primitive’ Christians as a Society of Friends. The ‘Valiant Sixty’ among those who heard Fox, then attempted to do just that, spreading their message of ‘the inner light’ in every man and woman out from the North Down to London, South, West and East – to Norfolk, the county of Thomas Paine. 

Although the Quakers’ creation of new congregations of ‘Friends’ in the 1650s came out of the spiritual turmoil of the Civil War, it was also a reaction against the brutal cruelty of that war. In fact George Fox had been moved to begin preaching a gospel of brotherly love already in 1646, right in the middle of the war. For is any war quite as terrible as the Civil War? – town against town, family against family, father against son, brother against brother, besieged women and children deliberately starved to death, prisoners deliberately mutilated and murdered after they have been promised pardon on surrender – and many other such atrocities – all in the name of ‘King and Country’ or else ‘For God and the People’. These very early Quakers were fired by a defiant, millenarian vision; they too wanted to turn the world upside down – but this time, unlike in the recent Civil War, by wholly non-violent means. Therefore immediately after the Civil War that had not brought about Jerusalem the Quakers preached and practised the alternative to war – non-violent resistance. Margaret Fell, the ‘Mother of Quakerism’ who would later marry Fox, wrote in 1660 to Charles II: 

We who are the people of God called Quakers, who are hated and despised, and everywhere spoken against, as People not fit to live… We are a people that follow after those things that make for Peace, love and Unity… we do bear our Testimony against all strife and wars… Our weapons are not Carnal, but Spiritual.

George Fox, 1661, delivered to Charles II a ‘Declaration from the Harmless and Innocent People of God, called Quakers against all plotters and fighters’. 

The Quaker Francis Howgilt, at his trial in Appleby said: 

It has been a Doctrine always held by us, and a received principle…that Christ’s Kingdom could not be set up with carnal Weapons, nor the Gospel propagated by Force of Arms, nor the Church of God builded by Violence; but the Prince of Peace is manifest among us and we cannot learn War any more, but can love our Enemies, and forgive them that do Evil to us…This is the Truth, and if I had twenty lives, I would engage them all, that the Body of Quakers will never have any Hand in War, or Things of that Nature, that tend to the Hurt of others. 

Following George Fox, the Quakers also opposed slavery and capital punishment. 

But if Quakers were so peaceable, why were they so persecuted in the 1650s, 1660s, 1670s and 1680s? Betrayed by local ‘informers’, arrested just for meeting to worship in silence in one another’s houses, or for refusing to attend their local church, they were heavily fined, imprisoned for months in filthy, stinking, dark holes – often below ground -, publicly stripped and whipped, stoned and even transported as slaves?. Under Charles II (1660- 1685), 13,562 Quakers were arrested and imprisoned; 198 were transported as slaves; at least 338 died in prison as a result of their injuries. It was in this same period that Bunyan the unlicensed Baptist preacher was in Bedford Jail and Richard Baxter, the Presbyterian minister who would not conform to the 39 Articles was tried in his frail and sick old age by the Chief Justice Judge Jeffreys. “What ailed the old stock-cole, unthankful villain, that he would not conform… He hath poisoned the world with his linsey wolsey doctrine”. Judge Jeffreys wanted the old man publicly whipped. But Baxter and Bunyan were individuals who were persecuted; the Quakers were persecuted as a collective body, an alternative, threatening counter- culture, a ‘Society of Friends’ that was a standing criticism of the wider dominant – and unfriendly – social fabric of Great Britain. 

The Reasons for the persecution: 

Quakers were seen as a threat to the given social order into which they had been born because they had many subversive beliefs and practices in addition to their refusal to bear arms. The refused to take their hats off in respect to ‘their betters’ because they were `no respecters of persons (cf. the Epistle of James above). This was not trivial; it was a traditional gesture of popular social protests and enraged ‘the better sort’. When one accused Quaker refused to take his hat off before the magistrate, the judge seized it, burned it and sentenced him to five months’ imprisonment. 

Quakers refused to bow courteously or to use the polite terms of address; for instance they refused to say ‘You’ to their ‘betters’ but called everyone the familiar ‘Thou’, like ‘Du’ in German or ‘Tu’ in French. They refused to . give any of their fellow humans a special title. If they lived under a monarchy, they would not say ‘Your Majesty’ to the King, but just call him ‘King’; they would not say ‘My Lord’ to an aristocrat or ‘Your Honour’ to a Judge, or even refer to anyone as ‘Sir’ or ‘Lady’, ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’. Instead, everyone was simply called by their first name and surname and addressed as ‘Friend’ by Quakers – even Cromwell, when Lord Protector of England, was addressed as ‘Friend Oliver’ by Fox. 

Quakers refused to swear any oath in a court of law because Christ had said ‘Swear not at all’. Again, in that same radical Epistle of James, we find : ‘above all things brethren, swear not, either by heaven, neither by the earth, either by any other oath: let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay. The truth was that everyone should speak everywhere and at all time, not merely in the witness box. But how could the non-oath taking Quakers be believed to be loyal citizens owing allegiance, or held capable of keeping any binding contracts, if they refused all oaths? 

Quakers refused to have any parson or minister, believing instead in their own Inner Light, that which is of God in everyone; they refused even to attend Anglican church services, that is ‘the prescribed national worship’, let alone pay their local Anglican parson his ‘tithes’ or church rates, no matter how often and how grossly their own goods were thereupon ‘distrained’, looted; half of their confiscated property being taken by those who had informed against them. Quakers maintained that there should be no paid ‘hireling’ ministers in Britain at all, which did not endear them to the professional clergy. And who knew what sedition, or incitements their meetings in one another’s houses might not be brewing, asked the magistrates? 

Finally, and perhaps worst of all in the eyes of their contemporaries, there even were many women Quakers, who followed their own Inner Light and preached in the streets as public missionaries who, when they were not in prison, travelled indefatigably throughout Britain and even the world, broadcasting the Quaker message of ‘that of God’ existing in every human being, including women. 

Thus 17th century Quakers seemed to be threatening the creation of an alternative, much more egalitarian society, and one that even included the spiritual equality of men and women. Quakers would not conform to church or state. And they were making thousands of converts. Where might it not end if almost everyone turned Quakers? Social Revolution? Already by 1660, i.e. in their first eight years, there had been at least 20,000 converts. In 1653 George Fox wrote: ‘0 ye great men and rich men of earth! Weep and howl for your misery that is coming [quotation from the Epistle of James]…the day of the Lord is appearing… All the loftiness of men must be laid low’. 

Alarmed, the Presbyterian Major-General Skipton, then in charge of London, had said in Parliament already in 1656: ‘[The Quakers’] great growth and increase is too notorious, both in England and Ireland; their principle strike at both ministry and magistracy’. It is not surprising, after all, that peaceable though they were, the Quakers were ruthlessly persecuted in an attempt to extirpate every one of them. How did they respond? They articulated their resistance, and testified to the principle of liberty of conscience. 

Quaker History of the Persecution. 

From the moment that they were persecuted, the late 17th century Quakers chronicled that persecution and their own un-budge-able, non-violent resistance. They wrote and printed pamphlets and letters to one another, above all to Margaret Fell, herself often imprisoned, and appealingly eloquently to the Magistrates, to King or to Parliament. 

In 1660 Richard Hubberthom wrote ‘[If] any magistrate do that which is unrighteous, we must declare against it’. This the Quakers judged the magistrates, and their social ‘superiors’, not the other way round. In 1664, after the Conventicle Act, that sought to banish Quakers to the West Indies, George Whitehead, who has been called possibly the most influential advocate of religious liberty in Britain,² ‘sheaved the judges their duty from the law and Magna Carta’. Every single example of arrest and punishment of Quakers was documented by a local Friend who could write a clear hand, naming both the local Sufferers and the local Persecutors on facing pages of their records.³ 

Thus Quaker solidarity and continuity was achieved through the creation of their own written accounts of individual and collective persecution. And it was upon these many local records, in addition to trial transcripts, that the amazingly comprehensive collective narrative compiled by Joseph Besse was based – The Suffering of the People Call Quakers for the Testimony of a Good Conscience 1650-1689. Thomas Paine was born precisely half way between these dates, in 1737. 

Besse title page: If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you (John). For the oppression of the poor, for the Sighing of the Needy, now I will arise, saith the Lord” (Psalms). 

Besse’s Preface to the Reader:

‘It was an excellent observation… that God is tried in the fire, and acceptable Men in the Furnace of Adversity… Persecution is a severe test upon the Hypocrite and Earthly-minded. ‘When thou passest flub the Waters, I will be with thee..ffsalahr. A Measure of this holy Faith, and a sense of this divine Support; bore up the spirit of the People called Quakers for near 40 years together, to stem the Torrent of Opposition… The Messengers of it were entertained with Scorn and Derision, with Beatings, Buffetings, Stonings, Whippings and Imprisonment, Banishments, and even Death itself’ 

Just to give one vivid example of the persecution of a woman Quaker in Sussex there is the case of Mary Akehurst as summarised by Besse in his volume on Southern England, ch. 34, pp.711-712: 

1659… Mary Akehurst, a religious Woman of Lewis [sic], going into a Steeple-house there, and asking a Question of the Independent Preacher, after his Sermon, was dragg’d out by the people, and afterwards beaten and puncht by her Husband, so that she could not lift her Arms to her Head without Paine. She also suffered much cruel Usage from her said Husband, who bound her Hand and Foot, and grievously abused her, for reproving one of the Priests who had falsely accused her. Her Husband also kept her chained for a Month together, Night and Day. 

Mary Akehurst’s neighbours won her release by pinning a written protest about her treatment on the Church door. She continued to testify to her Quaker convictions, although even after her husband had died, she was punished by the authorities time and again. David Hitchin’s Quakers in Lewes (1984), based on the full account held in the Public Record Office Mary Akehurst’s neighbours won her release by pinning a written protest about her treatment on the Church door. She continued to testify to her Quaker convictions, although even after her husband had died, she was punished by the authorities time and again. David Hitchin’s Quakers in Lewes (1984), based on the full account held in the Public Record Office takes up the story: In 1670 she was distrained of goods worth £29 by false information. She appealed to the next Sessions and the informer, fearing be found a perjurer, fled. Her goods were ordered to be returned. In 

1672 William Penn visited her in Lewes. In 1673 she was reported by an informer priest, William Snatt, for meeting in a private house, fined £8.10 shillings, and her goods were taken worth £16.18 shillings. In 1676 she was fined £10 for meeting in a house in West FirIe. In 1677 she was indicted for nine months’ absence from church. In 1686 (27 years after asking her first question in St. Michael’s church) when old, sick and unable to walk without being held up on either side, she was carried off at midnight by bailiffs to prison. In Besse’s words, op.cit. p.734: 

One of the Bayliffs, being drunk, when he got on Horseback, with many Oaths and Threatenings had set her upon his Horse, and would not suffer her to take Necessaries with her, so that her Friends thought she could not live till she came to the Prison. But the barbarous Bayliff swore, that if she could not hold it to Prison, which was twenty Mlles, he would tie her, and drag her thither at his Horse’s Tail. Being brought to Horsham Jail, she was kept dose Prisoner there about seven Months, and then was removed to London and committed to the King’s Bench. In Oxford… In Cumbria… 

It was men like George Fox, Francis Howgill, Edmund Burroughs, Richard Hubberthom, George Whitehead and Robert Barclay, and women like Margaret Fell, Ann Blaykling, Mary Fisher and Mary Akehurst who were Thomas Paine’s fearlessly radical 17th century forerunners, speaking out for justice and civil liberty, including liberty for (non-violent) non-conformity. 

Part Two 

Paine’s own Quaker Background. 

Paine’s magisterial biographer John Keane stresses that Paine was the child of a mixed marriage – half Anglican, half Quaker and suggests that this must have led to his having a balanced, even detached, view of both orthodox and heterodox Christianity and hence to his championing of toleration. I myself see no reason to think that young Paine felt himself to be equally Anglican and Quaker. He is generally agreed to have been much closer to his Quaker father to whom he was apprenticed at thirteen than he was to his Anglican mother. And he actually recounts in The Age of Reason how shocked and alienated he had been when he was 7 or 8 years old, on hearing his Anglican aunt’s orthodox Anglican religious teaching of Original Sin and redemption through God’s allowing the crucifixion of his own son. Instead, when young Tom Paine attended Quaker meetings in Meeting House Lane, he would have heard Quaker neighbours testifying not to sin or damnation but to their feelings of love and unity and to the working of God’s mercy in their own lives; he would also have absorbed the practical mercy that Thetford Quakers gave out towards the needy, suffering members of their meeting. 

For in Thetford, Quakers collective self-organization had already been established soon after the start of the first Friends’ meetings there.³ 

Through democratic ‘Quaker discipline’ that included ‘elders’ and ‘overseers’ and monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings as well as women’s meetings, taking care of the poor, the sick, the old, the widowed and the orphans had been the Quaker way from the first.⁴ Their path-breaking schemes of providing accommodation, weekly allowances, legacies and gifts of fuel and clothing (we again remember the Epistle of James) gave Paine a lifelong Quaker ‘feeling for the hard condition of others’ as he himself would write in his letter to the town of Lewes later. There would also have been (as there still is) decision-making by consensus – ‘the sense of the Meeting’. Therefore, despite arguments and some defections, and criticism, Quakers managed to practice democratic consultation and to avoid continuous acrimonious splitting into ever smaller groups. Instead, they tolerated different approaches to Truth if sincerely sought, trusting in each Friend’s own moral and reasoned judgement, as he or she followed their ‘Inner Light’. 

We should also note that Quakerism is, and has always been, an outward looking faith. They believed from the first that Quakerism is something to be lived out in the world and this bonded them in shared efforts at humanitarian intervention. For the Quakers have never been short of others’ Sufferings’ that need addressing, the sufferings of slaves, prisoners, the disenfranchised, the starving, refugees, the victims of war and persecution. 

Quakerism already had an influence on Paine’s schooling, between the ages of 7-13. His father said he must not learn Latin because of the books thro’ which that language is taught – think of the semi-divine status claimed for the founding of Rome in the Aeneid or the city or the deity accorded the later Roman emperors or Caesar’s triumph list history in his accounts of his conquest of Gaul. Simon Weil called history ‘believing the murderers at their own word’. 

Did, during this period, young Paine read a copy of Besse’s Sufferings of the Early Quakers in the small Thetford Meeting House library? Or did his father, or a richer Quaker neighbour actually own a copy?⁵ We shall never know, but at the very least there must have been an inextinguishable orally transmitted tradition. As Sylvia Stevens writes in her monograph A Believing People in a Changing World: Quakers in Society in North-east Norfolk, 1690-1800: 

When Friends such as Mary Kirby and Edmund Peckover who were directly descended from a Quaker of the first generation, gave their [oral] ministry, they were doing so as people who linked to the past but spoke a message for the present 18th century Norfolk Quakers acknowledged, shaped and revered their own religious pasts but lived in their own time. 

What would young Thomas Paine have read or been told about the treatment of the Quakers, including his own kin, in Thetford, in Norwich and elsewhere in Norfolk, before he was born? And how would they have reacted? 

The written history of persecution of Norfolk Quakers, especially Norwich and Thetford (Source: Besse)

1660 the deposition of Samuel Duncombe on the breaking up of a meeting in Norwich: ‘[We suffered their] smiting, punching, cruel mocking… thumping on the Back and Breast without Mercy, dragging some most inhumanly by the Hair of the Head, and spitting in our Faces, abusing both men and women…[They] have taken the Mire out of the Streets and have thrown it at the Friends, some of them holding the Maid of the House whilst others daubed her face with Gore and Dung, so as the skin of her face could hardly be seen.’ 

For that ‘scandalous expression’ Duncombe and the other Quakers were sent to prison. Whereupon Samuel Duncombe wrote again to the Mayor and Aldermen, beginning ‘Friends, Our Oppression is more than we ought always to bear in Silence. And now we are upon the brink of Ruin by the loss of our Goods,… made harbourless in our own houses… And what would you have us do? Do you think we are only wilful and resolve so to be? Do you think these things are pleasing to our own wills as creatures of flesh and blood as you are also, to suffer? You must also expect Judgement – therefore be not high-minded, but fear – for the Lord can quickly blast your Honour and disperse your Riches. We cannot sew Pillows under your armholes, but wish you well as we do ourselves.’

Duncombe later sent a second letter from Norwich prison, beginning not ‘Friends’, this time, but ‘Magistrates!’ And continuing: ‘For complaining of injustice our liberties are taken from us, we are forced to lodge in straw’. 

In February 1665 at the Quarter Sessions held at Norwich Castle, Henry Kettle and Robert Eden both of Thetford, and two others, were convicted of the third offence in meeting together (see Conventicle Act) and were sentenced to be carried thence to Yarmouth, and from that Port to be transported for seven years to Barbados’ (i.e. as slaves). When Kettle returned after seven years, he was again arrested and imprisoned. 

In 1676, William Gamham, Mary Townsend and Robert Spargin of Thetford were distrained of their good worth £2.5 shillings. One Captain Cropley molested them and attempted to disperse their religious meeting by Force of Arms. And when they asked for his commission so to do, he showed them his rapier. And one of them not going at his command, he beat him on the Head with his Stick and kickt him on the Back to the endangering of his Life. 

November 1676, Samuel Dunscombe [again] reported how his house was forcibly entered; ‘officers bringing with them one Tennison and impudent Informer and the common Hangman. They tarried several days and nights in that home and kept Samuel Duncombe’s wife, then big with child, a Prisoner, suffering her to speak to no body and admitting none of the neighbours to come near her. The Goods they took were valued at £42.19 shillings’. 

1678 ‘George Whitehead and Thomas Burr were taken at a meeting in Norwich. Charles Alden, a Vintner and one of the singing Men in the Cathedral, rushed in calling out ‘Here’s Sons of Whores; here’s 500 Sons and Daughters of Whores. The Church Doors stand open but they will be hanged before they will come in there’. sand whilst George Whitehead was speaking, [Alden] cryed out ‘Put down that Puppy Dog! Why do you suffer him to stand there prating?’ 

These Norfolk Quakers were then sent to prison in Norwich Castle and again in 1680 for refusing to take the oath. On his release George Whitehead went straight to Hampton Court to plead with the King on behalf of his fellow-prisoners left 27 steps below ground in Norwich Castle dungeons – ‘They are burying them alive’, he told the King, whom he just addressed as ‘King’, ‘They are poor harmless people, poor Woolcombers, Weavers and Tradesmen, like to be destroyed’. The prisoners were only released two years later. 

1682 Anne Payne was committed to prison for ‘absence from National Worship’ (Many other Paines, or Paynes, in Norfolk suffered the seizure of their goods, and imprisonment). 

1684 saw an ‘excessive Seizure from two Norfolk farmers, John Roe and William Roe, who were fined £240 and had all their cattle, corn and households goods taken by the Sherriff’s Officers in East Dereham. ‘The behaviour of the Officers and Assistants and who made this seizure was very rude. They broke open the Doors, Drawers and Chests and threatened the Servants of the House with Sword and Pistol. To make themselves merry they roasted a pigg and laid so much wood on the Hearth that they set the Chimney on Fire with which, and their Revelling, Cursing and Swearing, they affrighted the wife of the said William Roe to the endangering of her Life; she being then great with child, was delivered before her lime, and the child died a few days later’. 

The persecution continued in Norfolk up to 1690. Such things are not soon forgotten. Whether or not young Thomas Paine, born in 1737, read a copy of Besse, so many were the oral accounts of the persecution period that he must have heard many examples from his father, from his paternal grand- parents and from other Thetford Quakers. It was still living memory and there can be no doubt at all on which side he and his father were on. It would simply not have been possible for him as a sensitive, spirited, indignant child and youth to have been equally pro-Anglican, on the side of the punishing ruling class, and on the side of their victims, the heroes and heroines of Quaker dissent. 

Part Three 

Paine’s writing on Quakers and on Quakerly principles. 

1768-1775: Paine in Lewes. 

Thomas ‘Clio’ Rickman, who would become Paine’s closest English friend and first devoted biographer (Paine would write part of the Rights of Man in his London home), first attached himself to Paine as his inspiring mentor when he was a youth in Lewes. ‘Clio’ Rickman was a ‘birthright’ Lewes Quaker on both sides of his family, the Rickmans being the dominant family in the meeting there. They first settled in Lewes around 1700 and were almost certainly related to, if not directly descended from, the Quakers Nicholas Rickman from Arundel who had been pitilessly persecuted in West Sussex decade after decade before 1690. Their common Quaker heritage and knowledge of Quaker persecution history would have been one of the bonds between the radical debating Paine of the Lewes Headstrong Club and his young admiring convert to radicalism, Rickman. ‘Clio’ Rickman himself would be disowned by the Lewes meeting for ‘marrying out’ but eventually died as a Quaker in London and would be buried in the Quaker burial ground in Bunhills Fields. He would publish Paine and give him sanctuary in London, and himself suffer as a publisher for his Paine connection. 

1775-1787 America. 

1775-80 Paine worked with Philadelphia Quakers in the first anti-slavery society in America, founded by the Quaker John Woolman. He wrote his first essay there asking the Americans to ‘discontinue and renounce’ slavery in African Slavery in America. 

1775. In his Thoughts on a Defensive War, he wrote “I am thus far a Quaker, in that I would readily agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms, and settle matters by negotiation: but unless the whole will, the matter ends, and I take up my musket”, i.e. against the troops, including Hessian mercenaries, being employed by the British to put down the American struggle for colonial independence – ‘laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword (Common Sense). 

Therefore, in 1776 in his Appendix to Common Sense, Paine opposed those conservative ‘Tory’, non-resisting Philadelphia Quakers who, in 1776, advocated reconciliation with the British King, Paine accused this group of rich Quakers, who, he said, did not represent all Quakers, of being not really neutral and peacefully above the conflict as they claimed by de facto partisans on King George III’s side, when they argued against resistance. Their very participation in political argument forfeited their claim to be apolitical quietists. They were really on the side of Mammon. Had Paine known of the actual degree of American Quaker economic collaboration with the British then going on behind the scenes, he would have been even more incensed.⁶

It is noteworthy that in the same Appendix Paine proves that he has read some Quaker persecution history in his admiring allusion to ‘the honest soul of [the Quaker Robert] Barclay’ and his quotation from Barclay’s Address to Charles 11, criticising persecution under Charles II, a King who having himself been oppressed ‘hest reason to know how hateful the oppressor is to both God and man’. 

Xmas 1776 The American Crisis – first essay by Paine advocating total resistance even unto death: ‘These are the times that try men’s souls… Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered;…’ show your faith by your works’ (Epistle of James). 

November 1778, 7th Crisis essay, Paine coined the phrase ‘Religion of Humanity’, i.e. humanity is the true religion. My religion is to do good’. 

1788-9 and 1791: England. 

1789 Letter to Kitty Nicholson: 

There is a Quaker favourite of mine at New York, formerly Miss Watson of Philadelphia ; she is now married to Dr. Lawrence and is an acquaintance of Mrs. Oswald; so be kind as to make her a visit for me. You will like her conversation. She has a little of the Quaker primness – but of the pleasing kind about her.

1789 -1790 and 1792-1795: France 

1793 attacked by Marat re clemency for King denounced for being a Quaker and therefore against death penalty.

1794 – 6: Paine on Quakers and Quakerism in The Age of Reason. Conway Introduction. Paine’s ‘Reason’ is only an expansion of the Quakers “inner light’. Paine was a spiritual successor of George Fox. He too had ‘apostolic fervour’. 

Part 1, Ch. 1. The author’s profession of faith. 

‘I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy’. ‘My own mind is my own church’. 

Ch.111. The character of Jesus. 

‘He was a virtuous and amiable man. The morality he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some Greek philosophers many years before, by the Quakers since, and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any. 

Ch. X111 

My father being of the Quaker profession, it was my good fortune to have an exceedingly good moral education, and a tolerable stock of useful learning. Though I went to the grammar school, I did not learn Latin, not only because I had no inclination to learn languages, but because of the objection the Quakers have against the books in which the language is taught. 

And note how his first attempts to think and write about politics and government were determined by the principle in which he had been raised – I.e. Quakerism. 

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true Deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers: but they have contracted themselves too much by leaving the works of God out of their system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at the conceit that if a Quaker could have been consulted at the creation, what a silent and drab-coloured creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties nor a bird been permitted to sing. 

Part 2, Conclusion to The Age of Reason: 

The only sect that has not persecuted are the Quakers; and the only reason that can be given for it is, that they are rather Deists than Christians. They do not believe much about Jesus Christ, and they call all scriptures a dead letter. 

1797, Letter to Camille Jordan who was anxious to restore Catholic privileges, inc. church bells, in post-revolutionary France. 

The intellectual part of religion is a private affair between every man and his Maker, and which no third party has any right to interfere. The practical part consists in our doing good to each other. But since religion has been made into a trade, the practical part has been made to consist of ceremonies performed by men called priests; true religion has been banished; and such means have been found out to extract money even from the pockets of the poor, instead of contributing to their relief… 

No man ought to make a living by Religion. It is dishonest to do so. Religion is not an act that can be performed by proxy. One person cannot act religion for another… that can be performed by proxy. One person cannot act religion for another… 

The only people who, as a professional sect of Christians provide for the poor of their society, are people known by the name of Quakers. These men have no priests. They assemble quietly in their places of meeting, and do not disturb their neighbours with shows and noise of bells… Quakers are equally remarkable for the education of their children. I am a descendent of a family of that profession; my father was a Quaker, and I presume I may be admitted as evidence of what I assert. … Principles of humanity, of sociability, and sound instruction for advancement of society, are the first objects of studies among the Quakers… One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests. 

1803, Letter to Samuel Adams. 

…”the World has been overrun with fables and creeds of human invention, with sectaries of whole nations against all other nations, and sectaries of those sectaries in each of them against each other. Every sectary, except the Quakers, has been a persecutor. Those who fled from persecution were persecuted in their turn. 

1804, Prospect Papers. 

It is an established principle with the Quakers not to shed blood, Re revelation: the O.T. usage ‘the word of the Lord came to such a one – like the expression used by a Quakers, that ‘the spirit moveth him”. 

The Quakers are a people more moral in their conduct than the people of other sectaries, and generally allowed to be so, do not hold the Bible (i.e. the O.T.) to be the word of God. They call it ‘a history of the times’. 

Conclusion 

Paine himself was not a Quaker, because he was not a Christian and the Quakers were Christians, however unorthodox and radical. Nevertheless, his Quaker heritage from his father gave him a birthright example of principled, fundamental criticism of the corrupt, caste-ridden, unjust society into which he was born. 

The persecution history, in particular, of his Quaker forebears transmitted to Paine both by word of mouth and in print in his youth, must, I believe, have been truly inspirational ‘strengthening medicine’ as he in his turn dared to ‘speak truth to power’. There is no foundation for conviction like saeva indignatio. And Paine, like the early Quakers, would also face trial for ‘sedition’, would be exiled by a fearful aristocratic government and would be imprisoned and risk death for his convictions – the latter, ironically, at the hand of revolutionary extremists. 

Paine acknowledged the idea rightness of the Quaker Peace testimony and would only ever see justification in a purely defensive armed struggle. Paine helped start the American Quaker campaign in Philadelphia to abolish slavery and the slave trade. 

Paine remembered the Society of Friends’ organization of care for its weakest members as a template for the possibility of organized social welfare that he would expound in Rights of Man. His allusions to Quakerism and the practice of the Quakers in his writings whether in America„ in France or in England, were overwhelmingly respectful, even at time reverential – ‘I reverence their philanthropy’. 

So far I have implied the influence of Quakerism on Paine was as positive as it was profound. But was it wholly positive? Perhaps we should consider the comment made by the eighty year old portrait painted by James Northcote, himself a political liberal, as reported in Hazlitt’s first Conversation with Northcote, in 1829. 

Nobody can deny that [Paine] was a very fine writer and a very sensible man. 

But he flew in the face of a whole generation; and no wonder that they were too much for him, and that his name became a byword with such multitudes, for no other reason than that he did not care what offence he gave them by contradicting all their most inveterate prejudices. If you insult a room-full of people, you will be kicked out of it. So neither will the world at large be insulted with impunity. If you tell a whole country that they are fools and knaves, they will not return the compliment by crying you up as the peak of wisdom and honesty. Nor will those who come after be very apt to take up your quarrel. It was not so much Paine’s being a republican or an unbeliever, as the manner in which he brought his opinions forward (which showed self-conceit and a want of feeling) that subjected him to obloquy. People did not like the temper of the man. 

The first Quakers had certainly known how to get up the noses of their late 17th century persecutor. They knew they were in the right, that they were ‘the Children of God’ and those who were against them were mere ‘hirelings’ and ‘worldlings’. But they did not thereby endear themselves to their world. As Besse himself said: Nor could it be expected that a Testimony levelled both against the darling Vices of the Laity and the forced maintenance of the Clergy should meet with any other than an unkind reception.⁷ Was Paine too much like those earliest Quakers, forfeiting persuasiveness in the certainty of his own exclusive rightness – and so ‘[meeting] an unkind reception’? 

Twenty years earlier than Hazlitt’s Conversation about him with Northcote, on his deathbed in March,1809, Paine had expressed his last wish: 

“I know not if the Society of people called Quakers, admit a person to be buried in their burying ground, who does not belong to their Society, but if they do, or will admit me, I would prefer being buried there; my father belonged to that profession, and I was partly brought up in it.” 

According to Keane, a local New Jersey Friend, Willett Hicks: 

‘conveyed Paine’s request sympathetically to the local Friends, but it was refused. Hicks reported back that the society felt that Paine’s own friends and sympathizers “might wish to raise a monument to his memory, which being contrary to their rules, would render it inconvenient to them”….Paine sobbed uncontrollably’ …

Notes

1. Conway, Moncure, Life of Thomas Paine…. 1892, vol.1, p. 11. 
2. See Oxford DNB entry on Whitehead, See Public Record Offices for the earliest mss. Quaker archives, listing local ‘Sufferers’ and ‘Perpetrators on facing pages, month by month, year by year, 1652-1690. 
3. Those among the Valiant Sixty’ at Firbank Fell in 1651 who had gone to ‘ publish truth’ in Norwich and Norfolk in 1653-4 pi included Christopher Atkinson from Kendal, Ann Blaylding from Drawell, Richard Hubberthome from Yealand, James Lancaster from Walney, Dorothy Waugh from Preston Patrick and George Whitehead from Orton. 
4. Keane p. 24: they believed their mutual aid enabled them to return in Spirit to the grace of the earliest ‘primitive’ Christians. 
5. Quote intro. to facsimile of Besse re their distribution. 
6. See Conway, vol.1, pp. 78-77. 
7. Besse, Introduction.

The post `No Respecter Of Persons’: Thomas Paine And The Quakers: The Influence Of 17th Century Quaker Persecution History On Paine’s Radicalism  appeared first on .

In Thetford Thomas Paine was born

A day that heralded the dawn

Of revolutions that shook the world

When freedom’s banner was unfurled

First in America then France

When liberty learned to dance.

For while he plied his trade

Making stays for wife and maid;

He lost a wife and then began

To take the post of excuse man.

He moved to Lewes, found a wife,

Took up another roll in life.

He wrote a paper, cost him dear,

His job, his wife, a badger’s jeer.

Next to America he sailed

Turning his back on what had failed.

Benjamin Franklin was the hand

That sent him to the promised land.

There came the call – ‘Independence’.

Which he distilled in Common Sense –

‘These are the times to try men’s souls’

Identified America’s goals.

A bridge of iron was his next plan

To aid transport for everyman.

To Europe he returned and where

Revolution was in the air.

In France the Bastille was destroyed

All common people overjoyed.

Edmund Burke’s Reflections came

Saying the people were to blame

Tom Paine then wrote Rights of Man

And from the printing press it ran.

In one lifetime, of honour shorn,

Two Republics had been born,

Tom Paine was midwife to them both

Had witnessed freedom take its oath

In America where he had died

Only two or three there sighed.

William Cobbett stole his bones

An act no memory condones;

We do not know now where they lay

His words will greet each living day.

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Dr Richard Price was a man of many parts: preacher, moral philosopher, commentator on actuarial and public finance, and ardent campaigner for civil liberties. This essay focuses, for the most part, on his latter activities. 

One of the most influential radical thinkers of his day, though now little known beyond dedicated historians and scarcely quoted, he was a dissenting (non conformist) minister, the son of a dissenting minister, yet thoroughly traditional in his core beliefs in the omnipotence of God, the power of prayer and the rewards of heaven. Brought up and educated in the dissenting tradition, he cut no imposing figure, yet eventually attracted both a worshipful following as well as a coterie of powerful detractors. 

He was dissenting, of course, as a Protestant refusing to accept the practice of the established Church of England, and therefore restricted under the harsh laws introduced after the collapse of the Puritan Revolution. The Toleration Act of 1689 provided some easement, but this had excluded Roman Catholics and Unitarians (a word that first appeared in Britain in 1673). Nevertheless, after 1774, Price followed Joseph Priestley and Theophilus Lindsey in avowing a revealed Unitarian theology based on reason and the enlightened conscience. Typically, beliefs were not precisely prescribed, but the emerging Unitarians rejected the doctrine of the Trinity (looking at God as One as distinct from Father, Son and Holy Spirit), the idea of original sin and the threat of eternal punishment (yet fell short of a rational rejection of theism). They held Jesus Christ in the highest regard, but as a mortal man, not an incarnate deity. 

Newington Green 

Unsurprisingly, some of those of this dissenting persuasion extended their nonconformity into areas of political criticism, with a zeal for social reform. Price was a remarkable example. Born in 1723, and ordained at the age of 21, he spent the first twelve years of his ministry as chaplain to the Streatfield family of London’s Stoke Newington, as well as assisting at the Old Jewry Presbyterian Chapel, before moving, with his new Anglican wife Sarah, to the village of Newington Green as minister of its nonconformist church in 1758. The house where they lived, 54 Newington Green, part of a surviving historic terrace, was next door to the banker Thomas Rogers and therefore, from 1763, to a baby, Samuel Rogers, destined to become one of England’s leading poets. The area was already established as a centre of non-conformity, home to many well-heeled dissenting families. During the next 30 years no.54 was to extend a welcome to a wide assortment of celebrities, including his close friends Benjamin Franklin, James Burgh (who kept a dissenting academy on Newington Green) and Priestley, along with occasional visitors such as David Hume and Adam Smith, John Howard, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Home Tooke, Lord Lyttleton, and Earl Stanhope. Allardyce (see sources) describes it as “an important meeting place for the progressive and radical thinkers of the day”. 

By all accounts Price was not at first a great preacher. Cone (see sources) tells us that “his weak, unpleasant voice accentuated his other shortcomings as a speaker”, but that he later gained success “out of the thoughtful content of his sermons, the quiet earnestness of his demeanour, and his sincerity and humility”. These were virtues that were also effective in his writings. At least until his final address he was no firebrand; persuasive rather than dogmatic; indeed it was the mildness of his approach and his scholarly, measured discourse which earned respect from his friends and did much to confound those who opposed his views. His first important work was published in 1758 with a forbidding title which I will shorten to A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals. He had perfected this over many years, emphatic that morality should not be divorced from religion. Nature was evidence of God’s power and he believed that inconsistencies in such evidence were merely attributable to our inability to comprehend God’s design. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of a text running to nearly 500 pages, but it is relevant to bring out his insistence that intelligence is one of the requisites of practical morality, “necessary to the perception of moral good and evil”. And that liberty is essential to intelligent morality: “A thinking, designing, reasoning being, without liberty, without any inward, spontaneous, active, self-directing principle” cannot be conceived (pp 305-6). Thus, he argued, liberty and reason constitute the capacity of virtue. 

A call to civil liberty 

This passionate advocacy of personal freedom lay at the heart of Price’s thinking and found its most positive expression in his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, published in February 1776 (compare Burgh’s Political Disquisitions (1774)). Here he sets out his concept of liberty as the principle of self-direction or self-government, in contrast to the external conquest of will and private judgement: the difference between freedom and slavery. “To be free,” wrote Price, “is to be guided by one’s own will, and to be guided by the will of another is the characteristic of servitude.” Liberty could be physical, moral or religious, but in relation to civil liberty, it was necessary for governance to be seen as “the creature of the people”, originating with them and conducted under their direction, with a single-minded view to their happiness. Thus taxes must be freely given for public services and laws established by common consent; magistrates being merely trustees or deputies for carrying regulations into execution. Price recognised that not everyone could express their views on public measures individually or personally, but they could delegate authority through the appointment of substitutes or representatives. In doing so, he stressed the importance of a rule that people given the trust of government should hold office only for short terms, chosen by the majority of the state and subject to their instructions. 

Inevitably, he noticed, the interests of states would clash, but it would be no solution to make one of them supreme over the rest. His solution has a familiar ring: “Let every state, with respect to all its internal concerns, be continued independent of all the rest, and let a general confederacy be formed by the appointment of a senate consisting of representatives from all the different states.” 

The antithesis of civil liberty, Price contended, was the doctrine that there are certain men who possess in themselves, independently of the will of the people, a God-given right of governing them. Such a view represented mankind as a body of vassals: “to be obliged, from our birth, to look up to a creature no better than ourselves as the master of our fortunes, and to receive his will as our law — what can be more humiliating? …There is nothing that requires to be watched more than power. There is nothing that ought to be opposed with a more determined resolution than its encroachment… should any events ever arise that should render the same opposition necessary that took place in the times of King Charles the first, and James the second, I am afraid that all that is valuable to us would be lost. The terror of the standing army, the danger of the public funds, and the all- corrupting influence of the treasury, would deaden ail zeal and produce general acquiescence and servility.” 

The case for American independence 

It is irresistible not to see the first part of the pamphlet as a prelude — a setting of the scene — for the slightly better-known Part Two, devoted to Price’s observations on the justice and policy of the war with America. He was overtly sympathetic to the cause of the American colonies, in which he had taken a close interest for some years, not least as a consequence of his friendship with Franklin. Stanley Weintraub (see sources) notices that in January 1774, Price, Edmund Burke and Joseph Priestley were among those in the gallery of the Whitehall Palace Cockpit when the 68- year-old Franklin was called to the Privy Council to answer a claim that he had “publicly exposed” private letters from the royal governor of Massachusetts that somewhat exposed the realities of British foreign policy. These, said to have been sent by Franklin in confidence to an old friend in Boston, had subsequently been leaked to the Boston Gazette. Though subjected to a long and vitriolic assault, Franklin made no concession, but was eventually stripped of his representative office and obliged to return to America. The humiliation merely served to raise Franklin’s reputation in his home country and to reinforce a divide that was on its way to becoming irreconcilable. 

Both Price and Franklin had been members of the ‘Honest Whigs Club’ from at least 1769, along with James Boswell, dissenting clergymen Joseph Priestley and Andrew Kippis, James Burgh, botanist Peter Collinson, and Sir John Pringle (from 1772-78 president of the Royal Society – to which Price had himself been elected in 1765). The club met in a coffee-house on alternate Thursdays, and whilst we cannot now be privy to their discussions it seems clear that for some of them radical political reform was high on the agenda. They must have fed off each other, for obvious similarities are evident in the writings of Franklin, Burgh, Priestley and Price. 

Up to mid-1775, despite military activities, the grain of popular sentiment in America and the perceived colonial objective had generally been one of reconciliation. There was trust in George III and a belief that the British parliament would see sense and be persuaded to restore American rights within an amicable union. Indeed there was a view, especially in the so-called Continental Congress, that independence would not only be disloyal but might lead to mob rule and the loss of relatively safe trading routes. Such faith in the monarchy was, however, soon to be dispelled by a series of repressive royal measures and pronouncements which clearly demonstrated that the king was leading rather than being overruled by parliament, and was deaf to colonial supplications for conciliation and reform. Price had by this time been increasingly drawn into the political arena, both in his campaigning against the continuing intrusion upon the rights of Protestant dissenters and his empathy with the colonial rebellion. His contacts in London and letters from America kept him in touch with the tide of events across the Atlantic and elicited his unequivocal support for the rebels and their cause. There had been little appetite for war among the general populace in Britain, and several prominent people had warned of the futility of attempting to subdue the aspirations of these distant and disparate colonies by military force. But the king and his establishment were fixed on a collision course of crushing the rebellion, maintaining control, order, obedience and the sovereignty of parliament: effectively domination. Towards the end of 1775, Price determined to enunciate his thinking. When his Observations were published on 9 February 1776, six years had elapsed since the Boston ‘massacre’, all but nine months since the attack at Lexington and, crucially, more than a month after the sensational appearance of Paine’s Common Sense (some three months if one takes account of the time needed for Price’s pamphlet to reach America). It is now apparent to us that, although Price’s text reinforced the bid for independence and was welcomed, the American Congress was already moving to a separation from Britain: the die was already cast and the rift beyond reconciliation. 

Yet Price’s work contains some imperishable principles which have since been tested by history and deserve our closer attention. Typically, he began with a barbed olive branch, ready to make great allowances for the different judgments of others, rhetorically conceding that his words would not have any effect on those who still thought that British claims could be reconciled to the principles of true liberty and legitimate government. He recognised that the idea of America as a subordinate British colony was deeply ingrained, but argued that this was open to a change of heart when the idea of colonists being British subjects, bound by British laws, was seen to be unreasonable when tried against the principles of civil liberty. 

He pointed out that, although novel, the fact that the colonised state was on its way to becoming superior to its parent state was something that should be considered on the ground of reason and justice, rather than the old rules of narrow and partial policy. Alas, however, he saw that matters had already gone too far and that conflict (“the sword”) was now to determine the rights of Britain and America. But he thought it was not too late to retreat; to rely on the king’s disposition to “stay the sword”. 

First, one should consider the justice of the war. This rested upon an act of parliament giving Britain the power and the right to “make laws and statutes to bind the colonies and the people of America, in all cases whatever”. A dreadful power indeed, commented Price: “I defy anyone to express slavery in stronger language.” It amounted to saying that we had a right to do with them what we please. 

Price rejected the argument that there needed to be a supreme right to interfere in the internal legislations of the colonies, “in order to preserve the unity of the British Empire”. He pointed out that similar pleas had, in all ages, been used to justify tyranny, citing the example of the Pope as head of the Roman Catholic Church. Such an approach could produce “nothing but discord and mischief’. 

Nor could it be claimed that Britain was the superior state as the parent state. Parents do indeed have authority over their children, but only until they become independent and capable of judging for themselves. Thereafter only respect and influence is due to the parent. By this measure our authority in relation to the colonies should have been relaxed as they “grew up”, whereas we had taken our authority “to the greatest extent, and exercised it with the greatest rigour… No wonder then, that they had turned upon us.” The land was not ours simply because we had first settled there; if anyone could lay such a claim it was first with the natives, and then only with the settlers who cleared and cultivated the wilderness. Had they not, he asked, then established a system of governance similar to our own, with our agreement, for more than a century? Was it any wonder that they should revolt when they found their charters violated, and an attempt made to force innovations upon them by famine and the sword?” 

But aside from charters, Price continued, was it common sense to imagine that when people settle in a distant country those they have left behind should for ever be able to control their property and have the power to subject them to any modes of government they please? To be taxed and ruled by a parliament that does not represent them? And ought we to be angry because the colonies looked for a better constitution and more liberty than that enjoyed in Britain? Rather should it not be wished that there may be at least one free country left on earth to which we might flee when venality, luxury and vice had completed the ruin of liberty here? Imposing taxes without representation, Price suggested, was simply another form of despotism. 

Price then turned to the future, with, we can now judge, top marks for foresight. If, he speculated, it was argued that Britain had a supremacy entitling its government to exercise jurisdiction over taxation and internal legislation, should we then be equally entitled in perpetuity? In 1775 the colonists numbered a little short of half the British population, but the probability was that in another 50 or 60 years they would double our numbers, forming a mighty empire, consisting of a variety of states with the same or greater accomplishments and arts “that give dignity and happiness to human life”. Would they then have to continue to acknowledge Britain’s claim to supremacy, even should our legislature degenerate into a body of sycophants, little more than a public court for registering royal edicts? 

These were powerful arguments in favour of self-determination for the American colonies, reinforced by a scarcely concealed scepticism about our own governance and its future. Price went on to discuss specific aspects of the war with America: whether it was justified by the principles of the British constitution, its policy implications, its effect on the honour of the nation and the probability of its success. In its belief that discontent could be quelled by a resort to force of arms, he argued, the government had massively over-reacted, provoking a shift away from a natural disposition to accept British authority and co-operate in trade to a general exasperation and spirit of revolt. 

Divergent reactions 

In Britain, Price’s Observations prompted considerable interest: predictably divided between liberals who generally shared his views and conservative opponents who quickly published a number of angry rebuttals; not least one from John Wesley, who saw Price’s work as “a dangerous Tract…which, if practised, would overturn all government, and bring in universal anarchy.” But apart from concern raised by his close analysis of the likely financial consequences of war, Price’s text had little effect; none at all on Britain’s belligerent foreign policy. There were some fears for Price’s safety, but in fact no punitive action was taken against him. Ambrose Serie, the secretary to the British Admiral Lord Richard Howe, saw it as evidence of the mildest & most relaxed Government in the World”. In any other state than Great Britain, he argued, the book would have been burned and the author hanged. 

In America, unsurprisingly, Price’s text was well received and added to the author’s already glowing reputation. But whereas Paine’s Common Sense made a forceful and unambiguous case for independence and transformed colonial opinion, I think that the response to Price was no more than thoughtful. I think that anyone who reads Price’s full text, as against my considerable simplification (indeed over simplification) cannot fail to be struck by the contrast between Paine’s plain speaking and concise, straightforward and inspirational prose and Price’s lengthy perambulations. This distinction, I believe, similarly accounts for Price’s relatively low-key historical reputation. This is unfortunate, because the essence of Price’s text is not dissimilar from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, adopted only five months after the publication of Observations. Price’s thinking went to the heart of the values on civil liberty that we now share with the United States. Sagely, Cone titled his biography of Price Torchbearer of Freedom. 

The Declaration itself, written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, further fermented the spirit of rebellion, particularly against the obdurate George III. After its famous opening statement of principle it enumerated the history of the king as one of “repeated Injuries and Usurpations”, all directed to the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the states of the Union, and concluded with a declaration that the united colonies were free and independent states absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown. Readings of the text were organised in various parts of the colonies, prompting demonstrations hostile to the British and its monarch, the most famous of which took place in the evening of 9 July 1776 in New York. When the reading was over, a crowd marched to the Bowling Green, the location of William Wilton’s splendid representation of a mounted George Ill. In a great symbolic gesture, the rebels pulled horse and monarch down from its plinth, an event which now inevitably draws comparison with the fate of Sadam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad. In the case of the unfortunate image of George, the insult was intensified when the statue was later melted down and made into musket balls: apart, that it, from its head, which was mounted on a pole and exhibited for a time outside Fort Washington. 

Meanwhile, Price’s pamphlets continued to make waves at home. In the face of heavy criticism he went on to produce Additional Observations in 1777, and to republish a combination of both texts in 1778, attracting still more abuse. In America, by contrast, his popularity continued to grow. On 6 October in the same year, as a mark of the esteem in which he was held in America, Congress wrote to express its desire to consider him a citizen of the United States and to solicit his help in regulating their finances. He could be remunerated both for the move there and his services. But Price, no longer eager or feeling himself sufficiently fit for any such challenge, while gratified, graciously declined. Cone records that in his reply he looked to the United States as “the hope, and likely soon to become the refuge of mankind”. In 1781 Yale University honoured Price as a Doctor of Law, and in the following year the American Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him a fellowship. 

Nor was this the only political offer. Lord Shelburne, an old friend, keenly aware of Price’s financial expertise and concern for the national debt, had sought to tempt him away from his theological pursuits. When appointed Prime Minister in July 1782, on the death of Rockingham, he promptly asked Price to assist him. Once again, content in the radical milieu of Newington Green and preaching to a full chapel, Price declined, feigning that he did not have much to contribute. As it turned out, the opportunity would have been short-lived. Shelburne resigned in February 1873, after defeats in the Commons. 

Strategies for a blessed peace 

The end of the American war brought Price back into the political scene. He was able to correspond more freely with his friends in the new world, and soon started work on a pamphlet which reached the United States in 1784: Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, and the means of making it a benefit to the world. Though his advice was unsolicited, it was warmly welcomed by Franklin, Jefferson, Adams and other friends, thankfully received by members of Congress (and by George Washington personally), and widely read and admired. He enjoyed a status as a champion of America and in January 1785 was elected into membership of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia. 

In these Observations, Price suggested that the American Revolution, next to the introduction of Christianity, might prove to be the most important step in the progressive course of human improvement: a casting off of the shackles of superstition and tyranny. At the end of the pamphlet he conceded that he may have carried his ideas too high and deceived himself with visionary expectations. But there are those who find parallels in Price’s Observations and the American Constitution of 1788, and a close reading of his remarkable text will certainly reveal some surprising and timeless principles. 

Of particular interest are his thoughts on the “supreme importance” of religious and civil liberty, based on truth and reason. He looked for constitutional developments that would make government even friendlier to liberty, as a means of promoting human happiness and dignity; specifically liberty of discussion in all speculative matters and liberty of conscience in all religious matters, subject to restraint only if used to injure anyone in their person, property or good name. In the exercise of liberty of discussion Price included “the liberty of examining all public measures and the conduct of all public men; and of writing and publishing on all speculative and doctrinal points”. 

Here Price faced a difficulty, for he was aware of a common opinion (then as now) that some matters were so sacred, and others of so bad a tendency, that no public discussion of them ought to be allowed, and that those in authority should penalise any such discussion. Those, for example, who opposed the Muslim view of the divine mission of Mohamed, the Popish view of worship of the Virgin Mary, or the traditional Protestant view of doctrines of the Trinity or the supreme divinity of Christ. But, argued Price, civil power had nothing to do with such matters, and was not equipped to judge their truth. Would not, he asked, perfect neutrality be the greatest blessing? Different sects were continually exclaiming against one another’s opinion as dangerous and licentious. Even Christianity, at first, was so accused in that it ran counter to pagan idolatry; and the Christian religion was therefore reckoned “a destructive and pernicious enthusiasm”. Were this kind of judgment the rule there would be no doctrine, however true or important, the avowal of which would not in some country or other be subjected to civil penalties. 

Price next turned to liberty of conscience: freedom of religious belief and practice. Here he was on his home territory, and expounded — at length — on the virtues of true religion and their perversion when civil authority was involved. This, essentially, was a statement of the Unitarian position: a blast against slavish adherence to “obsolete creeds and absurdities”, imposing boundaries on human investigations and confining the exercise of reason. In some European countries, wrote Price, these dogmas and rituals had been recognised and acknowledged, but had become so entrenched by the state apparatus that it was scarcely possible to get rid of them. In his own country the growth of enlightenment had had no effect on the religious establishment: “not a ray of the increasing light had penetrated it”. Price believed that there were lessons here for America, where constitutional examples — while not perfect — encouraged him to think it might be possible that pernicious civil forms of gloomy and cruel superstitious religion might be avoided. 

Price’s thoughts on education were similarly challenging. He believed that its purpose should be to teach how to think, rather that what to think. He particularly regretted that people of different faiths, convinced that they alone had discovered the truth, should be confident advocates of education; whereas the “very different and inconsistent accounts that they gave” demonstrated that they were utter strangers to the truth. It would be better to teach nothing, he suggested, than to teach what they held out as truth. 

The greater their confidence, the greater the reason to distrust them: “We generally see the warmest zeal where the object of it is the greatest nonsense.” Thus, in Price’s view, education ought to be an initiation into candour, rather than into any systems of faith. Hitherto, education had been dominated by adherence to established and narrow [formulaic] plans, whereas Price contended that the mind should be rendered free and unfettered, quick in discerning evidence, and prepared to follow it from whatever quarter and in whatever manner it might offer itself. 

There were other snares and dangers facing the emerging nation. Price ranged briefly over the need for a just settlement of federal union and the avoidance of internal conflict. He warned of the danger of disputes being settled at “the points of bayonets and the mouths of cannon”, instead of relying on the collective wisdom of confederation. He stressed — as he had begun – the perils associated with excessive public debt, and the importance of preventing too great an inequality in the distribution of property. He saw equality in society as essential to liberty and, in this regard, urged that America would do well to avoid the British enthusiasm for hereditary honours and titles of nobility. Let there be honours to encourage merit, he proposed, but let them die with those who had earned them rather than bequeath to posterity a proud and tyrannical aristocracy. America would be better off without lords, bishops and kings, and certainly without the rule of primogeniture. 

Price similarly inveighed against excessive love of one’s own country, widely applauded as one of the noblest principles of human nature, but in fact one of its most destructive forces. He commended instead the benefits of communication across nations, whence people could see themselves as citizens of the world rather than of a particular state. 

But Price saved his most fervent — and controversial — proposition to a final section headed ‘Of the negro trade and slavery’. He was not the first writer to point out that slavery was completely at odds with principles of equality. Benjamin Rush had castigated slavery as a national crime, and early in 1775 Thomas Paine had made a spirited attack against the trade in The Pennsylvania Journal. Price himself cited Thomas Day’s tract Fragment of an original Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes, written in 1776, but not published until 1784. Keane (see sources) refers to there having been around half a million slaves working in the 13 colonies during the Revolution. The system of forced labour was well established and widely seen as legitimate. Price would have none of this. The trade was one that ‘cannot be censured in language too severe”; a traffic “shocking to humanity, cruel, wicked and diabolical”. Until measures were introduced to abolish this odious servitude, the United States would not deserve the liberty for which they had fought. Three years later a certain William Wilberforce would be drawn into the abolitionist cause. 

A female protege 

In the year marked by the publication of his observations on the American Revolution, an accident of fate introduced a completely different interest into Price’s day job at Newington Green. A young woman, destined famously to assert the rights of women, took a lease on a large house within sight of the church. Mary Wollstonecraft, aged 25, had chanced upon an unexpected inspiration. It is not for this article to set out the complex circumstances that brought Mary, her dearest friend Fanny Blood and her sister Eliza to this part of London; suffice it to say that, led by Mary but lacking adequate resources, each of them was seeking to break out from miserable situations and equally breaking with convention. They remained for a relatively brief period that was in many respects an unhappy one, marked by an unending struggle to make ends meet, the death of Fanny, and the ultimate impracticability of making a success of the school. But it was also a precious time that brought Mary into contact with Price and his circle. Although an Anglican, Mary was also drawn to attend the dissenting church, and was invigorated to experience the support and stimulation of good people whose religion was based on reason rather than a belief in supernatural events. Here, among an assembly of intellectual radicals steeped in a tradition that went back to Defoe, she was exposed for the first time to radical ideas, to the quest for change, seen as a realistic possibility. Here she was introduced to Joseph Priestley and taken to Islington to meet Samuel Johnson (though she preferred the thinking of Price) and, through Price, met her future publisher Joseph Johnson. And she also met women who could hold their own. The dissident aspiration for social reform took Mary in a particular direction in keeping with her personal experience, as a female, of blatant discrimination. We may conjecture that it influenced her in writing her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, which earned her a much needed advance from Joseph Johnson. Her school survived only until the autumn of 1786, when she moved to Ireland, but her experience at Newington left an indelible impression. Tomalin (see sources) refers to a letter from Mary in which she mentioned the particular friendliness of Dr. Price. Though his wife was dying (Sarah passed away on 20 September 1786 after a long illness), he still had time to think of Mary’s welfare. Tomalin comments that Mary learnt a great deal from Price; although she was never tempted to exchange her “easy-going” Anglicanism for his dissenting faith, he “set her on certain paths and prepared her to think critically about society”. 

Inspired by revolution 

The loss of Sarah, advancing age and declining health bore down on Price. He relocated to Hackney and, though continuing to preach, was mindful of retirement. Events, however, were moving in the opposite direction. It is hard to say quite when discontent in France could fairly be called a revolution, but by 1789 the social upheaval there was recognised as a powerful movement that could easily spread abroad; in Britain bringing hope to radicals aching for reform and fear to those attached to the old social order. Price, despite his tribulations, was drawn into the fray. As a leading member of the London Revolution Society, the agitation in Paris excited him and other radical protagonists to think that what had been achieved in America might be transplanted into Europe and give power to the people. The Society had been formed in 1788 to commemorate the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, but inevitably interest was now centred more on the revolution in France. On 4 November 1789 (the anniversary of the birthday of William of Orange), at the annual meeting of the Society held in the Dissenters’ meeting house in Old Jewry, Price delivered a daring sermon, quickly published as A Discourse of the Love of Our Country (with various appendages). This, of course, was an opportunity to return to some of his most precious themes and stand conventional thinking on its head. 

‘Country’ he said, was not to be thought of as the soil or spot of earth on which we happened to be born, but rather the community of which we were members. Nor should we see our country or its laws and governance as superior to other countries; nor confine wisdom and virtue to the circle of our own acquaintance and party. Indeed, we should see ourselves as citizens of the world guided by the blessings of truth [enlightenment], virtue and liberty, embracing under God universal benevolence, and loving our neighbours as ourselves. An enlightened and virtuous community must also be a free country; one that did not suffer invasions of its rights, or bend to tyrants. Obedience to just laws was essential to prevent a state of anarchy, but there were extremes of compliance that ought to be avoided: adulation was always odious and, when offered to men in power, served to corrupt them. Price deplored servility, and castigated the crawling homage that had greeted George ill’s recovery from illness. He would have chosen to wish that the king would henceforth more properly consider himself the servant than the sovereign of his people. 

He asked his congregation not to forget the principles of the 1688 revolution, which the Society had held out as “an instruction to the public”, notably: 

• the right to liberty of conscience in religious matters,
• the right to resist power when abused, and
• the right to choose our own governors; to cashier them for
• misconduct; and to frame a government for ourselves.

Price rejoiced that the ‘Glorious Revolution’, which had got rid of James II, had broken the fetters of despotism and saved Britain from the “infamy and misery” of popery and slavery. Yet, he was eager to point out that those events had fallen short of delivering perfect liberty. He lamented in particular continued civil restrictions on dissenters and the gross and palpable inequality of parliamentary representation. (in a footnote added to the version published in 1790 he defined this as “A representation chosen principally by the Treasury and a few thousand dregs of people who are generally paid for their votes.”) The state of the country was such as to render it “an object of care and anxiety”: a monstrous weight of debt was crippling it, and vice and venality were such that the spirit to which it owed its distinctive qualities was in decline. Every day seemed to indicate that the country was becoming more ready to accept encroachments on its liberties. 

But again Price saved his most audacious salvo to the end of his address. He declared that he saw “the ardour for liberty catching and spreading; a general amendment in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.” The times were auspicious. People were “starting from sleep, breaking their fetters, and claiming justice from their oppressors.” The spirit (“light”) that had set America free had reflected on France, and there kindled into a blaze that was laying despotism in ashes, warming and illuminating Europe! He concluded with a warning: “Tremble all ye oppressors of the world! Take warning all ye supporters of slavish governments and slavish hierarchies!…You cannot now hold the world in darkness. Struggle no longer against increasing light and liberality. Restore to mankind their rights; and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together.” 

On the same evening, members of the Society met again for their annual dinner at the London Tavern. Price, no doubt weary but still animated, moved an address to the National Assembly of France sending congratulations on the revolution and the prospect it gave “to the first two kingdoms in the world of a common participation in the blessings of civil and religious liberty”. As well as adding ardent wishes for the settlement of the revolution, the Society unambiguously and unanimously joined in expressing the particular satisfaction with which they reflected on “the tendency of the glorious example given in France to encourage other nations to assert the inalienable rights of mankind, and thereby to introduce a general reformation in the governments of Europe, and to make the world free and happy.” 

A mixed response 

The radical sermon and the congratulatory message inevitably reignited hostility to Price and provoked a pamphlet war. Price was not without supporters, yet perhaps the most telling reservation came not from an enemy but a valued friend. When John Adams, who was to become the second President of the United States, was appointed the new American minister to the Court of St. James in 1785, he and his family had travelled to Hackney to hear Price preach. But when, five years on, Adams read Price’s Old Jewry sermon, his response, while generous, was cautious. He warmed to its principles and sentiments, and recognised the historic importance of the French Revolution, but felt constrained to add that he had “learned by awful experience to rejoice with trembling.” He knew that France was not America, and warned that in revolutions “the most fiery spirits and flighty geniuses frequently obtained more influence than men of sense and judgment; and the weakest man may carry foolish measures in opposition to wise ones proposed by the ablest.” He saw France as being in great danger. McCullough (see sources) remarks that ahead of anyone in the government, and more clearly than any, Adams foresaw the French Revolution leading to chaos, horror, and ultimate tyranny. 

Mary Wollstonecraft’s defence of his Discourse (A Vindication of the Rights of Men), published anonymously, was decidedly double- edged, arguing that while his final political opinions were “Utopian reveries” they deserved respect as the product of a benevolent mind tottering on the verge of the grave. The world, she argued, was not yet sufficiently civilised to adopt such a sublime system of morality. 

Edmund Burke had been far less kind. As well as being alarmed by Price’s discourse he was also aware of Thomas Paine’s sympathy for the Revolution, and spent the best part of 1790 preparing his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published on 1 November. He wrote of his astonishment on discovering a Society that had devoted itself to consideration of the merits of the constitution of a foreign nation, leading on to sending, as though in a sort of public capacity, a sanction to the proceedings of the National Assembly in France; on its own authority and without the express agreement of the Society’s own government. He saw Price’s sermon as having been designed to connect the affairs of France with those of England, “by drawing us into an imitation of the conduct of the National Assembly”. This had given him “a considerable degree of uneasiness”. He had found “some good moral and religious sentiments, and not ill expressed, [but these were] mixed up in a sort of porridge of various political opinions and reflections”, of which the French Revolution was the “grand ingredient in the cauldron.” 

Burke saw the congratulatory message sent to the National Assembly as a corollary of the principles of the sermon, moved by its preacher. Few harangues from the pulpit, he wrote, had ever breathed less of the spirit of moderation. Much as in our own time the Archbishop of Canterbury has been criticised for expressing his political dissent in the pages of the New Statesman, Burke observed that “no sound ought to be heard in church but the healing voice of Christian charity.” “The cause of civil liberty and civil government,” he argued, “gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties.”

Burke’s Reflections are well known and need no further elucidation here. The same can be said of Paine’s famous rejoinder. The first part of his Rights of Man was published on 13 March 1791_ Little more than a month later, on 19 April, Price died, having been for some months, as Cone puts it, “a silent spectator to events in France and England”. He was buried at Bunhill Fields, after a service led by Joseph Priestley. Allardyce tells us that the funeral route was so crowded by well-wishers that the coffin arrived five hours late for the service. 

We, of course, have the benefit of hindsight in knowing that Britain would not take the revolutionary road. But it is important to understand that Price and Paine were writing before the onset of the horrific phase of the French Revolution that came to be known as the Reign of Terror. They believed that the uprising heralded a new dawn. Price knew that there were dangers. In a footnote to the Discourse he accepted that countries lacking our “excellent constitution of government” could not achieve liberty without “setting everything afloat, and making their escape from slavery through the dangers of anarchy.” But it is reasonable to surmise that the “good Dr Price” — known for freeing birds caught in the nets of local bird-catchers and a hero to poor people in Newington Green — would have shifted his ground in the light of those terrible events. The bloodletting in France (which almost claimed Paine’s life) need not be seen as invalidating Price’s cherished principles. It is perhaps rather that we British have been slower to act and less inclined to dramatic change and violence. Reform towards Price’s Utopia has gradually been conceded, both in Britain and the European Union, but has taken longer. Some may feel that even now we have still some way to go in achieving the goal of “perfect liberty”.

Sources 

Carl B. Cone: Torchbearer of Freedom, the influence of Richard Prim on eighteenth century thought (University of Kentucky Press, 1952). 

Richard Price: Observations on the nature of civil liberty, the principles of government and the justice and policy of the war with America (1776, available as a Google book). 

Richard Price: Observations on the importance of the American Revolution, and the means of making it a benefit to the world (the edition of March 1785, available as a Google book). 

Richard Price: A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (T.Cadell, 1790; available as a Google book). 

Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event (J. Dodsley, 2’d edition, 1790, available as a Google book). 

Alex Aliardyce: The village that changed the world (Newington Green Action Group, 2”d ed. 2010). 

Stanley Weintraub: Iron Tears, rebellion in America 1775-1783 (Simon & Schuster, 2005). 

Gregory T. Edgar. Campaign of 1776 — the road to Trenton (Heritage Books, 1995). Contains a brilliant account of the close-run congressional debate on the Declaration of Independence. 

United States Declaration of Independence (the first Dunlap broadside version, 4 July 1776). 

David McCullough: John Adams Simon & Schuster, 2002). 

Claire Tornalin: Mary Wollstonecraft (Penguin, revised edition 1992). 

John Keane: Tom Paine, a political life (Bloomsbury, 1995), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).

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Thomas Paine’s reputation among those who have not read his work — as I had not, before I sat down with Age of Reason not long ago — is as a somewhat scandalous free-thinker. According to A.JAyer, on whose 1988 critical biography Thomas Paine I have relied in preparing this appreciation, “As late as the beginning of this century, Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth president of the United States, chose to refer to Thomas Paine as a ‘filthy little atheist.”‘ Had you asked me, I would have guessed Paine to be an atheist, although omitting the adjectives. The truth is that, although Paine was a ferocious enemy of religion, he was not at all an atheist. 

Introduction 

What you notice first about Age of Reason is Paine’s resonant style. His words have a paradoxical impact because his grammar and vocabulary are so simple. He gets great impact from a series of one-syllable words, as in the well-known phrases “My own mind is my own church,” or “These are the times that try men’s souls.° Some of the most pungent paragraphs of Age of Reason are crafted entirely of words of one and two syllables. 

Was the book all rhetoric, or did it present a reasoned argument? Was it an antique or could it speak to modern readers? I read it carefully; I checked some of Paine’s Biblical assertions; then I wrote this Appreciation in order to come to better terms with the book. 

In the end I found arguments that are sensible and detailed — although put forward in vitriolic, impassioned rhetoric — and behind them an amazingly up- to-date mind, one that could easily adapt to modern cosmology and notions of “emergent” phenomena. Paine the philosopher deserves to be better-known, especially among technologists. 

The Opening 

Theme Age of Reason is in two parts that were originally written and published a year apart. Paine set forth his own creed at the outset of the first part. 

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy.

However, he wastes no time demonstrating why conventional believers find him uncomfortable: 

I do not believe in the creed professed by…the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish. appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. 

These are the two main themes of the two volumes that comprise Age of Reason: A case for Deism, the belief that God can only be apprehended by rational study of the creation; and an energetic, passionate, and reasoned attack on the legitimacy of all organized religions, and in particular on the legitimacy of Christian dogma. 

Attack on Revelation 

Paine wastes no words on attacking the behaviour of churches or religionists. He realizes that an attack on the basis of behaviour, however bad the behaviour might be, is only peripheral and can easily be defended. Are the priests of some church venal? Well, they are only weak humans, and in any event their divinely-ordained rituals are still efficacious. Does some church sanction violence? Well, there are historical or cultural excuses, and in any event, this other church does not, what about it? And so forth. 

Instead, Paine attacks directly the one claim that has to be the anchor of every church’s dogma: that the church does the work of a Deity as revealed by the Deity. 

Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals…Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. 

Paine mentions the Judaical scriptures, the Christian Bible, and the “Turkish” Koran (the Ottoman empire was the chief Islamic power of his day). How he would have relished having the Book of Mormon or Science and Health for further examples! 

Paine takes the axe of his rhetoric directly to this core concept, the very idea of “revelation,” as a message from God to a human. 

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third,… and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it. It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us second-hand, either verbally or in writing. 

He expands on this point for a few pages, but the fundamental thrust is home: the only proof that a particular scripture is a divine revelation is the assertion by a series of people that it is. Because all those reporters are human and capable of being deceived (and of deceiving), one has no reason to treat a scripture any differently than any other piece of reportage. Unless, of course, you can find something in the scripture that could not have been composed by the human mind. Paine doesn’t expect you will. For example, the commands claimed by Moses to have been given by God, 

…carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention. 

Revelation, if it happens, is personal and cannot demand the belief of any other than its recipient. But Paine says there are other reasons to distrust scriptures of all kinds. First, it is trivial and demeaning to call simple history “revelation” or “inspired”: 

For if I have done a thing, or seen it done, it needs no revelation to tell me I have done it, or seen it… Revelation, therefore, cannot be applied to anything done upon earth, of which man himself is the actor or the witness; and consequently all the historical and anecdotal parts of the Bible, which is almost the whole of it, is not within the meaning and compass of the word revelation, and, therefore, is not the word of God…When we contemplate the immensity of that Being who directs and governs the incomprehensible WHOLE, of which the utmost ken of human sight can discover but a part, we ought to feel shame at calling such paltry stories the word of God. 

Most important, human language is simply inadequate as a container for anything called divine: 

…we must necessarily affix the idea, not only of unchangeableness, but of the utter impossibility of any change taking place, by any means or accident whatever, in that which we would honour with the name of the word of God; and therefore the word of God cannot exist in any written or human language. 

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translations necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of wilful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the word of God. 

But is not revelation verified by miracles? Of course not, Paine says, and gives three reasons. First, we don’t know the extent of the laws of nature, and second, miracles can be faked. 

As, therefore, we know not the extent to which either nature or art can go, there is no positive criterion to determine what a miracle is, and mankind, in giving credit to appearances, under the idea of there being miracles, are subject to be continually imposed upon. 

But third, report of a miracle is simply ineffective as an inducement to belief; even supposing the miracle occurred, the very report of it invites disbelief: 

If…we see an account given of such a miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is, is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?…it is more difficult to obtain belief to a miracle, than to a principle evidently moral without any miracle. 

This is a restatement of Hume’s maxim on the miraculous, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened.” Hume’s work was published in 1758 and it is hard to imagine Paine would not have known of it. Paine’s prose, as usual, is the more pungent. 

Deism 

If no prophet or scripture can be trusted, what is left? Paine said he believes in a God; where would he read the Deity’s nature? As befits an old revolutionary, his answer is at once radical, egalitarian, and liberating. 

The WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man. 

…The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language…lt is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed.. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the Scripture, which any human hand might make, but the Scripture called the Creation. 

This is the key tenet of Deism, and the point that Paine most wanted to convey. 

At this point, Paine articulates versions of the First Cause and Design arguments for God’s existence. But he does not simply state them; he uses them as a springboard to advocate reason as the tool for religious understanding. He arrives at a conclusion that ought to make him the patron philosopher of every scientist or technologist: 

That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology. 

In a lengthy argument Paine uses the geometry of the triangle to show that “mechanics,” the practical application of science, is based on universal principles that are discovered, not invented, by man. “It is the structure of the universe that has taught this knowledge to man,” he says. But the same power of reason that enables us to discover and use the creation cannot stomach what is called theology: 

…it is certain that what is called the Christian system of faith…psi irreconcilable, not only to the divine gift of reason that God hath given to man, but to the knowledge that man gains of the power and wisdom of God, by the aid of the sciences and by studying the structure of the universe that God has made. 

It is almost eerie for a modern reader to see that phrase “the structure of the universe” used twice, clearly in the sense we use it, but in a book published in 1794. How delighted Paine would have been, if he could have watched the unfolding of modern cosmology as it discovers ever deeper and stranger aspects of the structure of the universe.

The Writing of Age of Reason 

Paine was a failure at business and marriage when he emigrated to the American colonies. The political ferment of the time awakened him to his true talent, a genius for arguing a cause. He published the pamphlet Common Sense early in 1776, and by the end of the year it had sold 150,000 copies — in a country that had a population of a few million, where all news moved by horse or sad. The pamphlet played a decisive part (says biographer Ayer) in turning public opinion toward secession and away from accommodation with England. During the war Paine published more pamphlets, the first of which begins with the famous sentence, 

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. 

In 1787 Paine returned to England, mainly to promote his design for an iron bridge. In 1790 the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke published a criticism of the French Revolution and a defence of privilege and a stratified society. This inflamed Paine, who immediately wrote and published his greatest work, The Rights of Man, an eloquent and detailed proposal for a democratic state based on universal (male) suffrage, with no unearned privilege and with features such as salaries for legislators, public health care, public education, and old-age pensions, all to be paid for by a graduated income tax. Each of these was a novel idea at the time. 

The Rights of Man was an immediate best-seller, but was also quickly ruled “seditious libel” by the British Government. Paine fled to France just ahead of an order for his arrest. The Crown tried and convicted him in absentia, and he never set foot in England again alive. Printers who sold his book were convicted and sentenced to jail or transportation, but the book continued to sell, ultimately passing 300,000 copies. 

Meanwhile the French welcomed him, made him an honorary citizen, elected him a representative to the National Convention, and appointed him to the committee that was compiling a new constitution. But this was the beginning of the Terror, when anyone not affiliated with the cadre in power was subject to arrest at any time, and dozens were taken from cells to the guillotine every day. Later Paine would write 

The intolerant spirit of Church persecutions had transferred itself into politics; the tribunal styled revolutionary, supplied the place of an inquisition…I saw many of my most intimate friends destroyed, others daily carried to prison, and I had reason to believe, and had also intimations given to me, that the same danger was approaching myself. 

In this feverish climate Paine sat down and wrote that “It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion,” and, continuing through the arguments summarized above, concluded the first part of Age of Reason (only 68 pages) with 

…if ever a universal religion should prevail, it will not be by believing anything new, but in getting rid of redundancies…in the meantime, let every man follow, as he has a right to do, the religion and the worship he prefers.

The day he wrote that, guards came from the revolutionary government to arrest him. They were courteous enough to let Paine detour past the house of a friend and drop off the manuscript on the way to jail. The work was published as a pamphlet white he was in prison. 

There he stayed for eight months, never sure when he might be taken out to have his head removed. The US representative in Pads, Gouvemor Morris, was an enemy of Paine’s, and did nothing to obtain his release, while reporting to the government at home that the Revolutionary Council had refused to release him. 

When Jefferson succeeded Washington as president, he sent a new ambassador, James Monroe (himself later President). Monroe was a Paine supporter, and quickly secured Paine’s release. Paine was very ill, and spent months recuperating in Monroe’s house. But as soon as he could write, he resumed work on the second part of Age of Reason. 

Flaming the Church 

The pamphlet edition of the first part of Age of Reason had already drawn criticism. As was only to be expected, most of the rebuttals were couched in Christian terms. Perhaps this is why, in the longer second part, Paine aims less at defining Deism as a distinct belief, and focuses on the negative task of demolishing Christian doctrine, and in particular on discrediting the Bible as a reliable document. In truth, Deism is such a spartan doctrine, the few pages he spends on it are probably sufficient. Whatever his motive, Paine swings away at the Bible with a fine iconoclastic energy. 

Biographer A. J. Ayer seems to find Paine’s detailed and sarcastic deconstruction of Biblical absurdities to be somehow quaint, barely relevant “At the time that Paine wrote Age of Reason,” he explains, “the view of orthodox Christians was that the Bible was the word of God. For example, in the case of the Old Testament, it was believed that God dictated the books of the Pentateuch to Moses and the book of Samuel to Samuel, and that it was through divine inspiration that Solomon wrote his Proverbs and David his Psalms.” 

Perhaps in the rational cloisters of Oxford, where Ayer writes, such beliefs are today only historical footnotes. And in fact there are no respected biblical scholars today who think that any books of the Bible (apart from some of Paul’s epistles) were written by their eponymous authors. When Paine wrote, there was no such thing as biblical scholarship, in the sense of learned, non- sectarian, non-judgemental scrutiny of the Bible as a text. There was plenty of study of the Bible, but the scholars who undertook it always started with a deeply-held belief in the inerrancy and divine inspiration of the text — reading the Bible only to seek further evidence of its presumed perfection. 

Outside Oxford, this is frequently still the case today. Belief in the literal, word- by-word truth of the Bible is by no means dead in this country. You do not have to go far to find people who can be shocked to the core and deeply angered by an assertion that the Gospel according to Mark might not have been written by a personal companion of Jesus named Mark. And even less- fundamental Christians commonly regard the Bible with a vaguely worshipful attitude, treat it as a sanctified artefact, and think it is at least disrespectful, possibly even blasphemous, to examine its text in any critical way. 

Paine had no such qualms. He says he had not had a Bible at hand while writing the first part of his book. But his critics: 

…will now find that I have furnished myself with a Bible and a Testament; and l can say also that I have found them to be much worse books than I had conceived. If I have erred in anything in the first part of the Age of Reason, it has been in speaking better of some parts of those books than they have deserved. 

With that he sets out to examine the Bible coldly, as a text, and to point out the grosser absurdities, contradictions, and barbarities that he finds littered through it. What is refreshing about Paine’s approach is that he does not simply fulminate; nor does he appeal to science or philosophy. Any such approach would lead only to empty word-wars with the theologians. He adopts a simpler, and more deadly, approach. 

The evidence that I shall produce in this case is from the books themselves, and I shall confine myself to this evidence only. Were I to refer for proof to any of the ancient authors whom the advocates of the Bible call profane authors, they would controvert that authority, as I controvert theirs: I will therefore meet them on their own ground, and oppose them with their own weapon, the Bible. 

The Old Testament 

The first seventy-odd pages that follow are primarily devoted to demolishing the notion that any books of the Old Testament could possibly have been written by Moses or by any other character who is named in them. This is really quite evident, if you only examine the text without preconception. Paine takes the books in turn, exposing in each at least one statement that cannot be true if the book is written by its legendary author. Here are two brief examples to demonstrate his methods. Of Deuteronomy, 

After telling that Moses went to the top of Pisgah… he [the author of Deuteronomy] tells us that Moses died there in the land of Moab, and that he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab; but as there is no antecedent to the pronoun he, there is no knowing who he was that did bury him. If the writer meant that he (God) buried him, how should he (the writer) know it? or why should we (the readers) believe him? since we know not whom the writer was that tells us so, for certainly Moses could not himself tell where he was buried. 

After finishing with the Pentateuch, Paine returns to Genesis to observe verse 36:31 

“And these are the kings that reigned in Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.” [This passage] could only have been written after the first king began to reign over them; and consequently, that the book of Genesis, so far from having been written by Moses, could not have been written till the time of Saul at least…but the expression, any king, implies more kings than one…and if taken in a general sense, it carries it through all the time of the Jewish monarchy. 

And by the way, 

…this verse that I have quoted, and all the remaining verses of the 36th chapter of Genesis, are word for word in the first chapter of Chronicles, beginning at the 43rd verse. 

As indeed they are. Intrigued, I verified this and some others of Paine’s reports of contradictions and found no mistakes. For example, he later notes 

As one proof, among others I shall produce, to show the disorder In which this pretended word of God, the Bible, has been put together, and the uncertainty of who the authors were, we have only to look at the first three verses of Ezra, 

and the last two in Chronicles; for by what kind of cutting and shuffling has it been that the first three verses in Ezra should be the two last verses in Chronicles, or that the last two in Chronicles should be the first three in Ezra? Given his remarks in the first part of the book on the fallibility of any written text, he relishes finding this and other proofs of just such failings, which show 

the disorder and ignorance in which the Bible has been put together, and that the compilers of it had no authority for what they were doing, nor we any authority for believing what they have done. 

While passing through the Old Testament he reacts to some of the barbarous cruelties it celebrates. 

When we read…that they (the Israelites) came by stealth upon whole nations of people, who…had given them no offence; that they put all those nations to the sword; that they spared neither age nor infancy; that they utterly destroyed men, women, and children; that they left not a soul to breathe — expressions that are repeated over and over again…are we sure all these things are fact? are we sure that the Creator of man commissioned these things to be done? and are we sure that the books that tell us so were written by his authority? 

The New Testament 

After 75 pages of going “through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees,” Paine turns to the New Testament and in particular to the four Gospels. When he wrote, belief was that the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were personal reportage from the pens of four of Jesus’ twelve apostles (a belief not uncommon today in some quarters, as I mentioned). It was this belief that Paine assumed and set out to undermine. He had no difficulty in seeing that 

The disordered state of the history in those four books, the silence of one book on matters related in the other, and the disagreement that is to found among them, implies that they are the production of some unconnected individuals, many years after the things that they pretend to relate, each of whom made his own legend; and not the writings of men living intimately together…in fine, that they have been manufactured, as the books of the Old Testament have been, by other persons than those whose names they bear. 

Today, non fundamentalist scholars think this is exactly the case, but it was by no means the common opinion in the 18th century. (For an accessible, readable analysis of the history and content of the Gospels, see Asimov’s Guide to the New Testament.) Paine opens his treatment of the Gospels by saying 

I lay it down as a position which cannot be controverted, that the agreement of all parts of a story does not prove the story to be true, because the parts may agree and the whole may be false; secondly, that the disagreement of the parts of a story proves the whole cannot be true. The agreement does not prove true, but the disagreement proves falsehood positively. 

This established, he notes the complete disagreement between Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies of Jesus. The first chapter of Matthew begins with giving a genealogy of Jesus Christ; and in the third chapter of Luke, there is also given a genealogy of Jesus Christ. 

Did those two agree, it would not prove the genealogy to be true…but as they contradict each other in every particular, it proves the falsehood absolutely. 

For the reader’s convenience, Paine sets out a table of the 28 generations cited by Matthew and the 43 given by Luke, so you can easily see that it is “only the two names of David and Joseph that are alike in the two lists.

“Now, if these men…set out with a falsehood between them…in the very commencement of their history…what authority…is there left for believing the strange things they tell us afterward? If they cannot be believed in their account of his natural genealogy, how are we to believe them when they tell us he was the son of God begotten by a ghost, and that an angel announced this in secret to his mother? 

And in a strange inverted prevision of Pascal’s Wager, Paine pleads 

Can any man of serious reflection hazard his future happiness upon the belief of a story naturally impossible…and related by persons already detected of falsehood? Is it not more safe that we stop ourselves at the plain, pure, and unmixed belief of one God, which is Deism, than that we commit ourselves on an ocean of improbable, irrational, indecent and contradictory tales? 

Continuing, he cites the contradictions in even the simplest matters of fact. Mark says the crucifixion was at nine in the morning, John says at noon. Each of the four books cites the written inscription supposed to be put above Christ on the cross, yet no two quote the same words. “We may infer from these circumstances, trivial as they are, that those writers, whoever they were, and in whatever time they lived, were not present at the scene.” Paine has high sarcastic fun with the apocalyptic account in Mark of events at the crucifixion (the veil in the temple rent, darkness, earthquake, graves opening) which is not corroborated by any of the other books. The books contradict each other about the events at the tomb and after. Matthew says that eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain, where they saw the resurrected Jesus. But Luke and John say the disciples were assembled in secret in Jerusalem, and Jesus appeared among them. Mark says Jesus ascended to heaven immediately after the meeting in the room; Luke says Christ led them out as far as Bethany. “Yet this is the evidence,” Paine says earlier, “and these are the books that have been imposed on the world, as being given by Divine inspiration, and as the unchangeable word of God.” 

Immortality

Leaving the Gospels, Paine turns to the epistles of Paul; and this provokes him to discuss his own thoughts on immortality. It most offends Paine that ‘the doctrine he [Paul] sets out to prove by argument is the resurrection of the same body…” 

[But] if I have already died in this body, and am raised again in the same body…it is presumptive evidence that I shall die again…The Personal powers of man are so limited, and his heavy frame so little constructed to extensive enjoyment, that there is nothing to induce us to wish the opinion of Paul to be true. 

In these words I think I can hear the voice of an ill, aging man. But this is also the first place at which Paine is less than careful in his reading of the Bible. Paul explicitly says the resurrected body is not the same tired one (1 Corinthians 15:42-44), and Luke has Jesus address the same point (Luke 20:35-8). 

Is Paine guilty of the debater’s trick of setting up a straw-man argument? No; he turns immediately to his own alternative vision of resurrection. It does not involve bodies at all, and like all Paine’s notions, it is original. Indulge me as I quote at length, as it is so original, and stands out as an oasis of constructive philosophy in a long trek of criticism. 

[The consciousness of existence is the only conceivable idea we can have of another life, and the continuance of that consciousness is immortality. The consciousness of existence, or the knowing that we exist, is not necessarily confined to the same form, nor to the same matter, even in this life. 

We have not in all cases the same form, nor in any case the same matter that composed our bodies twenty or thirty years ago; and yet we are conscious of being the same persons…[W]e know not how much, or rather how little, of our composition it is, and how exquisitely fine that little is, that creates in us this consciousness of existence; and all beyond that is like the pulp of a peach, distinct and separate from the vegetative speck in the kernel. 

Who can say by what exceedingly fine action of fine matter it is that a thought is produced in what we call the mind? and yet that thought when produced, as I now produce the thought I am writing, is capable of becoming immortal, and is the only production of man that has that capacity…[P]rint and reprint a thought a thousand times over, and that with materials of any kind…the thought is eternally and identically the same thought… if, then, the thing produced has in itself a capacity of being immortal, it is more than a token that the power that produced it, which is the self-same thing as the consciousness of existence, can be immortal also; and that as independently of the matter it was first connected with, as the thought is of the printing or writing it first appeared in…it is not more difficult to believe that we shall exist hereafter in a better state and form than at present, than that a worm should become a butterfly, and quit the dunghill for the atmosphere… 

This passage has an astounding modernity. Early in the book, Paine used “the structure of the universe” almost the way a modern cosmologist would use it. Here he comes within a hair of arguing that consciousness is a pattern or arrangement, independent of the medium on which it appears. It’s as if Paine had eavesdropped on a lecture by, say, Douglas Hofstader, 200 years in his future. 

Note, by the way, that Paine is not at all arguing for a “soul” in different words. There are profound differences between the Cartesian soul, a kind of indestructible essence attached to but separate from the body, and a pattern, or Paine’s “consciousness of existence.” A pattern can persist forever, but it cannot exist apart from a medium, and it can be disrupted and erased forever. 

Paine does not follow up his idea in any depth. He does not speculate, for example , on what medium might carry his “consciousness of existence” after the end of his body. 

Deism and Christianity 

Belatedly noting Paul’s remarks on resurrection, Paine devotes some paragraphs of heavy-handed sarcasm to them, and then finally rests his prosecution by summing up the logical bind in which his exposure of its contradictions has placed the Christian scriptures. 

The evidence I have produced to prove them forgeries is extracted from the books themselves, and acts like a two-edged sword, either way. If the evidence be denied, the authenticity of the scriptures is denied with it; for it is scripture evidence; and if the evidence be admitted, the authenticity of the books is disproved. 

In his conclusion, Paine restates the argument against revelation, and reminds the reader of the violence and barbarity recounted so approvingly in the Old Testament. 

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion…the Jews made no converts, they butchered all. 

And Christians can’t claim the loving-kindness of the New Testament exonerates them, since “the ministers preach from both books.” Therefore, 

It is incumbent on every man who reveres the character of the Creator, and who wishes to lessen the catalogue of artificial miseries…to expel all ideas of revealed religion. 

Is there no good in the Bible? Only accidentally, for 

the fragments of morality that are irregularly and thinly scattered in these books…are the natural dictates of the conscience…and are nearly the same in all religions and in all societies. 

In a footnote, Paine notes Salon’s description of the most perfect government, “That where the least injury done to the meanest individual, is considered as an insult on the whole constitution,” as a precept superior to any in the New Testament. Solon, Paine carefully notes, lived about 500 years before Christ. Again he contrasts Deism to conventional religions, and incidentally shows again that he is himself no atheist. 

If we consider the nature of our condition here, we must see that there is no occasion for such a thing as revealed religion. What is it we want to know? Does not the creation, the universe we behold, preach to us the existence of an Almighty Power that governs and regulates the whole? And is not the evidence that this creation holds out to our senses infinitely stronger than anything we can read in a book that any impostor might make and call the word of God? As for morality, the knowledge of it exists in every man’s conscience. 

Yet Paine apparently recognizes that different minds must interpret the open book of Creation differently. Lacking an accepted revelation to supply a mandatory uniformity, there will be doubt But doubt is not a problem, it an absolute necessity, because 

We must know also that the power that called us into being, can, if he please, and when he pleases, call us to account for the manner in which we have lived here; and, therefore, without seeking any other motive for the belief, it is rational to believe that he will, for we know beforehand that he can. The probability or even the possibility of the thing is all that we ought to know; for if we knew it for a fact, we should be the mere slaves of terror; our belief would have no merit, and our best actions no virtue. 

It is the coercive nature of revealed religion, and its absurd complexities as compared to Deism, that makes Christianity “render the heart torpid,” he says. Always the political thinker, he never forgets the political purposes that religion can serve. 

As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests. [and later] It has been the scheme of the Christian church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support. 

In the final paragraphs Paine turns his resonant voice again to the praise of natural science. 

The Bible of the creation is inexhaustible in texts. Every part of science, whether connected with the geometry of the universe, with the systems of animal and vegetable life, or with the properties of inanimate matter, is a text as well for devotion as for philosophy—for gratitude as for human improvement. It will perhaps be said that if such a revolution in the system of religion takes place, every preacher ought to be a philosopher. Most certainly; and every house of devotion is a school of science. 

The Aftermath 

Paine finally returned to the United States in 1802. He was 65, not in good health, and in bad odor with almost everyone. However much he might have intended to promote the purity of Deism, what people remembered (or more commonly, all they heard as sensational gossip) was his attack on Christianity. The distinction between belief in a God, and hatred for the religion through which most people had received their notions of God, was entirely too fine for the average person to grasp or care about. From the moment of publication of Age of Reason Paine was an atheist in popular opinion. 

In addition, he offended powerful figures that might have been his patrons. He blamed ex-President Washington for failing to rescue him from prison; and he published a series of letters strongly attacking the Federalist party for failing to hold to the democratic principles of the American Revolution. 

Thomas Jefferson, now in office as President, still supported him, but other old friends refused to speak to him; and he was denounced from pulpits in many towns. At one point, when he tried to book a ride on a stagecoach, the owner of the line refused to carry him, apparently because one of his stages had once been struck by lightning and he didn’t want to risk it happening again. At the end of this journey, Paine and a friend were run out of Trenton by an angry mob. Friends and disciples turned enemies, either because of his “atheism” or because of personal quarrels. 

Paine died in 1809. It was his wish to be buried in a Quaker cemetery, but the Quakers denied the request. He was first interred on the outskirts of a farm he owned in New Rochelle. In a final bizarre chapter to his life, an admirer, one William Cobbett, had Paine’s corpse dug up and brought to England, where he attempted to raise money for a monument by exhibiting the corpse. This endeavour failed. After Cobbett’s estate was sold, Paine’s body passed through several hands and eventually disappeared. As Paine wrote of Moses, “There is no knowing who he was that did bury him.” 

Perhaps it is just as well. “I here close the subject,” he wrote, 

and I leave the ideas that are suggested in the conclusion of the work, to rest on the mind of the reader; certain as I am, that when opinions are free, either in matters of government or religion, truth will finally and powerfully prevail.

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THOMAS Paine (1737-1809), author, editor, stay maker, excise man, small farmer, inventor, citizen of three countries, military courier, first US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, and pamphleteer for the Enlightenment, not only built diplomatic bridges between countries at a time of conflict, but also forged plans for bridges of iron that would cross the chasm between geography and politics. As the moments of war, post-war reconstruction and currency crisis unfolded, Paine documented and unravelled politics for citizens living in an age of personal uncertainty and helped to erect a symbolic bridge into what he hoped would be an age of common sense and reason. 

Thomas Paine, the man, struggled with the dual tasks of earning a living and creating a body politic. During his lifetime Paine faced jealous political opponents (some half his age) who campaigned to ruin his career and personal life, and who prepared slanderous biographies to be published before and after his death. (Moncure D. Conway (1832-1907), American abolitionist, biographer and researcher of the Paine I manuscripts discusses the biographies of Paine in his volumes, The Lift of Thomas Pals, New York: G. Putnam, vol. 1, 1892, preface, pp. ix – xvi.) Nonetheless, Paine left a legacy as a writer and a proponent of democracy that survived through the widespread support of mechanics and working class people who supported his ingenuity, honesty, and promotion of Enlightenment causes (universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, the demise of superstition, democratic government, the creation of full employment, a welfare system, and a retirement pension scheme). His writings, distributed as pamphlets and letters to the working class of the world, also reached the ears of presidents and reformers. Nineteenth and twentieth century supporters of Paine kept his legacy alive and extended the principles of the Enlightenment so that the bicentenary of Paine’s death on June 8, 1809 will be commemorated around the world this year. 

Thomas Paine’s bridge of diplomacy, both as a practical bridge and as a symbolic bridge between nations and political eras, centred on his proposal for a single span iron bridge braced by strong abutments cast from nature in the design of a spider’s web. The bridge was never completed. His bridge design and his political proposals were however taken up by others in Paine’s three countries of residence (England, the United States and France) and eventually extended around the world. Paine’s political bridge spanned three countries on two continents during a period when countries had sunk themselves under the debt of war. Faced with costly domestic reconstruction, collapsing banks, and currencies dissolving in quicksand, governments are forced to find solutions to failing domestic economies. 

Thomas Paine, the bridge builder, faced his own difficulty of finding governments willing to invest in durable iron bridges to replace the wooden and stone bridges that were being swept away by strong water currents, ice and sand flows – an enduring problem for governments accustomed to short term solutions and temporary construction in an era of war. As a political reformer, Paine also tried to build bridges between regions of the world that had sunk into debt from military expenditure. The idea of political diplomacy for Paine became paramount and inseparable from governments investing in long-term civilian infrastructure projects. For this reason, the author of an early draft 775) of the American Declaration of Independence (1776) including a clause to abolish slavery, the Pennsylvania Constitution in 1776, and revisions to the French Constitution of 1791 became a designer of bridges for civilian use. (Paine’s draft of the 1776 Declaration of independence appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal on 18 October 1775 under the pennamo “Humanitas.” Paine arrived in America from England on 30 November 1774 and secured employment as a writer for the Pennsylvania Journal in 1775-6.)

Paine’s Schuylkill River bridge, designed for its fortitude, easy portability and repair, was to have thirteen columns to commemorate each of the thirteen states in the Union and was subsequently adapted to meet the political needs and practical engineering requirements of the three principal countries involved in the American War of Independence. Paine eventually offered his design to countries in northern Europe as he struggled to find an investor. The War had been an expensive war for all involved. Parliamentary reformers in England estimated that the expense from the English side alone had been £139,521,035 by 1781 and an additional £1,340,000 in compensation payments not including the £4,000 per year in stipends paid to loyalists from 1788. (Charles Bradlaugh, “The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick,” Freeihought Publishing Company 11-amts, London: Fredhought Publishing Company, 1880, p. 45.) The French incurred similar expenses for their part. In the aftermath of the war, Paine predicted the collapse of the international monetary system unless politicians rapidly learned the skills of political diplomacy and economic intervention.

Paine, an English republican, had become a supporter of American Independence and moved to the United States in 1774, one year prior to the War of Independence. He was to personally witness two revolutions in his lifetime – the American War of Independence and the French Revolution – and his contribution to American independence included serving as a government secretary, military courier and clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, in addition to helping build the Bank of North America, a citizens’ subscription bank founded in May 1780 with his own subscription of $500. The Bank became incorporated by Congress and then by the State of Pennsylvania on 1 April 1782. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. T p. 221.) The purpose of the bank was to help fund the wounded war veterans of George Washington’s army, but the bank came under attack when it became too large and was unable to repeal its charter. Paine wrote about the general economic collapse and saved the bank with the distribution of his pamphlet entitled, Dissertations on Government the Affairs of the Bank and Paper Money (1786), in which he pointed out that the greed of the banks had caused them to lend money without proper security and that public claims had been exorbitant. He also pointed out that the debt of the banks was to be passed on to the subscribers who owed 6% interest in perpetuity on their holding while the banks continued to invest their money at 10-12% and speculators received an additional 20-30% on their investments. Paine argued against the creation of a paper currency to see the country through the crisis. Paine was left with personal financial debt as a result of the collapse of the bank and could not pay his own 6% interest in perpetuity and thus embarked on his bridge project in 1785. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol.1, p. 219. John Keane alternatively suggests that Paine Muted to bridges in a “bout of restlessness” following the war (see Keane, p. 267) and Alfred Owen Aldridge suggests Paine emerged from the Bank difficulties a rich man who was freed up by his money to pursue the bridge designs. (see Aldridge, Man (Reason The Life of Thomas Paine, Philadelphia & New York 3.5. Lippincott Company, 1959, p. 108.) This author prefers Conway’s interpretation because Conway investigated the available evidence closer to Paine’s time, and did not rely on George Chalmer’s 1793 biography of Paine.) 

Moncure Daniel Conway, the American abolitionist and biographer of the Paine manuscripts, stated that Paine had been referred to in his day as a “living Declaration of Independence” and had urged Americans to turn their thoughts from war to public efforts of reconstruction. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life Thomas Paine, vol. I, p.245.) Paine was an Enlightenment inventor who had used his scientific knowledge to invent a smokeless candle, wheels for carriages, as well as wood planers and now presented the more ambitious project of an enduring bridge for public use. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, The Cobbett Papers, vol. Q, Appendix A, p. 456.) Paine corresponded with and met Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), as both a politician and an inventor; with John Trumbull (1756-1843), painter of the American Revolutionary War; and Benjamin West (1738-1820), then a court painter for George Ill. 

Paine’s design for a single span iron bridge emerged at the time when iron foundries had started to turn from war production (cannons and cannon balls) in the early 18th century to civilian production (cast iron water mains, water pipes, sewers, fire engines, canals, door hinges and locks, water wheels and garden fences) in the late 18th century. The new technologies of iron ore smelting and iron casting came about as a result of the exhaustion of the tree stock that had fuelled the wars and industry of Europe from the 17th century. New fuel was required to replace the dwindling tree stock and coal used in the refining of iron ore by smelting charcoal became an alternative. 

The first attempt to build a cast iron bridge is generally agreed to have taken place in Lyon, France in 1755. The next is believed to have been the Coalbrookdale Bridge (1777-1779) on the River Severn in England. By 1750 coke smelting had been established in Coalbrookdale, and the Coalbrookdale Company was able to build a bridge with a design by Thomas Farrols Pritchard (1723-1777) completed by Abraham Darby Ill (1750-1791) who worked with the Coalbrookdale Company. A shortage of pig iron meant that iron ore had to be imported from Norway, Spain, Sweden and Russia. There was, however, a plentiful supply of coal from the fossilized remains of the old tree stock of Europe and in America. 

By 1783 and the Treaty of Paris, the best American trees had been cut to build English warships. The domestic use of trees in the United States had been severely restricted during the colonial period and only in the late 18th century were trees even considered for use in major bridge building projects. Oak was considered the wood of choice. (John Keane, Torn Paine: A Political Life, Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1995, p. 267.) America therefore embarked on a period of wooden bridges at a time when Europe was infatuated with the idea of more durable iron bridges. Thomas Paine, in his designs for an iron bridge in America pointed out that wooden bridges were impractical for a climate of freezing temperatures, ice, sand, silt and mudfiows, and unstable river basins. Pennsylvania seemed a good state in which to erect his first iron bridge for both pragmatic and political reasons since it was a state both rich in coal and the first state to broker independence from Britain. (Moncure D. Conway, Addresses and Reprints, 18504907, Boston and New York: The Riverside Press, 1909, pp. 403-406.) In 1785 Paine had completed his plans for bridges over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, the Harlem River in New York State, the Thames River in London, and the Seine River in Paris. While he waited for acceptance of his designs in one place, he moved on to the next and tried to take with him a bridge of diplomacy while awaiting a practical bridge of peace. 

The success of the Coalbrookdale Bridge in England with its single 100 Y2 foot span over the Severn and a rise of 50 feet bearing 278 tons of cast iron on a thrust principle on strong masonry abutments demonstrated to Paine the success of the cast iron technology for a wide stream bridge with high arches to allow the passage of boats. The Coalbrookdale Bridge had proved that iron could provide a secure material capable of withstanding strong currents on a river basin of clay, rock or chalk. (F.W. Sims (Ed), The Public Works of Great Britain, London: John Weald Architectural Library, 1838, n.p.) Cast and wrought iron bridges proved easy to transport in sections, repairable and highly durable due to the diagonal tension of bow and string suspension and were subsequently initiated all over the world. (Capt. A.H.E. Boileau; Outline of a Series of Lectures on Iron Bridges Delivered at the Calcutta Mechanic’s Institute on 1841, Calcutta: Mechanics’ Institute, 1842, pp. 2-9; Hamilton Weldon Pendred, Iron Bridges of Moderate Span, London: Crosby Lockwood and Co., 1887, pp. I24,140-1.) Paine was just one proponent of iron bridges. When Paine began his iron bridge designs he, like others, knew that the Blackfriars Bridge in London had recently given way and two bridges over the Tyne in Northumberland (one by John Smeaton) had collapsed when the piers gave way in quicksand. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol_ 1, pp. 243, 254.)

Some biographers have credited Paine as the next pioneer of iron bridge design after Coalbrookdale although with the profusion of iron bridge designers in the period this is an unnecessary claim. Moncure Conway made no such claim and pointed out that the most enduring historians have not been concerned with hailing triumphal “firsts.” Conway presented Paine’s bridge design in more modest terms as simply an original iron bridge design, as this was Paine’s own description. Conway searched Paine’s patent of August 28, 1788 registered by Paine for “Constructing Arches, Vaulted Roofs, and Ceilings on principals new and different to anything hitherto practiced.” (John Keane records the patent date as August 26, 1788 in his volume, Tom Paine: A Political Life, p. 276.) Paine proposed the basic design of his bridge as a section of a circle with iron abutments “dividing and combining” like “the quills of birds, bones of animals, reeds, canes, Etc.” where the arch could be composed of any length “joined together by the whole extent of the arch and take the curvature by bending.” The patent was granted in September 1788. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, val. p. 242. For more on Paine’s bridge design see Moncure D. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896, vol. IV, pp. 440-449. See also Paul Collins, -The Arch Revolutionary,” New Scientist, 6.November 2004, pp. 50-51.) Conway pointed out that the 100-foot iron arch designed by Thomas M. Pritchard and erected over the River Severn at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, did not anticipate Paine’s design and that such arguments are not appropriate to the historical assessment of Paine’s contribution to democracy and design. Conway thought it more politically important to point out that Paine remained destitute most of his life despite his political contributions. Had Paine’s proposals for bridges been adopted they would have provided him with an income. As it turned out, Paine’s political opponents attacked his small personal finances and land holdings in the United States leaving him destitute. Paine had to be buried on the small remaining portion of his farm land and then exhumed and transported overseas when the land was sold on because Paine had been unable to secure a grave plot in the local Quaker’s yard. Meeting and knowing people in high places had not advantaged Paine personally. Paine was well aware that he was being ruthlessly exploited. He kept notably quiet in political meetings apart from discussions of corporation, and the tone of his correspondence to Thomas Jefferson and other politicians became droll as he realised governments were not going to invest in his iron bridges. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 243. )

Paine hired John Hall, a mechanic from Leicester who had worked with the Boulton and Watt steam engine manufacturers, with John Wilkinson at the Coalbrookdale Company, and with Samuel Walker of Walkers and Co. in Yorkshire. (John Keane, Toni Paine: A Political Life, p. 268.) Paine and Hall shared an interest in Pennsylvania politics and in Benjamin Franklin’s election as president of the state. Paine belonged to a number of societies including the Society for Political Inquiries that met in Benjamin Franklin’s library. The Society for Political Inquiries had 42 members while Paine was a member including George Washington, James Wilson, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, and George Clymer. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life Thomas Paine,vol.1, p. 225.) Hall assisted Paine with his model for a 400-foot single span iron bridge over the Schuylkill River. Paine completed the design and the mathematical side of the construction while Hall constructed the model to Paine’s specifications. 

Paine and Hall presented two models for the Schuylkill River Bridge to Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, and General Morris in New York. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol.1, p. 218.) One model was constructed in wood and the other in cast iron. The Schuylkill River models stood in Franklin’s garden for some time before finally resting in Charles Wilson Peale’s Museum of Natural History in Philadelphia. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. 11. p. 318 and Appatcrut A, The Cobbett Papers, p.456.) By the nineteenth century, only one dilapidated model remained in the Peale collection, and no other bridge model was extant. It is believed that the bridge most closely resembling Paine’s was the bridge over the River Wear at Sunderland in the north of England erected in 1796 by Thomas Wilson. While Wilson’s bridge lacked the same web design it did contain circular reinforcements similar to those proposed by Paine and demonstrated that Paine’s bridge could have seen its way into a completed project. The Wear Bridge stood 236 feet in width and 95 feet in height. It was unfortunate for Paine that his bridge designs were not commissioned for he had to move elsewhere in search of work. 

In 1787 Paine returned to England and applied for a bridge patent in that country. Paine proposed a bridge design for the River Thames and approached iron men in the North of England to execute a model settling on Samuel Walker of Walkers and Co. near Sheffield who recommended that it be executed in wrought or cast iron. Paine proposed a bridge of 110 feet and built a model with money he and Peter Whiteside, an American Merchant in London, had raised. The model was built at the Rotherham works in Yorkshire and was erected in June 1790 at Leasing-Green (now Paddington Green). Visitors paid one shilling per person to help raise money for the project. In the meantime Paine went to Paris and proposed a bridge project there but was forced to return to London when Peter Whiteside’s business failed. Whiteside fell £620 in debt for his portion of the bridge and Paine and the American merchants Cleggett and Murdoch had to act as Whiteside’s bail. They paid his debt and as a result Paine lost the money for his aging mother’s stipend. He then recovered the money through visits to his bridge by Sir Edmund Burke, the Duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam of Wentworth House, Lord Lansdowne, Sir George Staunton and Sir Joseph Banks. However, no contracts for the bridge in England were forthcoming. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol.11, pp. 259-277.) Moncure Conway pointed out that while Paine continued to look for financial means in England and France and continued to promote the American cause overseas, “in truth America was silently publishing what they could out of a starving English staymaker.” (Moncure D. Conway, The Life ((Mantas Paine, vol. 1, pp. 244-245.) 

Paine continued to propose the benefits of iron bridges over wooden bridges and to request commissions from governments in France, England, the United States and Northern Europe. (Moncure. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 220.) Moncure Conway wrote of Paine, 

In setting the nation at once to a discussion of the principles of such government, he led it to assume the principles of independence; over the old English piers on their quicksands, which some would rebuild, he threw his republican arch, on which the people passed from shore to shore. He and Franklin did the like in framing the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, by which the chasm of °Toryism” was spanned. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, 1892, vol. I, pp. 224-5) 

The Schuylkill River contract was not secured due to “the imperfect state of iron manufacture in America” according to a letter from Monsieur Chanut, one of Paine’s French contacts. ‘Something of the same kind might be said of the political architecture,” added Conway. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 226.) Instead, the State of Pennsylvania erected a wooden bridge over the Schuylkill River between 1798 and 1805. 

Paine travelled to France with a model of his Schuylkill River Bridge in 1787 that he presented to the French Academy of Sciences in the hope that he would gain the attention of backers there or in Northern Europe. He proposed an arch of 400-500 feet to span the Seine. The French Academy met with Paine and agreed to appoint a committee to report on his bridge. While awaiting the decision Paine entered into correspondence with Thomas Jefferson who was American Minister in Paris at the time. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 228.) The French Academy returned a cautious response to Paine’s proposal, having examined iron bridge models. They agreed with him on material points and while generally favourable they expressed a preference to one of “our own” which turned out to be a less expensive and less enduring wooden bridge by Migneron de Brocqueville. (Montana D. Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 229.) The same correspondence from the French Academy expressed an interest in the famous bridge at Schaffhausen built by Grubenmann, a carpenter; the model shown to Paine by Perronet, the King’s architect.° Paine’s bridge was never built. Paine nonetheless continued constructing a diplomatic and political bridge of friendship across the channel and sent his design to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society in England. (Moncure D.Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 230.)

Paine’s mother in England was now 91 years old and Paine desperately needed money to support her. While Paine’s bridge efforts had not come to fruition, Paine was granted honorary citizenship in France and elected Deputy for Pas-de-Calais to the National Convention in 1792. It is not known whether his monetary situation improved from the position but it saved him from imprisonment in England for having written The Rights of Man (1791- 2). (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. 1, p. 230.)

While Paine awaited decisions on his bridge he wrote Denton Emigre, an archaeological treatise on freemasonry and was nominated by the 1792 Convention to revise the 1791 French Constitution. However as the Legislative Assembly progressed and voting began to abolish the monarchy, Paine fell into disfavour for advocating that Louis XVI be tried by jury, followed by imprisonment or exile, rather than executed. Paine opposed the use of the death penalty, which he considered to be the weapon of the monarchy, and was in favour of a democratic peoples’ constitution that supported trial by jury. On 11 December 1792 Louis XVI was placed on trial before the Convention, and was sentenced to death by a political vote of 380 to 310 on 19 January 1793 and executed on 21 January 1793. (Albert Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution 1789-1799, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977 (originally published as La Revolution Francaise, Presses Univasitaires de France, 1965.) Robespierre and his supporters in the Convention mistook Paine for a Girondist, which he was not. However, Paine was imprisoned for opposing the death penalty on December 25, 1793 and was only released on November 6, 1794 through the diplomatic work of General James Monroe, US Minister to France, who arranged for Paine to be granted American citizenship. While Paine was incarcerated he wrote, The Age of Reason (1794-5). 

In 1873 Gustav Courbet, artist and Minister of Fine Arts under the 1871 Commune explained to the American abolitionist Moncure Conway that he had little time to paint a commission of artworks for the Governor of Ohio since he had been wrongly forced to pay off the debt of the raising of the Vendome column in 1871. (Ellen L. Ramsay, Moncure D. Conway: Rationalism, and the Abolition of Slavery, London: Thomas Paine Society and The Freethought History Research Group, 2007, pp. 37-38.) Paine’s bridge plans were also interrupted by revolutions, imprisonment, economic turmoil, drafts of constitutions, advice to newly formed governments, and the writing of pamphlets including Common Sense (1776), The Age of Reason (1794-5) and The Rights of Man (1791-2). Such was the historical moment that public projects proposed by Enlightenment figures such as Paine only gradually pushed their way onto the world stage in the face of the rocky road of diplomacy and post-war reconstruction that had been temporarily undermined by the canon balls of war. 

Copyright 2008. Ellen R. Ramsay. 

ELLEN L RAMSAY BA, MA, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of art history currently on leave from York University and has published 215 articles on art, culture and politics. She is a member of the Thomas Paine Society in England. 

Selected Sources: 

Paul Collins, The Arch Revolutionary: New Scientist, 6 November 2004, pp. 50- 51. 

Moncure Daniel Conway (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Paine, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896. 

Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, New York: G.P. Putnam, 1892. 

John Gloag and Derek Bridgwater, A History of Cast iron in Architecture, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1948. 

John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995. 

Thomas Paine. The Construction of Iron Bridges, June 13, 1803, Presented to the Congress of the United States from Bordentown on the Delaware, New Jersey. Reproduced in Thomas Paine, Collected Writings, New York, The Library of America, 1995, p. 422-428. 

Ellen L Ramsay, Moncure D. Conway Rationalism and the Abolition of Slavery, London: Thomas Paine Society and the Freethought Historical Research Group, 2007.

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The Eric Paine Memorial Lecture for 2004

The writings, thoughts and indeed the eventful life of Thomas Paine regularly leaves an indelible mark upon a significant number of us who have lived after him. He challenges and excites the receptive just as much as he can infuriate those who have already made their minds up about the things Thomas Paine chose to criticise. My first encounter with the name and ideas of Thomas Paine occurred in a secondary school history lesson in which those present heard that an Englishman had gone dramatically out on a limb to defend the ideas of freedom embodied by the French Revolution. Moreover, he had done so in a text entitled Rights of Man, a title to stir the emotions and blood of any early adolescent. However discovering and investigating the legacy of Thomas Paine, even at the rudimentary level of youthful exuberance, was also an important moment for me in entering a dialogue with the conflicting identities I had been bequeathed. Just as Paine argued, as I was later to discover, no generation had a right to determine the choices of a future one so I felt able to question my own inheritance or at least to look at it more critically. 

Growing up simultaneously with Irish and English influences could certainly have led to some stark choices. Paine’s good (common?) sense and pithy dislike of humbug was, for me, an enabling intellectual strategy. It clearly helped me to transcend the archaic triumphalism of an English identity that was about to go into a rapid irretrievable tailspin. However, disdain of humbug was equally valuable in transcending the dangers of ghettoised identity that Irish nationalist sympathy might have led me into. The world is my country and to do good my religion’ was a forceful motto to carry around in late seventies and early 1980s London, A London which as we know witnessed conflict, violence and social being without doubt ‘a time to try men’s souls’. 

I was fortunate enough to attend university in England, in the last gasp of a properly funded, enabling education system which valued knowledge and personal enrichment as unequivocal social goods with potential benefits for all. In studying history and (for me) the 19th century, in which most things of importance seemed to happen, Paine became indispensable. He and his works were valuable companions to my undergraduate study both of radicalism and 19th century literature. These henceforth became a constant companion for me in my studies and writing of 19th century history. This is, in its way, indicative of a time in which my studies responded to the consequences of an historical moment. My tutors, almost to a man and woman, had been through the flowering of leftward inspired social history. Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson had left indelible imprints upon all who had lived through the academia of these years. Even those sceptical; and even downright hostile to such developments could clearly not ignore the fact that they were happening. In those years in academia, if you wanted to, you could trace the impact of Paine upon the thousands of people who were the source and raw material of history from below. For the self educated artisan whose consciousness filled riot and corresponding society alike Blake had been an exemplar poet whilst Paine was the ultimate consummate politician. This became cast as the newly recovered contribution of the English to the broader culture of the European left. 

Nonetheless, Thomas Paine and his influence did conflict with other agendas. When I studied the chartist movement and the radicalism surrounding it Paine was cast as a crucial part of the older, outmoded ideological emphasis. Paine’s creation of ‘did Corruption’ was cast as a regency hangover, which owed perhaps too much to eighteenth century Whiggery and anachronistic conceptions of duty and worth. Paine above all others would concede that mankind appreciates ideas, even old ones, through the history of experiences. Creating and praising the productive classes in the early 1980s made Paine sound uncomfortably poujadist and far too close to the mutterings of the Grantham grocer’s daughter for comfort. This attitude was readily contrasted with the economic agenda and analysis in radicalism that had been advocated not primarily by Thomas Paine but by Thomas Spence and Robert Owen. Owen, in particular for those who felt more comfortable with Marxism, could be portrayed as the man who simultaneously invented the labour theory of value, created the language of anti-capitalist denunciation, yet also disdained politics as an unnecessary distraction.

My immersion in this exciting and rewarding world took me into postgraduate study in which I reconnected with radicalism and most importantly rediscovered one of its most underrated, yet endearing qualities — indignation. Owen was an alarmingly cold-fish in comparison to Paine. He assured all who heard him that he alone had the answer to society’s ills and began to speak the language of inevitability which Marxists would later adopt as their own. This lineage undoubtedly had a history but it certainly did not deserve the liberty to overwrite political radicalism that some allowed it. Indignation had been central to the motivation of this earlier political lineage and this was a valuable emotion which Paine contained in abundance. An emotion which he successfully trickled through the whole of the nineteenth century popular politics. So Paine and indignation had been a constant companion to my studies of Radicalism, Chartism, Secularism, Blasphemy and Republicanism. He remains valuable to all of us who would venture into those worlds in search of historical and ideological explanations of how society developed during these crucially turbulent years. 

So why is he so useful? Why has Paine been a constant companion and why should he be.afforded quite such importance? We are already, by now, familiar with a conventional ideological history. However I would like to take us down some of the less obvious ways in which Paine is a companion to English history and — let me say a founder and proponent of the public interest and opinion as key concepts that make us modern. It is not simply a question of Thomas. Paine being ideologically valuable, he was also a radical who learned the important lesson that publicity and the skilled use of the media was essential to the successful reception of one’s message. Paine was an endlessly pithy and articulate critic. For a historian wanting to write the history of radicalism through these years Paine endlessly creates and inspires public pronouncement — even after his death. Paine was also the definitive user of the decisive moment, calculating the value of what he said and appreciating the importance of when he said it. He was the first to understand the nature of revolution and the first modem to understand the nature and potential magnitude of political change. 

He also understood that the first way to change things is to think them into being different — to imagine and use ‘mental strength’ (a phrase frequently used by 19th century radicals) to transcend the status quo. After all, it was Thomas Paine who showed the resonant power of thought and its publicity through his invention of the global village. No idea ever moved around the globe so fast as revolution in the name of reason. As a historian I could spend the rest of my life tracing the radical ripples from the huge pebble that was Thomas Paine. But his value also lies elsewhere. He is also a voice I sometimes hear when I am trying to evaluate our radical history alongside some of its personalities and byways. But there are also things that are essential about Paine’s work and contribution that made the entire phenomenon of the 19th century radicalism possible. Paine and his ideas have an enormous presence in their own right in this world and these clearly deserve to be studied. But also importantly for me, he sometimes acts as a companion and a prism through which to view the phenomena one encounters as a historian in this era. 

Ironically for someone who despised inheritance we need and deserve to look at what Paine inherited that is useful to us. Edward Thompson, in his last (posthumously published) work Witness against the Beast, tried to show how William Blake learned religious dissidence from his Muggletonian mother. We might similarly ask what did Paine take from Quakerism? The Quakers had once been extraordinarily radical and had been numbered amongst the dangerous sectaries of the English Revolution. They refused to accept what they regularly saw as spurious authority and refused (literally) to doff their hats to it and similarly refused to swear oaths to do things they deemed unworthy. In doing so they nurtured a culture of sober, considered yet determined resistance. Moreover, the Quakers through their actions in both England and the New World got themselves into trouble through their insistence upon the necessity of converting an unregenerate world. For these dedicated sectaries actions spoke emphatically as loudly as words ever did. Above ail, Quakers were moved by the spirit within them to pronounce and denounce. Quakerism was about speaking the mind and soul. Now obviously we know that Paine rejected Christianity in its remotely organised forms but some of those traits from Quakerism he arguably retained. Through his indulgence of some of these he gave radicalism in Britain the means and confidence to speak. Radicalism was to have opinions for itself, and to have no compunction about publicising these no matter how awkward and unpopular they might prove and no matter where such sentiments might lead the speakers.

Paine also provided the ‘ways and means’ for others to form and communicate their opinions. He was lucky enough to be regularly published and republished whilst continually exposing his readers (even posthumously) to the endless exciting possibilities of print culture. The danger for us is to see such developments as natural components of the modern world. Or worse to underestimate them or even consider them to be mundane. We should always remember the enlightenment world this torrent burst upon. It was a world where philosophical societies throughout the land craved information and acquired the urge to experiment and derive knowledge about a universe freed from the cant and prescription of protected knowledge. Corresponding societies and societies for constitutional information were more than mere focus groups. Provincial societies like these were places where the science of electricity would be discussed one evening to be followed the very next by the sciences of man and his interactions – in other words politics. 

Paine also wrote in a linguistically liberating language. Not only did he expose the possibilities of print culture he also innovated in his – use of it. Many scholars have noted how his literary style was a break from the past – putting aside the classical allusions (we might say in unison with his audience illusions) to adopt and promote plain speaking and writing. He attacked Bastilles of the word and Palaces of the imagination. Being in awe of language and spurious unearned nobility not only cheated us of our humanity it also cheapened and demoralised our lives turning them into mere enslaved existences. Bastilles of the mind and Palaces of the imagination, these ideas are potent and have not been purged from contemporary life, never mind our history, and we will have cause to visit them later. 

Again, for Paine, this innovative and immediate language was about creating the decisive moment although as we also know at times he could also lose the plot. Like most figures his ability to produce material that was memorable – when he could do it was what people would remember him by. The value of Paine’s language would extend beyond the simple and didactic into producing the endlessly quotable epithet. His image of the ‘plumage and the dying bird’ resonates throughout the radical world but the lack of reverence he showed for even the institution of accepted British history is also informative and demonstrates how irreverence had a purpose. Paine’s forthright language could be seen as a form of blasphemy upon the sacred cow of conventional British history. If the power of blasphemy lies in the power to remove the sting from revered institutions then Paine could do this with his waspish version of history. Could his contemporaries (and can we) ever take the Norman Conquest (or even most of aristocratic history from above) seriously again without conjuring to mind the scornful phrase ‘The Armed Banditti’? 

Thus for me, Thomas Paine has been a companion on a journey through 19th century radicalism and the language attached to this. He comes into his own when examining the history of the unstamped press in the 1830’s. Those daring and courageous individuals who took indignation onto the streets to sell unstamped newspapers in defiance of authority. They took such struggles into the court room and thence to prison only to come out and sell such papers again. Paine here reminds us of the duty to communicate, the value of such communication and also of the fear that authority would always possess about these issues. 

In thinking about Chartism Paine is perhaps of little help in looking at the mass movement and the demagoguery of Fergus O’Connor. He is of more assistance in assessing the value and achievements of James Bronterre O’Brien — the man with more credentials than most to lay claim to the title of the English Robespierre. Paine is of most use however in assessing the contributions and achievements of William Lovett and John Collins, the individuals who found themselves in prison after the Bull Ring riots of 1839. These men took a long hard look at what Chartism had achieved- for them as individuals and the cause of the working classes. They asked themselves some frank questions. Where had anarchy and mass protest got us and why they had not realised the potential of the radical mass platform? Rapidly these men realised that Chartism needed to rethink its strategy and ultimately to make some harsh decisions about what it was trying to achieve. They found themselves arguing that the working classes had not achieved their aims because they appeared raw and debased in the eyes and minds of their rulers. Thus their task was to raise expectations and standards through ‘Education Chartism’, ‘Temperance Chartism’ and ‘Christian Chartism’. This was communicated in their publication ‘Charitism a New Move’. Whilst Paine might not have liked the last of these all of them were species of self-help and enabling strategies that were taking and establishing rights for the individual, even if only within their own environment.

However, this is not to say that Thomas Paine is not a useful companion to have at your side when examining some of the set piece moments of the Chartist era. It is possible to hear him in one’s ear when scrutinising the events of the 1842 Chartist petition and its presentation to parliament. In presenting the petition the chartists believed parliament would see the justice of their cause and produce actions that would rectify the damage that had been done. However they reckoned without the Tory Thomas Macaulay, who rallied to protect the vested interests of those who had property to defend. In refuting the requests of the chartists, albeit in the kindest possible way, Macaulay outlined the manifesto of the conservatives with vested interests who have ever thought about the issue from that day to this: 

…I believe that universal suffrage would be fatal to all purposes for which government exists,. and for which aristocracies and all other things exist, and that it is utterly incompatible with the very existence of civilisation. I am firmly convinced that the effect of any such measure would not merely to overthrow those institutions which now exist, and to ruin those who are rich, but to make the poor poorer, and the amount of misery of the country even greater, than it is now represented to be… No one can say that such a spoliation of property as these petitioners point at would be a relief to the evils of which they complain, and I believe that no one would deny that it would be a great addition to the mischief which is supposed to be removed. But if such would be the result, why should such power be conferred upon the petitioners? That they should ask for it is not blameable; but on what principle is it that we, knowing their views are entirely delusive, should put into their hands the irresistible power of doing all this evil to us and to themselves? 

Now is it possible that, according to the principles of human nature, if you give them this power, it would not be used to its fullest extent? There has been a constant and systematic attempt for years to represent the Government as being able to do, and as bound to attempt that which no Govermment ever attempted; and instead of the Govenunent being represented, as is the truth, as being supported by the people, it been treated as if the Government possessed some mine of wealth, some extraordinary means of supplying the wants of the people – as if they could give them bread from the clouds, water from the rocks to increase the bread and the fishes five thousand fold. Is it possible to believe that the moment you give them absolute, supreme, irresistible power, they will forget all this? You propose to give them supreme power; in every constituent body throughout the empire capital and accumulated property is to be placed absolutely at the foot of labour. How is it possible to doubt what the result will be?’

Certainly it is possible to analyse the language here and as a historian to see that it embodies many well understood conceptions of eighteenth century government. But how should we get into the mind of the chartists whose claims and questions are to be consigned to oblivion by this answer? The language of indignation taught to them through a generation of unstamped papers and through their own paper the Northern Star must have made them equally able to hear Thomas Paine’s voice clearly. In this incident they would have heard him telling them in no uncertain terms that such language is not the defence of legitimately earned property but the defence of vested interests. Moreover, he would have asked the chartists to think long and hard about the condescension being offered to them. Such dismissive attitudes argue ordinary men and women are not discriminating, are capable of theoretical thought and indeed are spurned as a mob and populace or still worse Edmund Burke’s swinish multitude_ Paine would have asked bluntly whether parliament had bothered to read properly the Chartist Petition with any level of discrimination. Paine would argue that the quest for Annual Parliaments and the . payment of M.P’s made central authority more accountable. In the words of the petition, the role of an M.P. is a great and responsible position taking office ‘When called upon to undertake the ‘important business of the country’. This is Paine’s own language about sharing power, taking responsibility for government and considering it a great (the greatest) calling. 

If we move to study the great radical autodidacts of the 19th century Paine is again supremely valuable. He reminds us of the uses of the scowling crustiness and disdain for easy solutions that so characterised these people. Moreover, his work to demystify language was turned into a life’s work for many who clearly saw the social and political power inherent in education — particularly if it was self realised. This was also the gospel of self-help in action showcasing the power of individual accomplishment to reaffirm that making the most of life was worth the effort. 

Examining the radical history around another of my research subjects — blasphemy – will rapidly convince anyone that Paine stands as a colossus. He provides the foundation text which is prosecuted endlessly by the authorities — The Age of Reason (a volume still producing converts to rationalism as late as the 1950s). Once again Paine is a good companion in this territory. We can feel him alongside Daniel Isaac Eaton and the defenceless shopmen brought before the bench who in this instance resemble clearly Blake’s imposing tyrannical figure of Steelyard the Law Giver. However, it is also possible to feel Paine wincing alongside Richard Cattle as he embarks upon an exhaustive complete reading of The Age of Reason in the court room. But nonetheless Paine (as we do) would take some time to admire the fortitude of a man who would spend years of his life in prison and would regularly quote Diderot’s epithet about strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest. 

Paine might have chided J.S.MiII for being too polite in On Liberty for his denunciation of the prosecution for blasphemy of the insane individual Thomas Pooley in 1857 which really cried out for more in the way of indignation. But more importantly still Paine’s.culture of speaking out influenced those who would blaspheme. To blaspheme was emphatically to speak out, to venture the unpopular opinion and not be afraid of retribution and its consequences whether it emanated from this world or the next. Moreover, it was a call to feel and admit within your very self that the spurious must be questioned even unto your last breath. Importantly, the introduction of fun and ribaldry into blasphemy in the 1880s had an important cultural purpose — to argue we should not take power seriously any more. This was the colossal achievement of the enlightenment no matter what the suspicious post modem theorists would say. Paine’s favourite blasphemy might well have been Python’s Life of Brian. Not because it was particularly erudite but because it was mainstream and popular and touched thousands. It was perpetrated by public figures with cult influence especially amongst the young. Christian doctrine might summon to the mind comic images as easily as sacred ones. Paine argued that the sovereignty of this opinion was paramount — preserving it and offering it to others — after all was how revolutions began — a global village is, after all, one that talks and shares values. 

Looking at the British Empire also provides fertile ground for the implications of Paine’s culture of questioning and indignation. To radicals it was a system of oppression — but one changed by the application of opinion and holding this up to the measure of a civilised nation. Imperialism had, for radicals, originated in aristocratic tendencies and provided the playground for the worst tendencies of the ‘armed banditti’ let loose on a defenceless population. Paine’s ideological heir Charles Bradlaugh carried on the fight against such practices becoming the unofficial parliamentary ‘Member for India’ in the 1880s in succession to the radical Henry Fawcett. He fought jobbery, flunkeyism and attacks on the indigenous desire to govern and participate. Bradlaugh’s own visit to India in the 1880s, enabled him to envisage a risen people casting aside gods and princes in equal measure to embrace the enlightenment and reason. This dream was dashed for this generation by the growth of separatism and factionalism which moved Indian nationalism away from liberal, radical and rational solutions to the problem of government. 

However, it is really, paradoxically in the realm of republicanism where Thomas Paine’s influence is really not appreciated and perhaps a significant chunk of my own work has veered towards demonstrating a different history of republicanism in Britain. Paine’s feelings on monarchy and the cultural power it wielded are often resurrected and often quoted. He communicates this in an obviously celebrated phrase that has profoundly affected the history and historiography of republicanism. 

‘I have always considered monarchy to be a silly, contemptible thing. I ) compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there’s a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity, but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to open, and the company sees what it is, they burst into laughter’. 

This is a wonderfully cinematic image and like any cinematic image, we tend to view it from one camera angle. Our instinct is to feel ourselves a part of the audience. Paine would argue we are encouraged to look at the contemptible show and see a mixture of bombastic over the top ham performances. He would also draw our attention to the sight of some who have trouble with their lines and others who try not to be in the performance at all. It would also not escape his eye that some cast members appear merely interested in their press notices. Whilst laughter is generated in radical circles by this the laughter fades and Paine would solemnly note that a new generation of indifferent performers and performances replaces the old. This particular reading of the English republican legacy is traditionally how history has seen English republicanism. It is deemed a failure because we are still supposedly enthralled by the performance and will continue to watch it even if farce follows tragedy in the way Marx argued it would. No matter how much we as a nation allegedly lose respect we are nonetheless dismissed as addicted to the show.

But my own investigations into republicanism suggest our cinematic angle is wrong and Thomas Paine’s contribution is wider than simple invective. Paine intended us to focus on what the audience think — to watch for changes — and to make this audience progressively more discriminating. This was to be accomplished by the generation of opinion early on. From the spectacle of George IV’s funeral cortege being pelted with excrement through the accession of William IV (a man dull people called dull), monarchy had scarcely distinguished itself in the nineteenth century. But Victoria however became the middle class darling. In response to this English Republicanism set about undoing the special relationship to make the middle classes feel uneasy about this new alliance. In doing this they drew on everything Thomas Paine told them about how new societies would operate. They would foster and promote talent, industry, attainment and merit. They would, in short, be enabling and have a lively and healthy public sphere which would enshrine the demonstration of virtue. English Republicans did not have to overthrow the monarchy but to show how it was the enemy of all these things. They hoped it would go quietly under the urging of parliament and civil society. 

Monarchy was expensive – an intrinsic message of Charles Bradlaugh’s Impeachment of the House of Brunswick. Moreover, its benefits were extended only graciously and were in the end arbitrary. The benefits of local government existed only as long as monarchy’s charters were honoured; what had been graciously bestowed could be cynically withdrawn. Besides, monarchy’s attachment to the middle classes was fleeting and dramatically went into freefall with the death of Prince Albert. Victoria neglected her public duties; her ‘friendship’ with John Brown provoked adverse comment whilst her attempts to massage the royal finances were an embarrassment to the government. The last discovery allowed opponents to argue that the monarchy was crooked — a real fear for the Victorian middle classes who came to view fraud as the cardinal sin. 

Honour was scarcely satisfied by the succeeding generation since the Prince of Wales was shown to be deeply in debt. His less than distinguished performance in the Mordaunt divorce scandal and accusations he had perjured himself in court showed monarchy riding roughshod over civil society. Republicans openly asked the people what they thought of this and the answer came from monarchy — it would remake itself. We in turn should ask ourselves why such a move was necessary if the institution was so prosperous. Ultimately monarchy was made into an institution and it has been in this straight jacket ever since. We can judge it on these criteria and assess its usefulness. In doing so we have acquired discretion, powers of evaluation and nobility of reason Paine wanted us all to have. He would have argued that it is the duty of succeeding generations to look into the eyes of other members of this audience and make them tired of even laughing at the show. 

Paine has gained new relevance from some political scholars who have suggested that with the eclipse of socialism the radical agenda is up for grabs. If this is true it may be that we are living through a period in which ideology is becoming malleable. Not in some post-modernist flabby way but in asking individuals to draw upon their human resources and their own conceptions of worth and rights. This raw power can challenge governments and multinationals as effectively as older socialist critiques. Perhaps this should also be an occasion to re-examine the legacy of liberalism that came down to us shorn of at least some of its indignation. It should persuade us to look at how liberalism became polite and lost its potency. John Stewart Mill, when he stood for parliament, refused to canvas for votes assuming that right would triumph in the hearts, or more correctly, the minds of men. Would Thomas Paine have taken such an eventuality for chance? The polite New- Liberalism of John Robertson argued that the empire should be dispensed with because it was an uncivilised burden. Paine would have used stronger language than this and would have echoed Bradlaugh’s more strident criticism which saw republican virtue as the cause that would save the unfortunate peoples of an exploitative aristocratic empire. 

But the work of indignation is never complete. Paine and his ideological descendents like Charles Bradlaugh taught us that whilst the ignoble elements of human awe and the debasing effects of charisma could still do their work we should never be free. Our duty (in their eyes) was to become discriminating. To tear down, even if only in our own minds, the pedestals that envy, superstition and tawdry admiration had erected before our eyes.

But to come full circle, the issue of enabling people and how privilege was a blight on this was emphasised by two events occurring during my own lifetime at either end of the 1960s. The first of these was the expansion of the universities in which talent rather than the ability or means to pay merit an important social force. This waged, at least for a time, what war it could on the bastilles of the word and of the mind. This gave us social history and history from below — forces empowering and inspiring talent. When the opportunities were closed down we subsequently acquired postmodernism with its attendant obfuscation, cleverness and elitism — our worst Bastille of the mind! 

The second event was the Aberfan mine disaster and its appalling aftermath. This latter event prompted the radical songwriter Leon Rosselson to write his driven and scathing attack upon privilege and the destruction of opportunity ‘Palaces of Gold’. It is no coincidence here that palaces were the enemies of the republic of opinion and of merit and our finest instincts. 

The last verse reads as an indictment of accepting the condemnation of a previous generation and the failure to enable us all!

“I’m not suggesting any kind of plot,

Everyone knows there’s not,

But you unborn millions might like to be warned

That if you don’t’ want to be buried alive by slag heaps.

Pitfalls and damp walls and rat traps and dead streets,

Arrange to be democratically born

The son of a company director

Or a judge’s fine and private daughter.

Buttons will be press,

Rules will be broken.

Strings will be pulled

And magic words spoken.

Invisible fingers will mould

Palaces of God.”

We all owe Thomas Paine for giving us and helping us to retain our indignation, may it remain and grow ever more righteous as time passes. AMEN!

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