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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I find in Thomas Paine’s writing his active humanity, intelligence, principles of fairness, action, courage and responsibility for his actions a continuing satisfaction that attracts me to his “voice” every day. 

His original, outrageous ideas and arguments in defense of social fairness — regardless of conventional authoritarian obstacles and punishments — were a boon to the human condition. 

Then as now, people are people, who need food, clothing, shelter, health, and justice. Why withhold their access to the means for living when a practical solution already exists for ubiquitous fairness? Paine in his 1797 work, Agrarian Justice, proposes a real-world system for funding a universal basic income. He starts with the headline, “Means by Which the Fund Is to be Created.” 

Paine’s writing in Agrarian Justice most resonates with my own personal sensibilities. He says, “Civilization, therefore, or that which is so called, has operated two ways, to make one part of society more affluent, and the other part more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.” 

Paine’s human conscience and experience enabled him to see the forest for the trees. He saw the many benefits of social innovations versus loyalties to the unnecessary cruelties of the status quo, then and now.

As fair to fairness as fair can get, in my own opinion, a social justice system needs to be redirected to benefit its participants, not mostly the system itself . 

In his 1802 letter to Samuel Adams about Rights of Man, Paine explains why in France he opposed the execution of the King. He was “laboring to show they were trying the monarchy, and not the man, and that the crimes imputed to him were the crimes of the monarchical system.” This shows Paine’s strong, clear vision of societal justice over mere punishment and hate. 

For instance, in Agrarian Justice, Paine writes, “Practical religion consists in doing good; and the only way of serving God is, that of endeavoring to make his creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy.” 

Indeed, Mr. Paine, even in the 21st Century, in my experience, religions tend to want to make God happy, not make his creation happy. Hence their flaw and the source of their injustice! 

As far as I can tell about any important idea, Thomas Paine always said it first and better, much to my admiration, gratitude and enduring benefit. 

Doing good work, indeed, Mr. Paine! 

Harvey Simon, MPA, works in public administration. He lives in New York City.

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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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Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was one of the most active and prolific radicals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and perhaps “the first man to practice revolution as a sole reason for being.”¹ He wrote and fought for American independence from England, encouraged the abolition of slavery,² helped shape Pennsylvania’s constitution,³ advocated a restructuring of English government,⁴ argued for elimination of the death penalty,⁵ participated in France’s legislature,⁶ and “laid out the first design of a modern welfare state,”⁷ among other activities.⁸ While he lived, he directly influenced politics in America (perhaps even coining the name “United States”⁹), in England, and in France, and long after his death his writings have continued to be primary documents in the struggle for freedom and human rights worldwide.¹⁰ But what connection, if any, did the famous — and, at times, notorious — author of Common Sense, The Crisis, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason have with the Masonic Order? 

In Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, Professor Jack Fruchtman writes that there is insufficient evidence to answer the question with certainty: “It has long been questioned whether Paine was a member of the Masons. There is no definitive proof either way. There is no specific date known on which he joined nor a specific lodge to which he was attached.”¹¹ Nonetheless, it has been common to ascribe Masonic membership to Paine. This is seen in the tendency of some Grand Lodges, during the 1990s, to publish brochures that placed Paine on the roster of famous Masons.¹² One such example, “The Real Secret of Freemasonry,” an informational brochure put out by the Grand Lodge of Oregon, states: “The pantheon of Masons holds George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, among others.”¹³ Various Masonic Web-sites continue to make similar claims about Paine and Masonry, as well.”¹⁴

In The Transatlantic Republican: Thomas Paine and the Age of Revolutions, Bernard Vincent devotes a chapter to “Thomas Paine, the Masonic Order, and the American Revolution,” and explains several aspects of the inclination to consider Paine a Mason: 

While working on my Tom Paine biography, I was intrigued from the outset by the fact that all of a sudden, within just a few weeks or months, and as if by magic, Paine leaped from his obscure humdrum existence in England—where he had worked as a corset-maker and Excise officer—onto the American literary and political stage, there to become, at the age of almost forty, one of the leading lights of the Revolutionary movement. 

How was it that a man who was little short of a failure in his native country became acquainted so rapidly with the most prominent figures in the Colonies, even becoming a friend of theirs in many cases? How can one account for the quickness of his ascent and the suddenness of his glory?

One way of accounting for this, one hypothesis (which has several times been made), is to consider that Paine became a Freemason and that, as such, he enjoyed, first in America, then in England and France, the kindly assistance of certain lodges or of certain individual Masons.¹⁵ 

Vincent rejects this hypothesis, however, due to a lack of corroborative evidence. It is certain that Washington and Franklin were Masons, for example, but there is no equivalent support for such a claim about Paine. 

Assertions of Paine’s Masonic membership also rest on the fact that between 1803 and 1805, after returning to America from England and France, he penned the essay “Origin of Free-Masonry.”¹⁶ For some, Paine’s curiosity about Freemasonry, and his decision to write about it, have been, in and of themselves, sufficient proof that he was a Mason. However, Vincent rejects this line of reasoning as well:

Paine’s interest in Freemasonry was such that toward the end of his life, in 1805, he wrote a lengthy piece entitled An Essay on the Origin of Freemasonry… But this does not prove, any more than any other detail or fact that we know of, that Paine was a Mason. There is indeed no formal trace of his initiation or membership in England, none in America, and none in France. Questioned about Paine’s membership…the United Grand Lodge of England had only this to answer: “In the absence of any record of his initiation, it must, therefore, be assumed he was not a member of the order.”¹⁷ 

Though not necessarily a Mason himself, Paine certainly had several close friends who were members of the Order. For example, while living in France, after fleeing England in order to escape charges of sedition, Paine resided at the home of Nicolas de Bonneville. Samuel Edwards describes Bonneville as lain active Freemason” who “was convinced that the principles and aims of Masonry, if applied to the world’s ailments, would bring peace and prosperity to all nations.”¹⁸ The bond between the two men was quite strong: “From 1797 until 1802, Paine lived with the Bonnevilles in Paris, and Marguerite, Nicolas’ wife, and their sons eventually followed Paine to America.”¹⁹ Fruchtman suggests that during Paine’s time in Paris, Bonneville introduced him to the philosophies of Freemasonry and Theophilanthropism.²⁰ 

William M. Van der Weyde, in The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, also mentions Paine’s Masonic associations, while at the same time emphasizing that these friendships are not evidence he belonged to the fraternity: “Paine was the author of an interesting and highly instructive treatise on the Origin of Freemasonry…but, although many of his circle of friends were undoubtedly members of that order, no conclusive proof has ever been adduced that Paine was a Mason.”²¹ Likewise, Moncure Daniel Conway proposes that “Paine’s intimacy in Paris with Nicolas de Bonneville and Charles Francoise Dupuis, whose writings are replete with masonic speculations, sufficiently explains his interest in the subject” of Freemasonry, even though he himself was probably not a Mason.²² 

Bonneville’s widow published Paine’s “Origin of Free- Masonry” in 1810, after his death, although she chose to omit certain passages in it that could be seen as disparaging to Christianity. Most of these were restored in a later printing, in 1818.²³ Paine’s central premise in “Origin of Free-Masonry” is that the Order “is derived and is the remains of the religion of the ancient Druids; who, like the Magi of Persia and the Priests of Heliopolis in Egypt, were Priests of the Sun.”²⁴ The idea that Masonry derived from the Druids did not begin with Paine, and has been advanced by others after him.²⁵ According to Paine, however, this Druid origin is the true and deepest secret of Masonry, from which extend all the ceremonies and concealment Masons engage in: 

The natural source of secrecy is fear. When any new religion over-runs a former religion, the professors of the new become the persecutors of the old… [Wjhen the Christian religion over-ran the religion of the Druids…the Druids became the subject of persecution. This would naturally and necessarily oblige such of them as remained attached to their original religion to meet in secret, and under the strongest injunctions of secrecy. Their safety depended upon it. A false brother might expose the lives of many of them to destruction; and from the remains of the religion of the Druids, thus preserved, arose the institution which, to avoid the name of Druid, took that of Mason, and practiced under this new name the rites and ceremonies of Druids.²⁶ Commenting on Paine’s “Essay on Freemasonry,” Masonic author Albert G. Mackey quips that Paine “knew, by the way, as little of Masonry as he did of the religion of the Druids.”²⁷ 

Indeed, it is evident from Paine’s essay that he was not very knowledgeable of Freemasonry — although that fact alone does not, of course, prove he was not a Mason when he wrote it. Paine’s general tone, however, shows him to be an outsider trying to assess what is in the Order, rather than a member of it, and that, more than anything else, indicates that he was not a Mason at the time he composed “Origin of Free- Masonry.” For example, after referring to certain statements about Masonry made by the Provincial Grand Master of Kent, Captain George Smith, in the latter’s The Use and Abuse of Free-Masonry (1783), Paine concludes: 

It sometimes happens, as well in writing as in conversation, that a person lets slip an expression that serves to unravel what he intends to conceal, and this is the case with Smith, for in the same chapter he says, “The Druids, when they committed any thing to writing, used the Greek alphabet, and I am bold to assert that the most perfect remains of the Druids’ rites and ceremonies are preserved in the customs and ceremonies of the Masons that are to be found existing among mankind.” “My brethren” says he, “may be able to trace them with greater exactness than I am at liberty to explain to the public.” 

This is a confession from • a Master Mason, without intending it to be so understood by the public, that Masonry is the remains of the religion of the Druids…²⁸ 

These are not the words of a man who is himself a Master Mason, but rather of one who is guessing at what secrets a Master Mason knows and may be inadvertently revealing. Paine, an outsider, mistakes Smith’s personal conjectures for an unintended confession. If he was not a Master Mason at the time he wrote the essay, could Paine have been an Entered Apprentice or a Fellow-Craft? It is difficult to argue that Paine was curious enough about Freemasonry’s origin and philosophy to write seriously about the fraternity, and also to begin the Craft degrees, but that he did not wait until he had concluded them before finishing his essay. It is far more likely that he was not at all a member of the fraternity at the time of its composition, and was writing as a complete outsider. 

In his essay on Thomas Paine in Freemasonry Today, David Harrison speculates: “If Paine did enter into Freemasonry, it would have been during the period of the American Revolution, his life being at the epicentre of the social elite at that time, his closeness to Franklin, Washington, Lafayette and Monroe suggesting that he was undoubtedly aware of their Masonic membership.”²⁹ Paine’s “Origin of Free-Masonry,” however, indicates that despite his closeness to these men, he did not enter into Freemasonry at that time. Years later, around 1803-1805, he was still writing as an outsider. 

Although he may not have been a member, facets of Paine’s thought can be seen to correspond to Masonic principles. In The Age of Reason (of which “Origin of Free- Masonry” may have originally been intended to be a part),³⁰ for example, Paine explains his religious beliefs:

 I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. 

I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.³¹ 

Such statements, which have a Masonic ring to them, prompted Masonic historian Joseph Fort Newton to write of Paine: 

Thomas Paine…though not a Mason, has left us an essay on The Origin of Freemasonry. Few men have ever been more unjustly and cruelly maligned than this great patriot, who was the first to utter the name “United States,” and who, instead of being a sceptic, believed in “the religion in which all men agree” — that is, in God, Duty, and the immortality of the Soul.³² 

Similarly, Vincent concludes in The Transatlantic Republican that while Paine “probably never belonged to any specific fraternity, he nevertheless actively sympathized with the Masonic movement and the philosophy it espoused.”³³ 

Although Voltaire, for example, became a Mason shortly before passing away,³⁴ there is nothing to suggest that Paine became a Mason in the interval between composing “Origin of Free-Masonry” and his death a few years later, in 1809. As he was certainly not a Master Mason when he wrote the essay — and as there is no evidence he joined the fraternity after then — one may conclude, as have Mackey, Newton, and others,³⁵ that Paine was not a Freemason. Still, though the “pantheon of Masons” may not hold Thomas Paine, this influential and controversial man is nonetheless indelibly connected to Freemasonry, if only due to the close friendships he had with some in the fraternity, and to his having written an intriguing essay on its origins.

NOTES

1. Jerome A. Wilson and William F. Ricketson, Thomas Paine (Boston: Twayne Publisher, 1978), p. 163. 
2. Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), pp. 28-29 and 43-44. 
3. Isaac Kramnick, ed., Common Sense (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 31. 
4. Kramnick, Common Sense, p. 33. 
5. Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, p. 60. 
6. Kramnick, Common Sense, pp. 34-36. 
7. Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, p. 109. See also p. 120. Bernard Vincent devotes a chapter to “Paine’s Agrarian Justice and the Birth of the Welfare State.” See Vincent’s The Transatlantic Republican: Thomas Paine and the Age of Revolutions (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 125-135. 
8. Kramnick (Common Sense, p. 28) believes Paine also supported women’s rights. Hitchens, however, disagrees: “he was not a notable advocate of the rights of women” (Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, p. 98). So does Vincent, who considers Paine’s attitude toward women’s suffrage to have been pedestrian: “For once, Paine failed to be a prophet” (The Transatlantic Republican, p. 124). 
9. Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, pp. 8 and 36. Joseph Fort Newton, among others, believed this to be the case. See below, note 32. 
10. Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, pp. 141-142. 
11. Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994), p. 491, note 28. 
12. “Famous Non-Masons,” on the Web-site of Anti-Masonry – Points of View, <https://www.masonicinfo.cornifamousnon.htrn>. 
13. “The Real Secret of Freemasonry,” published by authority of the Trustees of The Grand Lodge of A.F. & A.M. of Oregon (U.S.A.: Still Associates, 1990). 
14. Two such examples: The Key West Masons Web-site, <https://www.kevwestmason.com>, which has a page of famous Masons, among whom Paine is listed, and the Web-site of the Valley of Albany, New York, <https://wwiv.vallevofalbany.aasrmasonrv.us/>, where a quote from the opening lines of The Crisis is attributed to “Bro. Thomas Paine.” 
15. Vincent The Transatlantic Republican, p. 35. 
16. Vincent (The Transatlantic Republican, p, 36) cites 1805 as the year “Origin of Free-Masonry” was written, as does Fruchtman (Thomas Paine; Apostle of Freedom, p. 491, note 29). However, William Van der Weyde places its writing in 1803. See “Chronological Table of Thomas Paine’s Writings,” on the Web-site of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, <htto://www.thomaspaine.orolchron.html>. 
17. Vincent The Transatlantic Republican, p. 36. It may be incorrect to describe “Origin of Free-Masonry,” as Vincent does, as “a lengthy piece.- It is actually less than 5,000 words long. 
18. Samuel Edwards, Rebel! A Biography of Tom Paine (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), p. 227. 
19. Fruchtman, Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, p. 275. 
20. Fruchtman, Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, p. 275 and pp. 379- 380. 
21. William M. Van der Weyde, The Life and Works of Thomas Paine (New York: Thomas Paine National Historical Association, 1925), vol. 1, p. 171. 
22. Moncure Daniel Conway, ed., “Origin of Free-Masonry,” in The Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1967), vol. 4, p. 290, note 1. 
23. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4, p. 290, note 1. 
24. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4, p. 293. 
25. Albert Gallatin Mackey addresses these ideas In his chapter on “Druidism and Freemasonry” in The History of Freemasonry (New York: The Masonic History Company, 1898), vol. 1, pp. 199-216. See also Andrew Prescott’s lecture on “Druidic Myths and Freemasonry,” on the Web-site of The Centre for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, <htte://freemasonrv.deptsheLac.uldindmohp?lann=081tvoe5mee&level 0=243&level1=387&level2=392&oo=381>. 
26. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4, p. 303.
27. Mackey, The History of Freemasonry, vol. ‘1, p. 199. 
28. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4, pp. 294-295. 
29. David Harrison, “Thomas Paine, Freemason?,” Freemasonry Today, Issue 46, Autumn 2008, <htto://www.freemasonrvtoday.com1461p11.php>. Arguing the possibility that Paine became a Mason during this time, Harrison continues: “Paine was certainly attracted to clubs and societies throughout his life, such as the White Hart Club which Paine attended when he was an exciseman in Lewes. He was a founding member of the first Anti-Slavery Society in America and he was involved in the society of Theophilanthropists and Philosophical Society…” In contrast, Vincent argues: “A rugged individualist, Paine neither liked collective ceremonies nor secret practices… Both his nature and the lessons of experience made him loathe the idea of regimentation. He never was a declared member of any party or sect or church, and it is highly probable that he never joined the Masonic Order” (The Transatlantic Republican, p. 39). 
30. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4, p. 290, note 1. 
31. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (Boston: Josiah P. Mendum, 1852), part 1, p. 6. These sentences are quoted, with slightly different wording, in Hitchens’s Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, p. 126. 
32. Joseph Fort Newton, The Builders: A Story and Study of Masonry (Iowa: The Torch Press, 1916), pp. 225-226, note 3. 
33. Vincent, The Transatlantic Republican, p. 35. 
34. Vincent The Transatlantic Republican, p. 38. 
35. For another example, see Augustus C. L Amold’s Philosophical History of Free-Masonry and Other Secret Societies (New York: Clark, Austen, and Smith, 1854), p. 204, second note. Arnold concludes that Paine was not “a member of the brotherhood.” He reproduces Paine’s entire essay in his Philosophical History, adding his own notes to it, with the aim of, among other things, correcting what he considers to be Paine’s mistaken assertions about the fraternity. See Philosophical History, p. 204, first note. See also the entry on Paine in William R. Denslow’s 10,000 Famous Freemasons, vol. 3: “Although Paine wrote An Essay on the Origin of Freemasonry, he was not a Freemason… Certain writers have made claims that he was a member of various lodges both in America and France.”

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The 2008 Eric Palme Memorial Lecture 

His creed was – and Thomas Spence had taught it to him – that ‘the Land is the people’s farm’ and that It belongs to the entire nation, not to individuals or classes. Thus did George Julian Harney, one of the pivotal figures of 19thC radicalism, begin a speech to a Chartist meeting in south London in 1845. I am sure I do not need to explain to this audience what Chartism was; but neither Thomas Spence nor Harney may be familiar to you. Born in 1817 on a troopship lying off Deptford, Harney was the son of a naval rating. Too sickly to follow his father to sea, he started his working life as a potboy in a London pub until, aged seventeen, he was taken on by the great radical bookseller and publisher Henry Hetherington. Hetherington was at the height of his influence, publishing the great unstamped weekly Poor Man’s Guardian and the teenage Harney quickly absorbed his employer’s politics. He had only worked there for a few months when, in October 1834, London’s other great radical publisher of the time, Richard Carille, faced financial ruin when his entire stock was confiscated following his -refusal to pay church rates. Harney’s response was to decorate the window of his employer’s shop with grotesque effigies of a Church of England bishop and the Devil. 

Harney was no milk and water radical, demonstrating but never fighting for his beliefs. In the same year as his vivid gesture of support for Carille, he served the first of three prison sentences for selling unstamped newspapers. He was co-founder of what – in effect – was a Painelte club: the London Democratic Association, the largest and liveliest of the capital’s Chartist organisations. From here Harney forged a reputation as one of Chartism’s outstanding national leaders. Then, in 1843, he joined the staff of Northern Star, the mighty Chartist weekly that, at its peak, outsold even The Times (and was thus, by definition, the biggest selling newspaper In history up to that point). As editor of the Star paper, Harney commissioned Frederick Engels to contribute articles on German politics, and he became good friends with both Engels and Marx who, by 1847, was speaking at Harney’s invitation at London Chartist meetings. 

Despite the decline of Chartism, Harney’s career as a campaigning journalist continued. He was still writing a regular column of political comment and reminiscence for the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle when he died, aged 80, in 1897. I detail Harney’s political career because he was a pivotal figure in the history of British radical politics, a man who In his youth was the friend of veterans from the London Corresponding Society (LCS); who went on to become a close associate of Mark and Engels, outlived them both and who was writing newspaper columns into the late 1890s, some readers of which would have lived into the 1950s. One of the things that interests me as a historian is the transmission of political Ideas – not so much through the intellectual analysis of the Influence of one great writer upon another, but rather at the ‘grassroots’ level of day-to-day belief and conviction. Is there, after all, more eloquent testimony to the Importance of Thomas Paine than the words of the almost apoplectic Attorney General at Paine’s seditious libel trial in 1792? ‘In all shapes and in all sizes, with an industry Incredible, it [Rights of Man Part 2] was either totally or partially thrust into the hands of all persons in this country . . . even children’s sweetmeats were wrapped in parts, and delivered into their hands, in the hope that they would read it’. 

So it intrigues me to see a Chartist of Harney’s stature nailing his political colours so firmly to the mast in 1845, not of Thomas Paine but of the other great radical Tom of the 1790s, Thomas Spence. In 1795 Spence, a London radical printer and author, published The End of Oppression, a dialogue ‘between an old mechanic and a young one’. In It he developed a theme to which he would return several times – notably in his pamphlet The Rights of Infants of 1797 – that Paine for all his manifest merits did not go far enough in prescribing what the future shape of society should be.

YOUNG MAN: I hear there is another RIGHTS OF MAN by Spence that goes farther than Paine’s.

OLD MAN: Yet it goes no farther than It ought.

YOUNG MAN: I understand that it suffers no private property in land, but gives it all to the parishes.

OLD MAN: In doing so It does right, the earth was not made for individuals

YOUNG MAN: It is amazing that Paine and other democrats should level all their artillery at kings, without striking like Spence at this root of every abuse and of every grievance.

So this lecture focuses on Spence’s critique of Paine. It’s not my intention to subvert Paine’s place in history and substitute Spence in his stead; but I do argue that an uncritical deference to Paine’s memory all too easily obscures the contribution of others among his contemporaries to radical political thought. In the field of agrarian ideas especially, that is of Ideas concerning the distribution and tenure of landed property, it was Spence not Paine whose influence was the more decisive. I want to trace that influence through to Chartism (and glimpse beyond it too), by considering Spence’s critique of Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1797) and the subsequent reception of that critique, notably Richard Carilie’s.

Spence’s life has never been accorded the scrutiny Paine has enjoyed and a few biographical details may be therefore helpful. He was born in 1750, the son of an impoverished Newcastle fishing net maker. He probably met the future French Revolutionary Jean Paul Marat during the latter’s residence in Britain In 1765-77. But the formative influences on Spence’s distinctive brand of political radicalism were seventeenth-century and Enlightenment ideas, especially the neo-dassical concept of natural law. The young Spence was also shaped by an iconoclastic Calvinism and until his death his political beliefs had a strongly millenarian tone. His critique of private property was qualitatively different from the customary eighteenth-century radical attack on land as inducing effeminate and corrupting luxury, or for having abrogated its reciprocal obligations to society at large. Private property in land, Spence argued, was a wholesale theft, for the loss of which there could be no act of reciprocity – certainly not the system of taxation and pensions proposed by Paine. In terms of the development of natural law theories of property he may not have made a break as decisive as Paine did; but I would argue that this is – literally – an academic issue. Greater historical significance should be attached to the impact of political ideas on contemporary popular political practice and thinking. 

For Spence the original state of nature is a simple axiom and therefore one to which he devotes comparatively little time: 

That property in land and liberty among men, in a state of nature, ought to be equal, few, one would faint hope, would be foolish enough to deny. Therefore, taking this to be granted, the country of any people, In a native state, is properly their common, In which each of them has an equal Property. 

Spence’s idea of an original state of nature owes a little – but only a little – to divine intervention: there are none of Paine’s contortions in accepting this. In fact Spence does not seem to have been very interested in the issue. Instead concentrating on building up extensive moral and political arguments in favour of the community of property (exactly what he means by community of property is a point to which I shall return). For Spence the true significance of the state of nature was wider than that advanced by Paine in Agrarian Justice. It is as much liberty as land which Is Important in this condition, which in Spenceanism is far from being notional. The biblical authority he emphasised was not Genesis, but elsewhere In the Pentateuch in the early Hebrew republic under Moses. The state of nature on which Spence mainly rested his arguments was not the Garden of Eden. Neither was It John Locke’s or some kind of arcadian wilderness. Rather, in the tradition of the civic humanists of the seventeenth century, It was an economic and social democracy In which an active civic life was possible for all: in the Spencean vision of how society should be, ‘each parish is a little polished Athens’. 

Spence therefore rejected any notion of a social contract, arguing that private property in land anathema. ‘Our boasted civilisation Is founded on conquest’; if the ‘country of any people, in A NATIVE STATE is properly their common’, than they jointly reap its fruits and advantages: ‘for upon what must they live if not upon the productions of the country In which they reside? Surely to deny them that right is in effect denying them a right to live?’ It follows from this view that members of any one generation cannot, by personally appropriating the soil, deny rights to that soil to those generations that succeed them. ‘for to deprive anything of the means of living, supposes a right to deprive it of life; and this right ancestors are not supposed to have over their posterity’. 

Here again Spence broke free from the prevailing conception – derived from Locke – of the development of private property in land. And here, too, lies the fundamental difference of his views from those of Paine, in the disavowal that time confers innocence upon private property in land. ‘There is no living but on the land and Its productions, consequently, what we cannot live without we have the same property in as our lives’. It should be noted though, that Spence followed Locke in using the term property to embrace selfhood: ‘what we cannot live without we have the same property in as our lives’. It is this property in one’s own life that is the most important of all property rights, and upon which communal rights of ownership in land are contingent. The so-called `right’ of private property in land is no right at all but its very antithesis: a pretence and usurpation sanctioned only by the apathy or ignorance of the population as a whole about their true rights. Any ascendancy over lands is hence an ascendancy over people. Therefore in Spence’s view the issue of land ownership lay at the root of all social inequality, economic exploitation and injustice. 

In his early works, Spence advanced the argument that the power of education would suffice to secure universal assent to a system of agrarian equality. It was to be some time after he moved to London, and immersed himself in the radical maelstrom of the capital as it reacted to the French Revolution, before Spence sharpened his perception that other – and more direct – means might be needed to persuade land-owners to yield up their property. His perception of the ends, however, was unchanging – a partnership in every community of the residents of all ages and both sexes, equally dividing between them the revenue from the lease of the land to those who actually cultivated it. Restrictions would be placed on the duration of leases, and the size of holdings. Each community would be self-governing, but joined with others in a federation to coordinate the defence of the nation by citizen militias. 

Spence had been a school teacher on Tyneside, but once In London (he moved here In 1788) he devoted himself full-time to radical politics, printing and writing and – his own unique contribution to popular political culture, the manufacture of copper token coins depicting radical icons and figures (including Paine) and inscribed with slogans. From his shop a few hundred yards from what is now Conway Hall, Spence devoted himself to the affairs of the ICS, to whose general executive committee he was a delegate and some of whose publications he printed. In 1793 he was one of a distinguished group of signatories to the Declaration of the Friends of the Liberty of the Press. He was arrested several times, including twice in December 1796 for selling Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. In 1794 Spence was detained without trial for seven months on suspicion of high treason. Imprisonment only had the effect of galvanising him more. Soon after his release he published the pamphlet to which I referred earlier, The End of Oppression. Here Spence re-evaluated the means by which his reforms could be secured and conceded for the first time that compulsion would be necessary. It was at this point that he attacked other reformers (Paine included) for passing over the critical issue of agrarian reform. Not only did Spence now explicitly endorse the use of force to secure radical objectives, he was emphatic that the destruction of the economic basis of political power must be chief among those objectives. It was a controversial and far-reaching step, and it met with considerable opposition among metropolitan radicals. Spence answered with his biting satire Recantation of the End of Oppression, containing this barely-veiled reference to Thomas Paine: 

Adieu then to striving against the stream, since the readiest way to get to port is to go with it. So here goes, my boys, for an estate and vassals to bow to mei Who would not be a gentleman and live without care! Especially a democratic gentleman without a king. Avaunt rights of man! I am henceforth a democrat, but no leveller. 

Spence further developed his critique of Paine in The Rights of Infants (1797). It also contained an extensive argument in favour of women’s rights, including the vote. This concern to widen the constituency of radical politics was also reflected in his continuing preoccupation with education and it was as an educator and author that he was mainly content to concentrate his energies. However from the beginning of the nineteenth century until his death In 1814, Spence attracted a small but loyal circle of followers, the Spencean Philanthropists. His book The Restorer of Society to Its Natural State, published in 1801, the year the Spencean Philanthropists were founded, again reiterated the justice of applying force to secure reform, this time invoking the examples of the American and French Revolutions and the British Naval Mutinies of 1797. For this he was arrested and tried for seditious libel. William Cobbett attended his trial: `he had no counsel and insisted that his views were pure and benevolent. . . He was a plain, unaffected, inoffensive-looking creature. He did not seem at all afraid of any punishment, and appeared much more anxious about the success of his plan than about the preservation of his life’. 

Spence was jailed for a year. It ruined him financially. On his release he resumed bookselling from a barrow, usually stationed in Oxford Street and more enterprisingly sometimes in Parliament Street, Westminster. But the Spencean Philanthropists continued to meet and were responsible for a flurry of publications in which their leader’s ideas were further refined to embrace forms of public ownership for ‘Shipping, Collieries, Mines and Many other Great Concerns’. It was they who organised Spence’s funeral in 1814.It Is clear from the Spence’s Recantation of the End of Oppression, that his very real admiration for Paine was tinged by envy – and this even before Paine’s Agrarian Justice was published. The latter served only to strengthen Spence’s conviction that republicanism alone would not suffice to secure real justice. The very name of its author secured for Agrarian Justice an audience far beyond Spence’s vainest hopes. One senses a certain righteous indignation that Paine (for selling whose publications Spence had after all been twice Imprisoned) should venture upon specifically agrarian reform entirely without reference to him. We can only conjecture how far – if at all – Paine was acquainted with Spenceanism. 

Like Spence, Paine postulated the historical reality of the state of nature, in which the right of every individual to an equitable share of the soil was absolute; both believed that such a situation was still obtained among North American aboriginal peoples. In such a state, Paine points out, there were none of, 

…those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes In all the towns and streets of Europe. Poverty therefore is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state. 

Spence and Paine therefore shared their primary supposition: but thenceforward their proposals diverged. Paine does not countenance the real yet figurative state of nature that Spence sought to restore. On the contrary, he held that, it is never possible to go from the civilised to the natural state’, because the latter was Incapable of supporting the level of population that, through manufactures and commerce, could in civilisation. 

The problem as Paine perceived it therefore was not really agrarian at all: it was one of poverty. ‘I am’, he declared, ‘a friend to riches because they are capable of doing good. I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it’. Thus it was that he posited in Agrarian Justice that all landowners should pay ‘to the community a ground-rent’, to be accumulated in a national fund. From the latter every person reaching the age of 21 would receive a bounty of ‘Fifteen Pounds Sterling, enabling him, or her, to begin In the World’; and all persons aged fifty and over would receive an annuity of £10, ‘to enable them to live in Old Age without Wretchedness, and go decently out of the world’. Having made this postulation, virtually the rest of Agrarian Justice is devoted to the arithmetic of the proposal – calculations no more or less spurious than those which feature in the writings of other reformers – Cobbett, say on how the population of early C19th England was declining, or Robert Owen on how much more productive the soil can be If ploughs were abandoned in favour of spade husbandry. 

Paine’s proposals had sufficient in common with Spenceanism for Spence to feel perhaps that his Ideas were In danger of being eclipsed. But mainly Spence was irked by Paine’s refusal to return to first principles and disavow that the passing of time rendered private property in land morally innocent. Agrarian Justice would extend no democratic control over the land, and no opportunity for the landless to return to it should they so wish. In Spence’s view, Paine’s plan would effectively reinforce the landed interest by incorporating it into a centralised state system of welfare payments. 

Under the system of Agrarian justice, the people will, as it were, sell their birthright for a mess of porridge [sic], by accepting a paltry consideration in lieu of their rights. . . . The people will become supine and careless in respect of public affairs, knowing the utmost they can receive of the public money. 

This was a major issue for Spence, the latter-day civic humanist in each of whose little polished Athens’ there would be extensive public participation in the processes of government He was quick to point out that Paine’s version of Agrarian Justice would give use to ‘the sneaking unmanly spirit of conscious dependence’. In Spence’s opinion, his own plan would be an incentive to vigilance over public expenditure, necessitating parliamentary democracy and stimulating education. His greatest fear was that Paine’s vision of Agrarian Justice would deteriorate into a placebo for social ills, masking the continuation of oppression. For Spence, the distribution of property, rather than political systems in themselves, determines the real character of a nation and the liberties it enjoys. ‘What does it signify whether the form of government be monarchical or republican while (landed) estates can be acquired?’, he demanded. 

This critique of ‘Paine and other democrats who level all their artillery at kings’ Is essentially a civic humanist one. Indeed, it is the formative thinker of British civic humanism, the philosopher James Harrington, whom Spence quotes more frequently than any other author in his writings. If there is a pivotal transitional figure in the development of radical ideas about property It is Spence, not Paine. The hitter’s Agrarian Justice represents at most a fine-tuning of the secularisation of natural law arguments. It is doubtful what impact – if any – these actually had. In the nineteenth century Agrarian Justice received little attention other than as a coda to its author’s earlier and more significant works. It was not reprinted after the 1790s until William Sherwin’s edition in 1817; Guide produced another (1819). It then lay dormant until the 1830s. 

Why this neglect? Great as his reputation as a democrat and polemicist was, Paine’s Agrarian Justice is deficient as an argument for land reform. Its most eye-catching proposal, for old age pensions, simply repeats without much elaboration remarks he had made in Rights of Man Part 2. Its fiscal proposals, concentrating as they are due on death duties, are arguably less radical in scope and intent than the progressive taxation proposed In Rights of Man. Paine’s Agrarian Justice was markedly less-Innovative in character than the work of Thomas Spence, and it was less-precise In identifying the roots of injustice – all this without the compensatory merit of being any more plausible or practicable. Arguably, it reveals an estrangement between its author and English popular radicalism, the consequences maybe of its author’s years of exile. This so-called agrarian reform, doing nothing to reduce the power of the landed interest, attracted little attention other than on account of its author. It was Spence’s agrarianism which more commonly informed theory and practice in the early labour and radical movements. This is evident even in the writings of Richard Carille, where Paine’s writ might have been assumed to have prevailed. 

For example in November 1822 Cartile, in an extensive review and critical development of an otherwise obscure pamphlet on taxation reform, rejected its argument that financial investments should alone be subject to taxation, thus creating an equitable tax that would avoid discriminating against the poor whilst taxing only those able to pay. CarHie was not opposed to implementing a socially progressive tax regime; but he argued that to base a so-called `equitable tax’ on investment in the funds would Ipso facto be an affirmation of the legal and moral right to such property. Carifie opposed this: ‘land, and land only’, he argued, was ‘the only tangible property’. The only sensible, and morally defensible, equitable tax would be ‘the Spencean plan . . certainly the most simple and most equitable system of society and government that can be imagined’. The Spencean plan, Cattle continued, had been run down by its critics without proper examination. It was eminently suited to immediate adoption by the emerging republics of Latin America but it was vain, he went on, ‘to urge it against the prejudices of those who have established properties in this country’. 

Instead, Cattle argued for a single equitable tax on land as the most effective social and financial strategy for a reformed parliament to pursue. The owners of large estates, much of them unproductive shooting land or parkland, would be forced either to give them up or turn them over to productive cultivation in order to meet the burden of the tax. This incentive to full cultivation was in turn a guarantor of greater employment, which would in turn increase demand for goods and produce that – because no longer taxed – would be more affordable. 

Thereafter the ‘equitable tax’ would be a recurrent feature of Carfile’s political thinking. And whenever he returned to the land question, he would cite Thomas Spence as his prime authority, reiterating the merits of equitable taxation: 

The sentiment of Thomas Spence, that THE LAND IS THE PEOPLE’S FARM, is incontrovertible by any other argument than that of the sword. The land cannot be equitably divided among the people; but all rent raised from it may be made public revenue, and to save the people from taxation. 

The case against agrarian monopoly and usury . . . the two master evils of society’ was one of the few economic issues (perhaps the only one?) Carlfie consistently advocated across his long and turbulent career. Indeed, this was the economic policy that sat alongside his advocacy of Paineite republicanism in the political arena. Less than four years before his death, Celine engaged the Chartist leader Bronterre O’Brien in a heated exchange on agrarian reform: 

Here is a subject worth thinking, worth talking, worth wilting, worth printing, worth a Convention. Universal Suffrage, in the present state of mind, and church, and kings, and priests and lords, is all humbug and trickery compared to it. 

And he concluded by repeating the ‘People’s Farm shibboleth’, concluding, ‘I am for getting the rent paid to the right landlord’. 

This is an instructive moment in the history of radicalism. Richard Garble, perhaps Paine’s foremost disciple, urged the nascent Chartist movement to abandon universal suffrage in favour of Spencean land reform. Carlile had republished Agrarian Justice but, clearly, he regarded Spenceanism as the more authoritative marker on the issues of agrarian and fiscal reform and – no less-crucially – more-familiar to his readership. It seems reasonable to conclude that CarlIle regarded Spencean theories as central to the pedigree of radical ideas about property and taxation in a way that Paine’s were not. 

In doing so Carille was not alone, as I indicated when I begun with Hamey’s tribute to Spence and the concept that ‘the land is the people’s farm’. Robert Owen recounted with pride in his autobiography how he was once mistaken for Spence. Francis Place, architect of the repeal of the Combination Acts which had made trade unions Illegal between 1798 and 1824, endorsed the views ‘of my old and esteemed friend . . . making the whole country the people’s farm’. The innovative thought of Thomas Spence on the issue of land reform was a bench-mark to which subsequent radicals (and sometimes their opponents) often referred. Among opponents, for example, Thomas Malthus singled out Spence for special criticism in the extensively revised 1817 edition of his Essay on Population. And John Stuart Mill warned of the dangers of falling ‘into the vagaries of Spenceanism’. Marx enlisted Spence in his German Ideology. Beyond Chartism, Spencean Ideas became a point of reference for a variety of reformers, including the pioneer of the Garden City movement, Ebenezer Howard. The rediscovery of Spence by H. M. Hyndman was especially significant. In 1882, at the insistence of Henry George, Hyndman republished what he described as ‘Spence’s practical and thoroughly English proposal for nationalisation of the land’. This was the first of three important late nineteenth-century reprints of Spence, the others being the Initiatives of the English Land Restoration Society in 1896, and the Independent Labour Party Labour Leader in 1900. 

But it Is within Chartism that Spence’s influence was particularly influential and this, I suggest is significant because – with over 3 million supporters at its zenith, the Chartist movement was (as it remains) one of the high points in the history of British popular politics. It was in effect Britain’s civil rights movement, and we should not let its concentration upon securing the vote for men alone obscure the fundamental challenge that it posed to the political establishment of early Victorian Britain. And that establishment, of course, was still overwhelmingly a landed one. 

Throughout the years after his death, former members of the Spencean Philanthropists were pivotal figures in London radical politics. For example, the London Democratic Association, the organisation that absorbed G J Harney’s earliest Chartist energies counted among its members several influential Spenceans, including Spence’s biographer, the poet and early socialist Allen Davenport, and the Brick Lane tailor turned radical bookseller Charles Hodgson Neesom (who, in 1847, would go on to be a founding member of Britain’s first ever Vegetarian Society). The young Harney was profoundly influenced by the Spencean generation and In turn – disseminated awareness of Spence through the Northern Star. Studies of Chartist attitudes to landed property have overwhelmingly focused upon its Land Plan, a remarkable (though, sadly, also remarkably flawed) initiative to settle its members on the land in cottage smallholdings. It speaks volumes for the extent of popular interest in agrarian reform that the Land Plan could mobilise well over 70,000 subscribers in the teeth of the economic crisis of 1847-1848. 

But the sheer scale of the land plan has obscured the extent to which agrarian ideas were central to all currents within Chartism. Furthermore, historians traditionally have had difficulty reconciling the sturdy possessive individualism of the Plan with those other arguments within the same movement, for public ownership of the soil. Chartists advanced arguments for, variously, forcible re- appropriation, land and building societies, a free market in landed property, deeply radical taxation regimes and, from 1850, `the Charter and something more’ (a social democratic programme with land nationalisation at its heart). 

Yet three common elements underpinned them all. First was an outright hostility to large accumulations of landed property, irrespective of the legal form in which they might be held. Thus, secondly, Chartism was suspicious of the central government as the putative owner or manager of the national estate. Thirdly, all Chartist conceptions of the reform of landed property shared a ‘way of seeing’ land that was shaped by ideas of shared access, usage and control rather than by possessive individualism. These three elements very much encapsulate the essence of Spence’s thinking. 

A powerful adjunct to this argument was that – of all methods of organising land holding – smallholding maximised the productivity return from labour input Into the soil. This in turn would alleviate poverty by widening employment opportunities and the production of plentiful food countering the spectre of starvation, so frequently used by Whig Malthusians to justify the reform of the poor law. This notion was itself powerfully rooted in contemporary idealization of spade husbandry (just about the only principle held consistently and unanimously by three of the greatest figures of early 19th century radicalism, William Cobbett, Robert Owen and Feargus O’Connor). Even Bronterre O’Brien, the Land Plan’s fiercest critic from within the Chartist movement, eulogized smallholding. 

The development of arguments favouring large-scale collective farming was an ideological Rubicon that none of the Chartists ever crossed. Land nationalisers and Land Planners alike favoured small- scale cultivation. Support for land nationalization certainly did not equate with any interest in the collectivization of agriculture. For the Chartists, suspicion of centralizing state power was a leitmotif. This, like the promotion of the smallholding ideal, was one of the elements that bound together supporters of the Land Plan with its critics in the movement. And it was an element which acted to curtail enthusiasm for land nationalization, because the mechanism needed to administer the national estate was essentially incompatible with the Chartist concept of light government nationally and significant local autonomy. The main Chartist land nationaliser, Bronterre O’Brien’s response to this was to argue (just as Thomas Spence had done) in favour of local community control, once the nationalisation of property in soil had been secured by nationwide legislation. 

For Chartists of every persuasion, the first duties of a reformed parliament would include land reform. For, to quote the movement’s great newspaper Northern Star once more: 

Monopoly of land is the source of every social and political evil . . . every law which ‘grinds the face of the poor’ has emanated from time to time from this anomalous monopoly . . . our national debt, our standing army, our luscious law church, our large police force, our necessity for ‘pauper’ rates, our dead weight, our civil list, our glorious rag money, our unjust laws, our game laws, our impure magistracy, our prejudiced jury system, our pampered court, and the pampered menials thereunto belonging, are one and all so many fences thrown round the people’s inheritance. 

The land plan’s presiding genius and Chartism’s greatest leader, Feargus O’Connor, specifically interweaved mechanisation into this catalogue of injustice: 

What is the loud demand of the working people for a plain, simple, and efficient PLAN for practical operations on THE LAND, but the effort of man to regain his natural position, from which he has been dislodged by the combined operations of high-taxation, paper-money, and an unduly- hot-bed-forced amount of manufacturing machinery? 

This abiding perception of history as a continuing decline in the people’s fortunes re-echoes both Spence and William Cobbett and it had an important impact on Chartist Ideology. It meant that even within the deepening economic problems of the 1840s, an agrarian analysis of contemporary problems – and an agrarian prescription for them – was not redundant. The key social problem that Chartists perceived was not so much a society that was rapidly industrialising, but a society that was increasingly divided (politically, socially and economically) between rich and poor. 

To sum up, then. All Chartists agreed that land reform would be a political, economic and social imperative for a reformed parliament. There was virtual unanimity that the basis on which land should be held for cultivation must be that of smallholdings and small farms. The emergence of arguments in favour of land nationalization was attenuated by a continued disposition in favour of small-scale ownership (which In time meant ex-Chartists were a significant element with the emergence of building societies). The concept of land nationalization was also constrained by suspicion of the State and its centralizing tendencies. 

Was there a single defining feature of the various Chartist positions on land reform? I would argue there was, and I would describe it as neo-Spencean. It is a commonplace of Chartist historiography that the movement appealed particularly to displaced domestic outworkers such as handloom weavers. A disposition towards small-scale production is evident too in Chartist agrarian ideology. The movement’s overarching political outlook privileged issues of equity and access over that of public ownership. Access to – and control of – the land, rather than the democratization of ownership itself, was the essential basis from which all Chartist land reform emerged. The ostensibly Janus-headed stance of the Chartists, at once critical of private ownership of the soil and yet zealous In promoting smallholdings, ceases to be problematic once we register that the key issue for all Chartist land reformers was access to – rather than direct ownership of – the land. 

And so in conclusion I return to where this lecture began, with George Harney, the main architect of the 1851 ‘Charter and something more’ social democratic programme, telling his audience of Londoners: ‘His creed was – and Thomas Spence had taught it him – that “the Land is the people’s farm”, and that it belongs to the entire nation, not to individuals or classes’. When Spence spoke of ‘the real rights’, or ‘the whole rights’ of man, he was signalling that the profoundly radical prescriptions of Thomas Paine had to become more radical still. Republicanism, even accompanied by a fiscal regime of progressive taxation, would not alone suffice to restore humanity to the natural state Spence believed possible and necessary. In Chartism’s emphatic drive for radical parliamentary reform, we can see the working out of Paineite thinking. And in the same movement’s impulse towards agrarian reform, we can see the working out of Spencean thinking. Tom Paine and Tom Spence walked with the Chartists: both should walk with us still today.

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Text of a talk given at the Thomas Paine Society AGM, November 4, 2006 in Conway Hall. 

The advertised title of this talk/article is something of a misnomer. It will go well beyond South London and will include the 20th as well as the 19th century. 

Described by T. E. Uttley of the Daily Telegraph as “that evil man Tom Paine”, Thomas Paine was for generations of radicals, secularists and republicans an example and an inspiration. My first port of call was the Great Harry public house in Woolwich. On the walls there is a pictorial display about Paine and Cobbett, which rightly says that Cobbett married the daughter of a sergeant stationed in Woolwich. It also claims that Paine had a staymaker’s shop in Woolwich High Street, but I’ve been unable to find any evidence of this. What is certain is that from the 1830s the area became a centre of radicalism and secularism. 

The link between the Jacobin Corresponding Societies of the late 18th century and the Chartists of the mid 19th century was the tailor Francis Place. While awaiting the birth of his child, Place read Paine’s The Age of Reason. So impressed was he by the book that he sought out its owner who persuaded him to join the London Corresponding Society. Place remarked that Paine and Burke had made every Englishman a politician. In 1796 Place decided to produce a cheap edition of The Age of Reason, feeling sure he could sell 2,000 copies through the LCS. The printer Thomas Williams was sentenced to a year’s hard labour for producing a seditious and blasphemous libel. In 1819 Place offered to help Richard Carlile who had been imprisoned for publishing The Age of Reason. Place wrote for Carlile’s Republican, which he produced from behind bars. The Republican for February 22, 1822 reported a gathering in Stockport to celebrate the natal day of Mr Paine “whom Englishmen ought to consider the greatest man their island ever produced.”

By the mid 1830s Place was a member of the Chartist London Working Men’s Association which had been formed by Dr James Black. In the London Mercury of March 4 1837 Bronterre 0′ Brien reported a meeting of 4,000 democrats in the Crown and Anchor in The Strand. (The tavern had been the scene of a celebratory dinner for the radical Unitarian Jerimiah Joyce on his acquittal on a charge of treason. As a member of the Society for Constitutional Information he had been involved in the distribution of 200,000 copies of Paine’s Rights of Man at the low price of 6d. It was later a meeting place for supporters of the 1832 Reform Act): He wrote that Henry Vincent had given ” a capital spicy hash of Paine’s exposure of Blackstone’s old humbug about the checks of our nicely balanced Constitution.” One London Chartist group named itself for Paine, others took the names of Wat Tyler and William Wallace. 

O’Brien, editor of The Poor Man’s Guardian and biographer of Robespierre, had read and admired Paine’s Agrarian Justice in which “the contrast of affluence and wretchedness…like dead and living bodies chained together” is attributed to the landed monopoly. In a speech made in Glasgow he said “Read Paine…and a host of others and they will tell you labour is the only genuine property.” For making a similar speech in 1840 O’Brien was imprisoned for seditious conspiracy. In prison he was allowed to read only the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. 

A dose associate of O’Brien was George Julian Harney. Born in Deptford (the local Chartists met in the Earl Grey pub in Straightsmouth, Greenwich), he went to sea at 14 and on his return became printshop boy at the Poor Man’s Guardian. Harney organised the East London Democratic Association described by Dr David Goodway as a Painite Club. With a membership of 4,000 it had a strong base in the impoverished Spitefields silk weavers. Hamey edited several Chartist publications, the best known of which is the Red Republican in which appeared the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto. Whenever Hamey mentioned Paine’s name he printed it in capitals. The issue for October 5, 1850 carried an article on Paige’s trial in 1792 for publishing “his admirable and unanswerable attack on Kingcraft – Rights of Man.”

At numerous Chartist dinners and banquets (such events were less likely to attract the attention of the authorities than overtly political meetings) Paine’s name was toasted with great gusto. 

As Chartism declined as a national force many members joined secular societies. The Greenwich and Deptford Secular Society was formed by Victor Le Lubez, a freemason and member of the First International, in 1862. In 1865 secularists in nearby Woolwich and Plumstead held a tea party and soiree to celebrate Paine. Such events were quite common. Bradlaugh’s National Reformer for February 19, 1871 carried a report of a meeting in Liverpool ‘e had an address from Mr Watts on Paine” On January 31 there had been a ball and soiree in the New Hall of Science, Old Street, to celebrate Paine’s birthday. The proceeds went to the Secular Sunday School Fund. The Association of Eclectics in Glasgow had celebrated Paine’s birthday on February 2. The meeting was enlivened by songs and recitations. The National Reformer for February 4, 1872 reported an address on Paine’s birthday given to the South Staffordshire and East Worcester Secular Union. 

Some secularists named their children after Paine. The National Reformer of July 20, 1873 reported that a Mr and Mrs Coates of the Manchester Secular Institute had named their son Thomas Paine in a ceremony conducted by Harriet Law. The leading Hastings secularist and republican Alfred King also named his son Thomas Paine. Sadly the boy died as an infant. 

Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner’s The Reformer published in its issue for May 15, 1897 a previously unpublished letter from Paine to Thomas Jefferson with a commentary by Moncure Conway, Paine’s biographer. 

The Bradford secularist and socialist J. W. Gott published a monthly The Truthseeker to promote mental freedom and social progress. A special issue carried a cartoon of Paine surrounded by the symbols of his struggle for liberty. The August 1902 issue had a quotation from Paine on its front page and a “marvelously cheap” edition of The Age of Reason was advertised price 6d. Gott was the last Englishman to be imprisoned for blasphemy, his imprisonment led to his premature death. 

1909 was the centenary of Paine’s death. The National Secular Society held various events to mark the event. The Freethinker January 31, 1909 reprinted an article from the Toronto Secular Thought by Michael Monahan which pointed out that Paine was 5 inches taller than President Roosevelt who had called Paine ” a dirty little atheist”. The issue for February 7 carried an advertisement for an edition of The Age of Reason published by the Edinburgh Rationalist Club. The March 7 issue reprinted an article from the Brighton Herald which claimed that Paine’s jawbone had come into the hands of a Mrs Wilkinson of Liverpool. It was claimed a member of her family had buried it in an Anglican churchyard. Branches of the NSS held open air meetings on Paine. Bethnal Green branch held in Victoria Park addressed by F. A Davies. There were two lectures in Birmingham Bull Ring and one in Liverpool by H Percy Ward, a former Wesleyian preacher who had been secretary of the British Secular League. The main event was a meeting in St James Hall, Great Portland Street. Speakers included Herbert Burrows, Harry Snell, Chapman Cohen and G W. Foote. Watts reprinted Conway’s biography of Paine for the Rationalist Press Association. It sold for half a crown. The Times of June 8 published an article on Paine calling him the greatest of pamphleteers. 

1937 was the bicentenary of Paine’s birth, The Freethinker for January 31 was a special Paine issue with a portrait on the front page. At the time illustrations in the radical press were rare. Chapman Cohen spoke at NSS branch meetings in Liverpool on Paine The Pioneer. The’ Man That shook The World and on Clapham Common W Kent spoke. NSS members were urged to step up their sales of The Age of Reason. It sold for 4p, Ingersoll’s Oration On Paine cost 2d. The West London branch sold both at Hyde Park. The Freethinker for March 14 published an article on Paine and Bourgeois Myths by Jack Lindsay. Another article by H. Cutner was entitled The Apostle of Liberty. A bicentenary dinner at which 200 people were present was organised in the Holborn Restaurant, High Holborn. Tickets were 8 shillings and Cohen took the chair. Evening dress was optional. The BBC refused to make a broadcast about Paine but a meeting was held in Thetford with the Mayor in the chair. 

In 1965 F. A. Ridley, who had edited The Freethinker , was writing about Paine in the Independent Labour Party’s weekly, which he had also edited. On a different level Harvey’s brewery of Lewes makes an excellent Paine ale and in the original Star Trek series a star ship was named for Paine. Another was called Potemkin.

2009 will provide many opportunities to celebrate Paine but best of all would be the final victory of his struggle against kingcraft and priestcraft.

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Thomas Paine is someone I had heard of, but not known much about, in spite of having read for a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford between the ages of 32 and 35, as part of my youthful ambition to become Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer. I had previously been in the Royal Navy and in banks in the City, to which I returned having decided that I could not afford to continue with academic studies. I had hoped to study the Economics of Inheritance. I still hope to arrange for the republication of the book of that title by Josiah Wedgwood. I had scraped an Upper Second and had simultaneously just failed to become Liberal MP for Newbury in the two 1974 General Elections, regrettably on either side of my finals. It was not until after I had left Oxford that in conversation with Alan Ryan, my erstwhile tutor and now Warden of New College, I mentioned to him what I thought had been my original idea of Universal Inheritance_ In response, he remarked – rather absent-mindedly – that Tom Paine had suggested something along those lines. I was not pleased, but thought no more about him!

I had already published “Inheritance for All” in the Liberal Party magazine New Outlook in March 1976. The idea was to make the sale of council houses to tenants fair to others, and to spread wealth more widely. In the event, the sale of the century went ahead. Lucky for some, but not for others. Then, over the years, I went on arguing in the City and elsewhere for my views about the need for “greater equality of opportunity in education, health and the inheritance of wealth”, together with “the privatisation of all activities except those which cannot, or ought not, to be rationed by price”. Liberal Party discipline had been even weaker in 1974 than it is now, and that had been the platform upon which I had stood in Newbury. The voters had approved, but it is still not a combination available from any political party. Had I known there was to be a second General Election in October 1974, I would have spent the summer canvassing Labour voters instead of completing my degree. With those views, it would not have been difficult to squeeze the February Labour vote enough to turn the October Con 24,000, Lib 23,000, Lab 10,000 result into a very unexpected Liberal victory. If pigs had wings! The same ideas were included in my Liberal Party Election Address in the 1979 South West Herts Parliamentary By-election, in which I was unwise enough to stand, early in the Thatcher years. But maybe some seeds were sown.

Years later, in 1998, having been inspired by a life-stopping moment two years earlier, I formed the Campaign for Universal Inheritance. In 2000, to my great delight, the Fabian Society came out with a very similar idea in a leaflet entitled, amusingly for a socialist society, “A Capital Idea”. This no doubt encapsulates and explains why I could never persuade Labour Party activists whom I met in the course of politics to take the idea seriously. The authors of the leaflet claimed originality ten years beforehand, in 1990, while very fairly drawing my surprised and recollected attention to Thomas Paine’s original proposal in Agrarian Justice written in 1795-6.

Hence my joining the Thomas Paine Society. I am only just beginning to learn more about him. I have also been helped by the enthusiasm of my cousin, Louise Simson, a great Thomas Paine admirer, who has written a film script about him that I hope will come to fruition. l have also briefly met Lord Attenborough at my request, through Anthony Smith, the President of Magdalen College. If a film is made about Thomas Paine, I hope to get in a plug. 

What is the proposal? Paine suggested in 1796 that every young person should receive an inheritance of capital of £15 at the age of 21, financed by a fund to be created out of a levy on inheritance. I unknowingly reinvented this idea and named it Universal Inheritance, in parallel with Universal Suffrage. It will transform our country, as did universal suffrage. 

The Campaign for Universal Inheritance’s most recent formulation is as follows:

“Every young man and woman born a British citizen should have the right not only to a vote but also to an inherited share in the wealth of the country, regardless of the fortunes or misfortunes, generosity or lack of generosity of parents. Lower the rate of British Inheritance Tax on giving from 40 per cent to between 10 and 20 per cent, according to political taste. Introduce in tandem with it a new progressive tax, starting at the same chosen rate and remaining there for most beneficiaries, on all inheritance and capital gifts received, except from partners or spouses. 

Avoid double taxation by transferable tax credits. Use the proceeds to give every British-born young man and woman on reaching the age of 25 a minimum British Universal Inheritance of between £5,000 and £10,000, itself subject to the new progressive tax on lifetime receipts of capital gifts and inheritance received. The figures and tax rates should be arrived at in the context of political preferences and of the average wealth in Britain at the end of 2002 for every adult and child, which according to the Office of National Statistics was £85,000.”

As I wrote in a recent memorandum to the members of Michael Howard’s new Shadow Cabinet, this is an entirely extra instrument of economic and social policy. It is a meritocratic proposal as radical and revolutionary in its way as the Thatcherite sale of council houses.

Unlike the New Labour Government’s hare-brained Baby Bond proposal, which will go not only to those babies who will inherit nothing else but also to those who will become inheritance billionaires – British Universal Inheritance is means-tested by reference to other inheritance and capital gifts received. It could, if necessary, absorb the Baby Bond proposal, which is for £250 or – if parents just happen to be on income support at the time – £500. This could be treated as just another inheritance, to be received at 18, added to the chosen figure of between £5,000 and £10.000, and be likewise subject to and financed by the 10 to 20 per cent tax on inheritance received. 

The Baby Bonds, sadly, are a cynical New Labour “good news story” that sounds good but will benefit no one except for investment advisers for 18 years. They are the products of New Labour’s unwillingness to tackle the last class, media and political Great Taboo – on the judicious positive redistribution of inherited wealth in each new generation. As a result the government is eschewing the means test in the one area in which it would be wholly beneficial – the inheritance of wealth.

British Universal Inheritance will enable home ownership and enterprise. £5,000 is the maximum the Prince’s Trust will invest in a small business. (He should pay inheritance tax too!) It will help to reduce alienation, crime, policing costs, social exclusion and welfare state dependency. This judicious, positive redistribution of the stock of capital will enable taxation on the flow, or stream, of income and expenditure to be reduced (towards Oliver Letwin’s 35 per cent target?). 25 is a good age for financial responsibility. Banks would be able to lend against the certain receipt of British Universal Inheritance for certain approved purposes after the age of 18. The Fabian Society suggested £10,000 at 18 – too much too young, at least during the introductory period. Once introduced, the amount and the progressive rate of tax will grow under the pressure of democratic debate.

There are always problems of transition. On first introduction, British Universal Inheritance should ideally be tapered down from the chosen figure at the age of 25 to zero at 30 – with a balance making it up to the chosen figure at the age of 75 and above, so that all may expect to benefit eventually. The amount and initial tapering will have to be set with this in mind. 

The wider spread of the private ownership of capital will transform society, just as did the wider spread of the right to vote – another human right for all. Being self-financing, the cost of this country-transforming proposal will be merely the annual yield of the present exemption-riddled 40 percent British Inheritance Tax – about £2.5 billion a year. 

At present, receipts by the next generation of £ billions of business, farming and shareholding assets and of lifetime gifts are scandalously and shamefully free of tax. While others inherit nothing at all. Unless New Labour comes to their senses, the Conservative Party may well adopt British Universal Inheritance first. This will confound New Labour and make sense to many more voters of Conservative Party policy slogans for “choice” and “a fair deal for all”, not to mention “making this country theirs as much as it is ours”.

Given that the New Labour government has completely ignored the idea, it is left to OPPORTUNITY (The Campaign for British Universal Inheritance) to carry forward Thomas Paine’s original proposal for positive redistribution of inherited wealth and popular – as opposed to dynastic – capitalism in Britain. Fairer Capitalism in the United Kingdom. (FCUK?) Let us make it happen. It will be very good and inclusive for all citizens of our British community, including, topically – all our British-born Muslim brothers and sisters. Maybe The (continuing and British) Liberal Party, whose constitution still calls for the wider spread of wealth and power (not the same as the Euro-fanatic Lib Dems) will get there first. That will be a start, for others to follow.

And let no one get away with talking about the importance of reducing poverty, either nationally or internationally, without being reminded of the need for National Universal Inheritance schemes in all countries. It will be easier to gain support in rich countries for aiding poor countries if wealth in the rich countries and also in the poor countries is more evenly spread. In every country, those who would inherit great wealth should inherit less in order that all others in their country should inherit at least some minimum amount of capital at the age of 25, to be gradually clawed back by initially modest taxation on further receipts of capital gifts and inheritance. 

Let us vindicate again Thomas Paine, that great reformer.

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Thomas Paine: At the Limits of Bourgeois Radicalism. By Anthony Arblaster. In SOCIALISM AND THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM. Edited by P. Osbome. Verso, 1991. £12.95  

It is refreshing to read an essay about Thomas Paine which not only places him in his historical context but also emphasises his relevance  oday. This essay is part of a book which was compiled in 1991, when the dust created by the fall of the Berlin Wall had not yet settled, with  the aim of rescuing socialism from its many jubilant critics.  

In the introduction Peter Osborne writes: ‘To write of the future of  liberalism in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century was, of  necessity, to write also about socialism. Today, a hundred years later, the  reverse is true: it has become impossible to write off the prospects for socialism without raising once more its relation to liberalism.’ It is in  this context that Arblaster writes about the liberal radicalism of Thomas  Paine. He starts his essay by placing Paine in the context of the  radicalism of the French Revolution. He points out that the ideology of  the American and French Revolutions was a bourgeois ideology of the  most radical form. A radical ideology with its limitations and  impediments but still challenging and relevant. Arblaster argues, ‘This  radical ideology points both backwards and forwards – backwards to  pre-capitalist notions of a ‘moral economy’, forwards to socialism – but it  also intersects the central liberal ideology of the market. All three  elements are present in Paine, but also in the French and American  Revolutions of this period.’  

Arblaster then sets about explaining Paine’s liberalism by showing  that Paine does not see a political or economic cause of war but rather  its roots lie with the dominance of societies by hereditary monarchs. Get  rid of them and there would be no wars. He also shows that Paine’s  liberalism is closely linked to Adam Smith and believes that free trade  benefits all. His attack on hereditary monarchy was also for economic  reasons as monarchs put an unnecessary burden on taxation. However,  Paine was not an advocate of economic egalitarianism, as Arblaster  points out that even in Agrarian Justice Paine believes that some  economic inequalities are justified and even desirable.  

Arblaster is aware that Paine’s liberalism could easily be used by  conservatives like Margaret Thatcher, so he is keen to redress the  balance by showing Paine’s radicalism. While most of Paine’s contemporaries saw poverty as undesirable but nevertheless a natural consequence  of over-population, Paine could never bring himself to blame the poor for their condition. He clearly started to move towards a class analysis of  poverty and wealth. Arblaster points out that Paine not only goes a lot  further than most of those around him but also a lot further than many  people today in his solutions to end this problem. He does not see this  contradiction of Paine’s belief in minimalistic government while  advocating intervention to end poverty as a problem with Paine, because they are central to the bourgeois assault on feudalism and absolutism, and the liberalisation of capitalist enterprise; but also  because at this point in modern history no one… is formulating a theory  of interventionism, of positive state action.’ Therefore, ‘Paine stands at  the most radical edge of bourgeois liberalism in theory, and could even  be said to go beyond it in his detailed practical proposals.’  

Not only is an excellent essay on Thomas Paine which clearly and  concisely explains his ideas and places them in their historical context,  but Arblaster also successfully shows that Paine is still relevant today. He points out that ‘Recent vast increases in capitalist power and in the  huge wealth of a small minority, coupled with attacks on the poor and  their minimal entitlements, have returned these issues to the centre of  the political stage. With the Labour Party currently debating the future  of Clause 4 (A clause in the British Labour Party constitution) those who want to ditch it and embrace the market  economy should read Paine and this essay. This is an essay which would  be welcomed not only by scholars of Paine but also be a good  introduction to his work. We need more essays of this calibre.

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We do not usually think of Thomas Paine as an economist and, indeed, his writings under this head are neither systematic nor particularly original. Nevertheless, his economic ideas reflect his attitude to wider political issues and show both a grasp of economic realities and a penetration in powers of analysis which have been consistently under-rated by his biographers.

The Case of the Officers of the Excise, which Paine wrote in 1772, is his first known political work of which we have any record. He backed up the claim of his fellow excisemen to improved pay and working conditions by drawing attention to “the high price of provisions” which he attributed to “the increase of money in the kingdom”. Rising prices, he argued, were harmful because they were unjust. To some they brought affluence; others might find their market situation strong enough to enable them to offset the effects of inflation by pushing up the price of their own products. But large numbers of people would find themselves in the same category as Paine’s fellow customs officers and would lack either the economic or the political strength to counter the effects of inflation.

Paine returned to the question eight years later when, in The Crisis Extraordinaza,he dealt with the problems of war finance at the time of the American revolution. The Federal Government had come to depend increasingly on paper money to cover its expenses. Paine underlined the inflationary consequences and stressed the importance of meeting public expenditure out of taxes and loans rather than by the printing press. Assessing the needs of the central government at £2 millions a year, he proposed raising half the sum by taxes and half by loans at 6 per cent. Paine would have preferred to raise the entire sum by taxes but he recognised that in view of the primitive state of government machinery this was unpractical. In the circumstances he recommended that half the money should be raised by loans and half by taxes. These should consist mainly of import duties – since there were only a few points of entry they would be comparatively easy to collect – and by excise duties on liquor. He argued the case for the latter in characteristic Paine style, with a touch of salty irony: “How often”, he remarked, “have I heard an emphatical wish, almost accompanied by a tear, ‘Oh, that ‘etir-poor fellows in the field had some of this!’ Why then need we suffer under a fruitless sympathy, when there is a way to enjoy both the wish and the entertainment at once?”

Paine’s views on war finance in particular, and on monetary policy in general, were developed more explicitly in his Letter to the Abbe Raynal, which appeared in 1782. Inflation and taxation, it argued, were two alternative ways of paying for a war and, of the two, taxation was much to be preferred. However, it needed an administrative machine that might not be available to a revolutionary Government, so that inflation might be used as a temporary expedient. Otherwise taxation, by directly reducing demand, made people aware of the real costs which were being incurred, and so occasioned frugality and thought”, while inflation gave rise to “dissipation and carelessness”. Moreover, taxation gave governments some control over the allocation of the burden and this, in democratic conditions, increased the likelihood that it would be fairly distributed. As soon as possible after the war the currency should again be based on gold and silver. This would restore the public’s confidence and provide an automatic discipline on government.

Paine’s most recent biographer, Professor A.O. Aldridge, says baldly that: “Paine’s economics are now outmoded. Virtually a mercantilist, he considered gold and silver as the only form of capital”.”But to put the matter in these terms suggests some lack of historical imagination. Paine’s life was passed in a period of secular inflation which began in the 1740s„ when he was a child, and continued down to the end of the French wars. British wheat prices rose from less than 30/- a quarter in the early 1740s, to over 50/- in the early 1770s, when Paine left for America. By the 1790s they were over 70/- and still on a rising trend. By contrast, the wages of a craftsman in the Home Counties rose only from 2/- a day in 1740 to a day in 1800. Add to this the fact that Paine spent the most active periods of his political life supporting revolutionary governments which were desperately coping with the problems of war finance, and his ideas can be seen in reasonable perspective.

Professor Aldridge, writing in a period of full, Keynesian reaction to the depression of the 1930s, may have failed to grasp the significance of what Paine was saying. But to the radical of the late ei;Iteenth century, as to William Cobbett who in this, as in some other respects, became his disciple, the salient feature of inflation was that it re-distributed income in favour of the rich and to the detriment of the wage-earner and artisan. Taxation, by contrast, made possible a more equitable distribution of the burden and in this aspect of Paine’s Letter to the Abbd Raynal we can find the germ of the ideas which were to reach fruition ten years later in Part 11 of the Rights of Man.

After the end of the Revolutionary War, Paine found himself spelling out, in somewhat greater detail, his ideas on sound finance which then and later gave him an undeserved reputation for economic “conservatism”. The War had been followed by a slump and it seemed to many, including, for a time, a majority in the Pennsylvania Assembly, that trade would improve if the supply of paper money were to be increased. The agitation was directed against the Bank of Pennsylvania, which Paine had helped to establish during the War, and the reformers were demanding the repeal of the Bank’s charter and a substantial increase in the note issue. In 1786 Paine replied with a pamphlet, Dissertations on Government the Bank and Paper Money. The Bank’s opponents, mainly up-country farmers and their friends, complained that the Bank had a vested interest in keeping money scarce and therefore dear. On the contrary, wrote Paine, the role of a bank is to mobilise savings which would be otherwise unspent, and return them, through loans, into circulation. In doing so it earns its own profits while at the same time serving the interests of the farmers and merchants by increasing the amount of trade.

Paine was not against the use of paper money as such. But he insisted that whatever was printed must have a hundred per cent backing from the country’s reserves of gold and silver. This would not, as was feared, restrict trade by unduly limiting the supply of money. Paine showed that the volume of trade depended not only on the quantity of money but also on the efficiency with which financial institutions were able to attract deposits from the public’s savings and return them through loans back into circulation. Paine did not use the term “velocity of circulation” which was to feature so prominently in the later development of monetary theory, but he certainly employed the concept.

Like many of his contemporaries, Paine was obsessed by the growth of the National Debt. In 1786 he wrote Prospects on the Rubicon mainly to oppose the war which was clearly threatening between England and France. The pamphlet’s nAin argument was that England’s past wars had increased her National Dept and that this had resulted in “an unparalleled burden of taxes”. In consequence; “A few men have enriched themselves by jobs and contracts and the groaning multitude bore the burden.” Paine thought that the system was not only vicious but also unstable and that the further rise in the national debt which would result from a belligerent foreign policy would inevitably end in national ruin.

The War which Paine had foreseen broke out in 1793. Three years later, soon after his release from the Luxembourg prison, he published The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, in which he carried these arguments further and re-stated them in more rigorous and systematic form. He argued that the system of financing wars by borrowing, which had been in operation since the late seventeenth century, was insidious. It meant that in the long run the national debt must grow faster than any possible increase in the gold reserve. Paine was here developing a theme he had already broached in Part 11 of his Rights of Man. Every expansion of the national debt would increase the load of interest payments which could only be met by further depreciating the currency. Paine was convinced that he had stumbled on a new economic law of epochal import- ance. In accordance with a principle analogous to the law of gavitat- ion, the developments he was describing must, he was convinced, accelerate in geometric ratio. “I have not made the ratio”, he insisted, “any more than Newton made the ratio of gravitation. I have only discovered it…”

As a piece of economic analysis, The Decline and Fall has serious limitations. The British economy turned out to be more firmly based and its tax system much more resilient than Paine – or, for that matter, any of his contemporaries – expected. Though Paine recognised the importance of the manufacturing industry in Britain and the United States, such industry was still in its early infancy. The industrial revolution had barely begun and no-one seems to have rightly assessed the strength which it was to give an economy or buoyancy it could impart to tax receipts. Paradoxically, however, despite its inadequacies as a long range economic forecast, The Decline and Fall was one of Paine’s more immediately influential publications. In 1797, the year following its appearance, the Bank of England was forced to suspend cash payments and Paine’s predictions seemed vindicated. From then on the automatic discipline of a paper currency linked to the gold reserve was removed and inflation- ary pressures were accentuated. As in America, the main sufferers included the self-employed artisans and wage-earners to whom Paine was linked by social origins and political outlook. In short, while Paine was wrong in thinking that a rising national debt would mean an inevitable economic collapse he was right to see in it an instrument for enriching the wealthy at the expense of the poor. When in 1803, his pamphlet came into the hands of William Cobbett it converted him at once from an acid critic of Paine to one of his warmest – and most influential disciples.

Paine wrote The Decline and Fall in Paris, soon after his release from the Luxembourg. During the winter of 1795-6, while still convaleso- ilk, he wrote what was to be his last important work, Agrarian Justice opposed to which appeared in 1797. To a greater extent than in any of his other writings, Paine dealt on the stark contrasts between wealth and poverty. He flatly asserted that the effects of civilisation had been to impoverish the mass of mankind. “Civilization…or that which is so called”, he maintained, “has operated two ways, to make one part of society more affluent and the other part more wretched than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.”

Paine saw the cause of poverty in the appropriation, by large land- owners, of the proceeds of other men’s labour. Land, the main source of wealth, was the natural gift of the Creator and its fruits should not be privately appropriated. On the other hand existing land had gained considerably from cultivation, the benefits of which belonged, by right, to the improver – that is, as a general rule, to the landowner., large or small. The solution, therefore, was not, as some had already begun to argue, the public ownership of land, but an inheritance tax of 10 per cent – more where land was not in the direct line of descent – to be used to finance cash grants of £15 to all on reaching the age of 21, and an annual pension of £10 to everyone over the age of 50. The same pension would also be available to the disabled. The interest of this pamphlet lay not only in its detailed proposals, which completed the social security programme outlined in Part 11 of the Rights of ° but also in the underlying philosophy which rejected a return to an agrarian society and fully accepted, indeed welcomed, the part played by manufacturing industry in promoting the general welfare.

Paine’s ideas on economics and finance were of a piece with his approach to politics. Applied science and the development of industry could bring undreamed of benefits to humanity, but only so long as their fruits accrued to the labouring men and small property owners who were, in his view, the creators of wealth. The economy would grow best in conditions of “sound” finance. Wars, paper currency not linked to gold, inflation and a rising national debt made up a complex which redistributed wealth in the interests of the rich. 

On this ground and within these limits it is difficult to say that Paine was wrong.

(The edition of Thomas Paine’s Key Writings edited by Harry Hayden Clark (Hill and Wang, New York, 1965) announces on the front cover that The (sic) Rights of Man is published, along with other writings, “complete”, perversely omits the entire social security programme of Part 2.)

1. Man of Reason. The Life of Thomas Paine, 1960, p.121.

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AGRARIAN JUSTICE (from the Bache edition, Philadelphia, 1796, with the French introduction of 1796 added)

AUTHOR’S INSCRIPTION

To the Legislature and the Executive Directory of the French Republic: The plan contained in this work is not adapted for any particular country alone: the principle on which it is based is general. But as the rights of man are a new study in this world, and one needing protection from priestly imposture, and the insolence of oppressions too long established, I have thought it right to place this little work under your safeguard.

When we reflect on the long and dense night in which France and all Europe have remained plunged by their governments and their priests, we must feel less surprise than grief at the bewilderment caused by the first burst of light that dispels the darkness. The eye accustomed to darkness can hardly bear at first the broad daylight. It is by usage the eye learns to see, and it is the same in passing from any situation to its opposite.

As we have not at one instant renounced all our errors, we cannot at one stroke acquire knowledge of all our rights. France has had the honor of adding to the word Liberty that of Equality; and this word signifies essentially a principle that admits of no gradation in the things to which it applies. But equality is often misunderstood, often misapplied, and often violated.

Liberty and Property are words expressing all those of our possessions which are not of an intellectual nature. There are two kinds of property. Firstly, natural property, or that which comes to us from the Creator of the universe &,dash; such as the earth, air, water. Secondly, artificial or acquired property &,dash; the invention of men.

In the latter, equality is impossible; for to distribute it equally it would be necessary that all should have contributed in the same proportion, which can never be the case; and this being the case, every individual would hold on to his own property, as his right share. Equality of natural property is the subject of this little essay. Every individual in the world is born therein with legitimate claims on a certain kind of property, or its equivalent.

The right of voting for persons charged with the execution of the laws that govern society is inherent in the word liberty, and constitutes the equality of personal rights. But even if that right (of voting) were inherent in property, which I deny, the right of suffrage would still belong to all equally, because, as I have said, all individuals have legitimate birthrights in a certain species of property.

I have always considered the present Constitution of the French Republic the best organized system the human mind has yet produced. But I hope my former colleagues will not be offended if I warn them of an error which has slipped into its principle. Equality of the right of suffrage is not maintained. This right is in it connected with a condition on which it ought not to depend; that is, with a proportion of a certain tax called “direct.”

The dignity of suffrage is thus lowered; and, in placing it in the scale with an inferior thing, the enthusiasm that right is capable of inspiring is diminished. It is impossible to find any equivalent counterpoise for the right of suffrage, because it is alone worthy to be its own basis, and cannot thrive as a graft, or an appendage.

Since the Constitution was established we have seen two conspiracies stranded-that of Babeuf, and that of some obscure personages who decorate themselves with the despicable name of “royalists.” The defect in principle of the Constitution was the origin of Babeuf’s conspiracy.

He availed himself of the resentment caused by this flaw, and instead of seeking a remedy by legitimate and constitutional means, or proposing some measure useful to society, the conspirators did their best to renew disorder and confusion, and constituted themselves personally into a Directory, which is formally destructive of election and representation. They were, in fine, extravagant enough to suppose that society, occupied with its domestic affairs, would blindly yield to them a directorship usurped by violence.

The conspiracy of Babeuf was followed in a few months by that of the royalists, who foolishly flattered themselves with the notion of doing great things by feeble or foul means. They counted on all the discontented, from whatever cause, and tried to rouse, in their turn, the class of people who had been following the others. But these new chiefs acted as if they thought society had nothing more at heart than to maintain courtiers, pensioners, and all their train, under the contemptible title of royalty. My little essay will disabuse them, by showing that society is aiming at a very different end (-) maintaining itself.

We all know or should know, that the time during which a revolution is proceeding is not the time when its resulting advantages can be enjoyed. But had Babeuf and his accomplices taken into consideration the condition of France under this Constitution, and compared it with what it was under the tragical revolutionary government, and during the execrable Reign of Terror, the rapidity of the alteration must have appeared to them very striking and astonishing. Famine has been replaced by abundance, and by the well-founded hope of a near and increasing prosperity.

As for the defect in the Constitution, I am fully convinced that it will be rectified constitutionally, and that this step is indispensable; for so long as it continues it will inspire the hopes and furnish the means of conspirators; and for the rest, it is regrettable that a Constitution so wisely organized should err so much in its principle. This fault exposes it to other dangers which will make themselves felt.

Intriguing candidates will go about among those who have not the means to pay the direct tax and pay it for them, on condition of receiving their votes. Let us maintain inviolably equality in the sacred right of suffrage: public security can never have a basis more solid. Salut et Fraternite.

Your former colleague,

THOMAS PAINE.

AUTHOR’S ENGLISH PREFACE

THE following little piece was written in the winter of 1795 and ’96; and, as I had not determined whether to publish it during the present war, or to wait till the commencement of a peace, it has lain by me, without alteration or addition, from the time it was written.

What has determined me to publish it now is a sermon preached by Watson, Bishop of Llandaff. Some of my readers will recollect, that this Bishop wrote a book entitled “An Apology for the Bible,” in answer to my second part of “The Age of Reason.” I procured a copy of his book, and he may depend upon hearing from me on that subject.

At the end of the Bishop’s book is a list of the works he has written. Among which is the sermon alluded to; it is intitled: “The Wisdom and Goodness of God, in having made both Rich and Poor; with an Appendix, containing Reflections on the Present State of England and France.”

The error contained in this sermon determined me to publish my “Agrarian Justice.” It is wrong to say God made Rich and Poor; He made only Male and Female; and he gave them the earth for their inheritance.

Instead of preaching to encourage one part of mankind in insolence. . . it would be better that priests employed their time to render the general condition of man less miserable than it is. Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make his creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy.

THOMAS PAINE.

AGRARIAN JUSTICE

To preserve the benefits of what is called civilized life, and to remedy, at the same time, the evil which it has produced, ought to considered as one of the first objects of reformed legislation.

Whether that state that is proudly, perhaps erroneously, called civilization, has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man, is a question that may be strongly contested. On one side, the spectator is dazzled by splendid appearances; on the other, he is shocked by extremes of wretchedness; both of which it has erected. The most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized.

To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe. Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state. On the other hand, the natural state is without those advantages which flow from Agriculture, Arts, Science and Manufactures.

The life of an Indian is a continual holiday, compared with the poor of Europe; and, on the other hand it appears to be abject when compared to the rich. Civilization, therefore, or that which is so called, has operated, two ways, to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.

It is always possible to go from the natural to the civilized state, but it is never possible to go from the civilized to the natural state. The reason is that man in a natural state, subsisting by hunting, requires ten times the quantity of land to range over to procure himself sustenance, than would support him in a civilized state, where the earth is cultivated. When, therefore, a country becomes populous by the additional aids of cultivation, arts, and science, there is a necessity of preserving things in that state; because without it there cannot be sustenance for more, perhaps, than a tenth part of its inhabitants. The thing therefore now to be done is to remedy the evils and preserve the benefits that have arisen to society by passing from the natural to that which is called the civilized state.

Taking then the matter up on this ground, the first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period. But the fact is that the condition of millions, in every country in Europe, is far worse than if they had been born before civilization begin, had been born among the Indians of North America at the present day. I will show how this fact has happened.

It is a position not to be controverted, that the earth, in its natural uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be, the COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life-proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.

But the earth, in its natural state, as before said, is capable of supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it is capable of doing in a cultivated state. And as it is impossible to separate the improvement made by cultivation, from the earth itself, upon which that improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from that parable connection; but it is nevertheless true, that it is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor therefore of cultivated lands, owes to the community ground-rent; for I know of no better term to express the idea by, for the land which he holds: and it is from this ground-rent that the fund proposed in this plan is to issue.

It is deducible, as well from the nature of the thing, as from all the stories transmitted to us, that the idea of landed property commenced with cultivation, and that there was no such thing, as landed property before that time. It could not exist in the first state of man, that of hunters. It did not exist in the second state, that of shepherds: Neither Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, nor Job, so far as the history of the Bible may credited in probable things, were owners of land. Their property consisted, as is always enumerated, in flocks and herds, and they traveled with them from place to place. The frequent contentions, at that time, about the use of a well in the dry country of Arabia, where those people lived, also shew that there was no landed property. It was not admitted that land could be claimed as property.

There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue. From whence then arose the idea of landed property? I answer as before, that when cultivation began, the idea of landed property began with it, from the impossibility of separating the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that improvement was made. The value of the improvement so far exceeded the value of the natural earth, at that time, as to absorb it; till, in the end, the common right of all became confounded into the cultivated right of the individual. But there are, nevertheless, distinct species of rights, and will continue to be, so long as the earth endures.

It is only by tracing things to their origin that we can gain rightful ideas of them, and it is by gaining such ideas that we, discover the boundary that divides right from wrong, and which teaches every man to know his own. I have entitled this tract Agrarian Justice to distinguish it from Agrarian Law. Nothing could be more unjust than Agrarian Law in a country improved by cultivation; for though every man, as an inhabitant of the earth, is a joint proprietor of it in its natural state, it does not follow that he is a joint proprietor of cultivated earth. The additional value made by cultivation, after the system was admitted, became the property of those who did it, or who inherited it from them, or who purchased it. It had originally no owner. Whilst, therefore, I advocate the right, and interest myself in the hard case of all those who have been thrown out of their natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property, I equally defend the right of the possessor to the part which is his.

Cultivation is, at least, one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly, that began with it, has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.

In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for. But it is that kind of right which, being neglected at first, could not be brought forward afterwards till heaven had opened the way by a revolution in the system of government. Let us then do honour to revolutions by justice, and give currency to their principles by blessings.

Having thus ,in a few words, opened the merits of the case, I shall now proceed to the plan I have to propose, which is,

To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of Fifteen Pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.

And also,

The sum of Ten Pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.

MEANS BY WHICH THE FUND IS TO BE CREATED

I have already established the principle, namely, that the earth, in its natural uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE — that in that state, every person would have been born to property — and that the system of landed property, by its inseparable connection with cultivation, and with what is called civilized life, has absorbed the property of all those whom it dispossessed, without providing, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss.

The fault, however, is not in the present possessors. No complaint is tended, or ought to be alleged against them, unless they adopt the crime by opposing justice. The fault is in the system, and it has stolen perceptibly upon the world, aided afterwards by the agrarian law of the sword. But the fault can be made to reform itself by successive generations, without diminishing or deranging the property of any of present possessors, the operation of the fund can yet commence, and in full activity, the first year of its establishment, or soon after, as I shall shew.

It is proposed that the payments, as already stated, be made to every person, rich or poor. It is best to make it so, to prevent invidious distinctions. It is also right it should be so, because it is in lieu of the natural inheritance, which, as a right, belongs to every man, over and above property he may have created or inherited from those who did. Such persons as do not choose to receive it can throw it into the common fund.

Taking it then for granted, that no person ought to be in a worse condition when born under what is called a state of civilization, than he would have been had he been born in a state of nature, and that civilization ought to have made, and ought still to make, provision for that purpose, it can only be done by subtracting from property, a portion equal in value to the natural inheritance it has absorbed.

Various methods may be proposed for this purpose, but that which appears to be the best, not only because it will operate without deranging any present possessors, or without interfering with the collection of taxes or emprunts necessary for the purposes of government and the revolution, but because it will be the least troublesome and the most effectual, and also because the subtraction will be made at a time that best admits it, which is, at the moment that property is passing by the death of one person to the possession of another. In this case, the bequeather gives nothing: the receiver pays nothing. The only matter to him is that the monopoly of natural inheritance, to which there never was a right, begins to cease in his person. A generous man would not wish it to continue, and a just man will rejoice to see it abolished.

My state of health prevents my making sufficient inquiries with respect to the doctrine of probabilities, whereon to found calculations with such degrees of certainty as they are capable of. What, therefore, I offer on this head is more the result of observation and reflection than of received information; but I believe it will be found to agree sufficiently with fact.

In the first place, taking twenty-one years as the epoch of maturity, all the property of a nation, real and personal, is always in the possession of persons above that age. It is then necessary to know, as a datum of calculation, the average of years which persons above that age will live. I take this average to be about thirty years, for though many persons will live forty, fifty, or sixty years, after the age of twenty-one years, others will die much sooner, and some in every year of that time.

Taking, then, thirty years as the average of time, it will give, without any material variation one way or other, the average of time in which the whole property or capital of a nation, or a sum equal thereto, will have passed through one entire revolution in descent, that is, will have gone by deaths to new possessors; for though, in many instances, some parts of this capital will remain forty, fifty, or sixty years in the possession of one person, other parts will have revolved two or three times before those thirty years expire, which will bring it to that average; for were one-half the capital of a nation to revolve twice in thirty years, it would produce the same fund as if the whole revolved once.

Taking, then, thirty years as the average of time in which the whole capital of a nation, or a sum equal thereto, will revolve once, the thirtieth part thereof will be the sum that will revolve every year, that is, will go by deaths to new possessors; and this last sum being thus known, and the ratio per cent to be subtracted from it determined, it will give the annual amount or income of the proposed fund, to be applied as already mentioned.

In looking over the discourse of the English Minister, Pitt, in his opening of what is called in England, the budget (the scheme of finance for the year 1796,) I find an estimate of the national capital of that country. As this estimate of a national capital is prepared ready to my hand, I take it as a datum to act upon. When a calculation is made upon the known capital of any nation, combined with its population, it will serve as a scale for any other nation, in proportion as its capital and population be more or less. I am the more disposed to take this estimate of Mr. Pitt, for the purpose of shewing to that minister, upon his own calculation, how much better money may be employed than in wasting it, as he has done, on the wild project of setting up Bourbon kings. What, in the name of heaven, are Bourbon kings to the people of England? It is better that the people have bread.

Mr. Pitt states the national capital of England, real and personal, to one thousand three hundred millions sterling, which is about one-fourth part of the national capital of France, including Belgia. The event of the last harvest in each country proves that the soil of France more productive than that of England, and that it can better support twenty-four or twenty-five millions of inhabitants than that of England of seven or seven and a half millions.

The 30th part of this capital of £1,300,000,000 is £43,333,333, which the part that will revolve every year by deaths in that country to new possessors; and the sum that will annually revolve in France in the proportion of four to one, will be about one hundred and seventy-three millions sterling. From this sum of £43,333,333 annually revolving, is be subtracted the value of the natural inheritance absorbed in it, which, perhaps, in fair justice, cannot be taken at less, and ought not be taken for more, than a tenth part.

It will always happen that of the property thus revolving by deaths every year, part will descend in a direct line to sons and daughters, and other part collaterally, and the proportion will be found to be about three to one; that is, about thirty millions of the above sum will descend to direct heirs, and the remaining sum of £413,333,333 to more distant relations, and in part to strangers.

Considering then that man is always related to society, that relationship will become comparatively greater in proportion as the next of kin is more distant: It is therefore consistent with civilization to say, that where there are no direct heirs, society shall be heir to a part over and above the tenth part due to society. If this additional part be from five to ten or twelve per cent, in proportion as the next of kin be nearer or more remote, so as to average with the escheats that may fall, which ought always to go to society and not to the government, an addition of ten per cent more, the produce from the annual sum of £43,333,333 will be:

From 30,000,000 at ten per cent — — — — 3,000,000

From 13,333,333 at ten pr. ct. with the addition of ten per cent more £2,666,666

_____£43,333,333____________________________________________________£5,666,666

Having thus arrived at the annual amount of the proposed fund, I come, in the next place, to speak of the population proportioned to this fund and to compare it with the uses to which the fund is to be applied.

The population (I mean that of England) does not exceed seven millions and a half, and the number of persons above the age of fifty will in that case be about four hundred thousand. There would not however be more than that number that would accept the proposed ten pounds sterling per annum, though they would be entitled to it. I have no idea it would be accepted by many persons who had a yearly income of two or three hundred pounds sterling. But as we often see instances of rich people falling into sudden poverty, even at the age of sixty, they would always have the right of drawing all the arrears due to them. — Four millions, therefore, of the above annual sum of £5,666,666 will be required for four hundred thousand aged persons, at ten pounds sterling each.

I come now to speak of the persons annually arriving at twenty-one years of age. If all the persons who died were above the age of twenty-one years, the number of persons annually arriving at that age must be equal to the annual number of deaths, to keep the population stationary. But the greater part die under the age of twenty-one, and therefore the number of persons annually arriving at twenty-one will be less than half the number of deaths. The whole number of deaths upon a population of seven millions and a half will be about 220,000 annually. The number arriving at twenty-one years of age will be about 100,000. The whole number of these will not receive the proposed fifteen pounds, for the reasons already mentioned, though, as in the former case, they would be entitled to it. Admitting then that a tenth part declined receiving it, the amount would stand thus:

Fund annually………………………………….£5,666,666 To 400,000 aged persons at £10 each ……………..£4,000,000 To 90,000 persons of 21 yrs. £15 each…………….£1,350,000 £5,350,000

Remains: £316,666

There are in every country a number of blind and lame person totally incapable of earning a livelihood. But as it will always happen that the greater number of blind persons will be among those who are above the age of fifty years, they will be provided for in that class. The remaining sum of £316,666 will provide for the lame and blind under that age, at the same rate of £10 annually for each person.

Having now gone through all the necessary calculations, and stated the particulars of the plan, I shall conclude with some observations.

It is not charity but a right — not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together. Though I care as little about riches as any man, I am a friend to riches because they are capable of good. I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene. The sight of the misery, and the unpleasant sensations it suggests, which, though they may be suffocated, cannot be extinguished, are a greater draw-back upon the felicity of affluence than the proposed 10 per cent upon property is worth. He that would not give the one to get rid of the other, has no charity, even for himself.

There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals. It is, however, but little that any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to be relieved is considered. He may satisfy his conscience, but not his heart. He may give all that he has, and that all will relieve but little. It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pullies, that the whole weight of misery can be removed.

The plan here proposed will reach the whole. It will immediately relieve and take out of view three classes of wretchedness. The blind, the lame, and the aged poor; and it will furnish the rising generation with means to prevent their becoming poor; and it will do this without deranging or interfering with any national measures. To shew that this will be the case, it is sufficient to observe that the operation and effect of the plan will, in all cases, be the same as if every individual were voluntarily to make his will and dispose of his property, in the manner here proposed.

But it is justice, and not charity, that is the principle of the plan. In all great cases it is necessary to have a principle more universally active than charity; and with respect to justice, it ought not to be left to the choice of detached individuals, whether they will do justice or not. Considering, then, the plan on the ground of justice, it ought to be the act of the whole, growing spontaneously out of the principles of the revolution, and the reputation of it ought to be national and not individual.

A plan upon this principle would benefit the revolution by the energy that springs from the consciousness of justice. It would multiply also the national resources; for property, like vegetation, encreases by offsets. When a young couple begin the world, the difference is exceedingly great, whether they begin with nothing or with fifteen pounds a-piece. With this aid they could buy a cow, and implements to cultivate a few acres of land; and instead of becoming burdens upon society, which is always the case, where children are produced faster than they can be fed, would be put in the way of becoming useful and profitable citizens. The national domains also would sell the better, if pecuniary aids were provided to cultivate them in small lots.

It is the practice of what has unjustly obtained the name of civilization (and the practice merits not to be called either charity or policy) to make some provision for persons becoming poor and wretched only at the time they become so. — Would it not, even as a matter of economy, be far better, to adopt means to prevent their becoming poor. This can best be done, by making every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, an inheritor of something to begin with. The rugged face of society, chequered with the extremes of affluence and want, proves that some extraordinary violence has been committed upon it, and calls on justice for redress. The great mass of the poor, in countries, are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible them to get out of that state of themselves. It ought also to be observed that this mass increases in all countries that are called civilized. More persons fall annually into it than get out of it.

Though in a plan of which justice and humanity are the foundation principles, interest ought not to be admitted into the calculation, yet it is always of advantage to the establishment of any plan, to shew that it beneficial as a matter of interest. The success of any proposed plan submitted to public consideration, must finally depend on the numbers interested in supporting it, united with the justice of its principles.

The plan here proposed will benefit all, without injuring any. It will consolidate the interest of the republic with that of the individual. To the numerous class dispossessed of their natural inheritance by the system of landed property, it will be an act of national justice. To persons dying possessed of moderate fortunes it will operate as a tontine to their children, more beneficial than the sum of money paid into the fund: and it will give to the accumulation of riches a degree of security, that none of old governments of Europe, now tottering on their foundations, can give.

I do not suppose that more than one family in ten, in any of the countries of Europe, has, when the head of the family dies, a clear property of five hundred pounds sterling. To all such the plan is advantageous. That property would pay fifty pounds into the fund, and if there were only two children under age they would receive fifteen pounds each (thirty pounds), on coming of age, and be entitled to ten pounds a year after fifty. It is from the overgrown acquisition of property that the fund will support itself; and I know that the possessors of such property in England, though they would eventually be benefitted by the protection of nine-tenths of it, will exclaim against the plan. But, without entering any inquiry how they came by that property, let them recollect that they have been the advocates of this war, and that Mr. Pitt has already laid on more new taxes to be raised annually upon the people of England, and that for supporting the despotism of Austria and the Bourbons, against the liberties of France, than would pay annually all the sums proposed in this plan.

I have made the calculations stated in this plan, upon what is called personal, as well as upon landed property. The reason for making it upon land is already explained; and the reason for taking personal property into the calculation is equally well founded though on a different principle. Land, as before said, is the free gift of the Creator in common to the human race. Personal property is the effect of Society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of Society, as it is for him to make land originally. Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist, the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came. This is putting the matter on a general principle, and perhaps it is best to do so; for if we examine the case minutely, it will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence. It is, perhaps, impossible to proportion exactly the price of labour to the profits it produces; and it will also be said, as an apology for the injustice, that were a workman to receive an increase of wages daily, he would not save it against old age, nor be much better for it in the interim. Make, then, society the treasurer, to guard it for him in a common fund; for it is no reason that, because he might not make a good use of it for himself, another should take it.

The state of civilization that has prevailed throughout Europe, is as unjust in its principle, as it is horrid in its effects; and it is the consciousness of this, and the apprehension that such a state cannot continue when once investigation begins in any country, that makes the possessors of property dread every idea of a revolution. It is the hazard and not the principle of revolutions that retards their progress. This being the case, it is necessary as well for the protection of property as for the sake of justice and humanity, to form a system that, whilst it preserves one part of society from wretchedness, shall secure the other from depreciation.

The superstitious awe, the enslaving reverence, that formerly surrounded affluence, is passing away in all countries, and leaving the possessor of property to the convulsion of accidents. When wealth and splendor, instead of fascinating the multitude, excite emotions of disgust; when, instead of drawing forth admiration, it is beheld as an insult on wretchedness; when the ostentatious appearance it makes, serves call the right of it in question, the case of property becomes critical, and it is only in a system of justice that the possessor can contemplate security.

To remove the danger, it is necessary to remove the antipathies, and this can only be done by making property productive of a national blessing, extending to every individual. When the riches of one man above other shall increase the national fund in the same proportion; when it shall be seen that the prosperity of that fund depends on the prosperity of individuals; when the more riches a man acquires, the better it shall for the general mass; it is then that antipathies will cease, and property be placed on the permanent basis of national interest and protection.

I have no property in France to become subject to the plan I prose. What I have, which is not much, is in the United States of America. But I will pay one hundred pounds sterling toward this fund in France, the instant it shall be established; and I will pay the same sum England, whenever a similar establishment shall take place in that country.

A revolution in the state of civilization is the necessary companion of revolutions in the system of government. If a revolution in any country be from bad to good, or from good to bad, the state of what is called civilization in that country, must be made conformable thereto, to giveth at revolution effects. Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterians. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them (expression of Horsley, an English bishop, in the English parliament); and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation.

It is a revolution in the state of civilization that will give perfection to Revolution of France. Already the conviction, that government, by representation, is the true system of government is spreading itself fast in the world. The reasonableness of it can be seen by all. The justness of it makes itself felt even by its opposers. But when a system of civilization, growing out of that system of government, shall be so organized, that not a man or woman born in the republic but shall inherit some means of beginning the world, and see before them the certainty of escaping the miseries that under other governments accompany old age, the revolution of France will have an advocate and an ally in the heart of all nations.

An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot — It will succeed where diplomatic management would fail — It is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the Ocean, that can arrest its progress — It will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.

MEANS FOR CARRYING THE PROPOSED PLAN INTO EXECUTION, AND TO RENDER IT AT THE SAME TIME CONDUCIVE TO THE PUBLIC INTEREST

I. Each canton shall elect in its primary assemblies, three persons, as commissioners for that canton, who shall take cognizance, and keep a register of all matters happening in that canton, conformable to the charter that shall be established by law for carrying this plan into execution.

II. The law shall fix the manner in which the property of deceased persons shall be ascertained.

III. When the amount of the property of any deceased persons shall be ascertained, the principal heir to that property, or the eldest of the co-heirs, if of lawful age, or if under age, the person authorized by the will of the deceased to represent him, or them, shall give bond to the commissioners of the canton, to pay the said tenth part thereof within the space of one year, in four equal quarterly payments, or sooner, at the choice of the payers. One-half of the whole property shall remain as a security until the bond be paid off.

IV. The bond shall be registered in the office of the commissioners of the canton, and the original bonds shall be deposited in the national bank at Paris. The bank shall publish every quarter of a year the amount of the bonds in its possession, and also the bonds that shall have been paid off, or what parts thereof, since the last quarterly publication.

V. The national bank shall issue bank notes upon the security of the bonds in its possession. The notes so issued, shall be applied to pay the pensions of aged persons, and the compensations to persons arriving at twenty-one years of age. — It is both reasonable and generous to suppose, that persons not under immediate necessity, will suspend their right of drawing on the fund, until it acquire, as it will do, a greater degree of ability. In this case, it is proposed, that an honorary register be kept, in each canton, of the names of the persons thus suspending that right, at least during the present war.

VI. As the inheritors of property must always take up their bonds in four quarterly payments, or sooner if they choose, there will always be numeraire arriving at the bank after the expiration of the first quarter, to exchange for the bank notes that shall be brought in.

VII. The bank notes being thus put in circulation, upon the best of all possible security, that of actual property, to more than four times the amount of the bonds upon which the notes are issued, and with numeraire continually arriving at the bank to exchange or pay them off whenever they shall be presented for that purpose, they will acquire a permanent value in all parts of the republic. They can therefore be received in payment of taxes, or emprunts equal to numeraire, because the government can always receive numeraire for them at the bank.

VIII. It will be necessary that the payments of the ten per cent be made in numeraire for the first year, from the establishment of the plan. But after the expiration of the first year, the inheritors of property may pay ten per cent either in bank notes issued upon the fund, or in numeraire. If the payments be in numeraire, it will lie as a deposit at the bank, be exchanged for a quantity of notes equal to that amount; and if in notes issued upon the fund, it will cause a demand upon the fund equal thereto; and thus the operation of the plan will create means to carry itself into execution.

FINIS

Thomas Paine

PAINE WRITINGS LEGEND

Major Works
American Revolution
American Politics & Government
Essays
English Affairs
French Revolution
Other
Poetry
Religion
Letters
Recently Discovered
Works Removed

1772

To Oliver Goldsmith December 21, 1772

Case of the Excise Officers

1775

A Serious Thought

Liberty Tree

An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex

Farmer Short’s Dog Porter: A Tale

Reflections on Unhappy Marriages

Duelling

Reflections on Titles

The Dream Interpreted

Cupid and Hymen

African Slavery in America

To Honorable Benjamin Franklin Esqr. March 4th, 1775

An Account of the Burning of Bachelors’ Hall

The Death of General Wolfe

Reflections on the Life and Death of Lord Clive

Useful and Entertaining Hints

New Anecdotes of Alexander the Great

A Dialogue between General Wolfe and General Gage

The Magazine in America

The Snowdrop and the Critic

1776

The Crisis I

To Anonymous August 16, 1776

Dialogue between the Ghost of General Montgomery and an American Delegate

Four Letters on Interesting Subjects

A Fifth Forester Letter

The Forester’s Letters

Epistle to Quakers

Common Sense

1777

To Timothy Matlack Oct. 30, 1777

The Crisis IV

To William Bingham July 16, 1777

To Honorable Benjamin Franklin, LL.D. July 9th, 1777

To Richard Henry Lee July 1, 1777

To Honorable Benjamin Franklin LL.D. June 20th, 1777

Candid and Critical Remarks on a Letter Signed Ludlow

The Crisis III

To the People

Retreat across the Delaware

The Crisis II

1778

The Affair of Silas Deane

To Henry Laurens December 15, 1778

A Serious Address To The People Of Pennsylvania On The Present Situation Of Their Affairs

The Crisis VII

To Benjamin Franklin October 24, 1778

The Crisis VI

To his Excellency George Washington June 5th, 1778

To Henry Laurens Spring 1778

To the Honorable Benjamin Franklin, Esqr. May 16, 1778

To the Honorable Benjamin Franklin May 16, 1778

To Henry Laurens April 11, 1778

The Crisis V

1779

To the Printer of the Pennsylvania Packet

To the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania October 11, 1779

To the Supreme Executive Council of the State of Pennsylvania September 28th, 1779

To his Excellency Joseph Reed, Esq. Sept. 18th, 1779

To the Honorable Henry Laurens September 14, 1779

Peace and the Newfoundland Fisheries

To the Honorable Congress of the United States June 17, 1779

To the Continental Congress May 25, 1779

To Hon. John Jay May 20, 1779

To the Hon. John Jay April 23, 1779

To the Honorable Congress of the United States April 21, 1779

To the Honorable Congress of the United States April 3, 1779

To the Honorable Congress of the United States March 30, 1779

Response to *Observations on the American Revolution*

To Benjamin Franklin March 4, 1779

To his Excellency George Washington January 31, 1779

To Major-General Greene January 31, 1779

To the Honorable Henry Laurens January 17, 1779

To the Honorable Henry Laurens January 14, 1779

To the Congress of the United States January 8, 1779

To the Congress of the United States January 7, 1779

To the Honorable Congress of the United States January 6, 1779

To M. Gerard January 2, 1779

1780

Public Good

To the Honorable Members of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania November 3rd, 1780.

The Crisis Extraordinary

To Major-General Nathanael Greene September 9, 1780

The Crisis IX

To the Honorable Joseph Reed June 4, 1780

To Blair McClenaghan May, 1780

Emancipation of Slaves

The Crisis VIII

The American Philosophical Society

1781

To his Excellency George Washington November 30, 1781

To Honorable Robert Morris November 26, 1781

To Jonathan Williams, Merchant November 26, 1781

To Colonel [John] Laurens October 4, 1781

To the Honorable Robert Morris, Esqr. September 20, [1781]

To his Excellency Thomas McKean [August or September, 1781]

To Benjamin Franklin May 28, 1781

To James Hutchinson March 11th, 1781

To Major-General Nathanael Greene January 10, 1781

To Benjamin Franklin (May) 1781

1782

Six Letters to Rhode Island

To Robert Morris December 7, 1782

Letter to the Abbe Raynal

To Robert Morris November 20, 1782

The Crisis XII

Epitaph on General Charles Lee

To his Excellency George Washington September 7, 1782

To Robert Morris September 6, 1782

A Supernumerary Crisis

The Crisis XI

Response to an Accusation of Bribery

The Necessity of Taxation

To his Excellency George Washington March 17th, 1782

To Honorable Robert Morris March 17th, 1782

The Crisis X

To Honorable Robert Morris, Esq. March 1782

To Robert Morris February 20, 1782

To Honorable Robert Morris, Esq. January 24, 1782

1783

A Supernumerary Crisis II

To James Duane December 3, 1783

To Robert Morris October 14, 1783

To George Washington October 13, 1783

To his Excellency George Washington October 2, 1783

Hail Great Republic!

To a Committee of the Continental Congress October, 1783

To his Excellency George Washington September 21, 1783

The Address of the Citizens of Philadelphia

To his Excellency George Washington July 22, 1783

To W. Wallace Junior June 30th, 1783

To his Excellency Elias Boudinot June 20th, 1783

To Doctor Benjamin Rush June 13th, 1783

To his Excellency Elias Boudinot June 7th, 1783

The Crisis XIII

To Robert Morris January 23, 1783

1784

To Honorable General Irwin, Vice-President November 27th, 1784

To His Excellency George Washington April 28, 1784

To General Lewis Morris February 16th, 1784

1785

To His Excellency Benjamin Franklin December, 31 1785

To Mr. Claypoole (Pennsylvania Packet) December, 1785

To the Congress of the United States September 28, 1785

To the Congress of the United States September 27, 1785

To Honorable Benjamin Franklin, ESQ., September 23, 1785

To Temple Franklin Sept. 23, 1785

To a Committee of Congress September 1785

To the Continental Congress August 13, 1785

1786

To the Honarable Thomas Fitzsimmons November 19th, 1786

To George Clymer, Esquire Nov 19th, 1786

Attack On Paper Money Laws

To John Hall September 22, 1786

On the Affairs of The State

To Daniel Clymer, Esqr. September 1786

To His Excellency Benjamin Franklin, Esquire June 6th, 1786

To a Member of the Pennsylvania Council June, 1786

Dissertations on Government

To Mr Henry Claypoole (Pennsylvania Packet) January, 1786

1787

To George Clymer, Esquire December 29, 1787

To the Right Honorable the Marquis of Lansdowne Sept. 21, 1787

Prospects on the Rubicon

To George Clymer August 15, 1787

To The Royal Academy of Sciences July 21, 1787

To Benjamin Franklin June 22, 1787

To His Excellency Benjamin Franklin March 31, 1787

The Society for Political Inquiries

1788

Some Of The Letters Paine Wrote To Jefferson During 1788–1789 Concerning The Iron Bridge

To Thomas Jefferson December 16, 1788

To Thomas Jefferson September 15, 1788

To Thomas Jefferson September 9, 1788

To Thomas Jefferson September 7, 1788

Specification of Thomas Paine

To Thomas Jefferson May, 1788

To Thomas Jefferson February 19, 1788

1789

Some Of The Letters Paine Wrote To Jefferson During 1788–1789 Concerning The Iron Bridge

To George Washington, 16 October 1789

To Thomas Jefferson September 18, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson September 15, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson July 13, [1789]

To Thomas Jefferson June 18, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson June 17, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson May 1789

To Anonymous May 1, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson April 10, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson February 26th, 1789 & March 12, 1789

To Benjamin West March 8, 1789

To Thomas Walker, Esqr. February 26th, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson February, 16th, 1789

To Kitty Nicholson Few January 6, 1789

To Anonymous [1789]

To Thomas Jefferson [1789]

1790

To Thomas Jefferson September 28, 1790

To William Short June 28, 1790

To William Short June 23 and 25, 1790

To William Short June 22, 1790

To William Short June 4, 1790

To William Short June 1, 1790

To His Excellency George Washington May 31, 1790

To His Excellency George Washington May 1790

To Anonymous April 16, 1790

To Benjamin Rush March 16, 1790

1791

To John Hall November 25, 1791

Thoughts on the Establishment of a Mint in the United States

To William Short November 2, 1791

Address and Declaration

To His Excellency George Washington July 21, 1791

To Abbe Sieyes July 8, 1791

To Messiurs Condorcet, Bonneville, and Lanthenas 1 June, 1791.

Rights of Man Appendix

Rights of Man Part the First

1792

To Citizen Le Brun December 4, 1792

On the Propriety of Bringing Louis XVI to Trial

To the English Attorney General (Archibald MacDonald) November 11, 1792

To the French National Convention October 22, 1792

An Essay for the Use of New Republicans

To Benjamin Mosley October 1, 1792

Address to the People of France

Letter Addressed to the Addressers

To The Sheriff of the County of Sussex

Letters to Onslow Cranley

Letters on the Prosecution of Rights of Man

Answer to Four Questions

To the Chairman of the Society for Promoting Constitutional Knowledge (2)

To the Chairman of the Society for Promoting Constitutional Knowledge

To the English Attorney-General

To J.S. Jordan February 16, 1792

To Thomas Jefferson February 13, 1792

To George Washington February 13, 1792

Rights of Man Author’s Notes

Rights of Man Part the Second

1793

The Age of Reason — Part I

To Thomas Jefferson October 20, 1793

To Citizen Barrere September 5, 1793

Citizen of America to Citizens of Europe

To George Jacques Danton May 6, 1793

To Thomas Jefferson April 20, 1793

To Doctor James O’Fallon February the 17, 1793

Shall Louis XVI be Respited?

To John King January 3, 1793

Plan of a Declaration

To Citizen Barrere 1793

Observations on the Situation of the Powers

1794

The New Covenant

To James Monroe November 2, 1794

To James Monroe October 20, 1794

To James Monroe October 13, 1794

To James Monroe October 4, 1794

To James Monroe [October 1794]

To James Monroe September 14, 1794

To James Monroe August 25, 1794

To James Monroe August 18, 1794

To James Monroe August 16, 1794

To the French National Convention August 7, 1794

Forgetfulness

To Gouverneur Morris February 24, 1794

From the Castle in the Air

1795

To Daniel Isaacs Eaton December 4, 1795

To Gilbert Wakefield, A.B. November 19, 1795

The Age of Reason — Part II

To James Madison September 24, 1795

To Bache August 5, 1795

The Constitution of 1795

Observations on Jay’s Treaty

Dissertation on the First Principles of Government

To Samuel Adams March 6, 1795

To James Monroe [1795]

1796

To James Monroe August 15, 1796

To a French Minister August 13, 1796

Contentment

Letter to George Washington

The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance

Letters on the Bank

Agrarian Justice

1797

To Citizen Barras December 29, 1797

The Eighteenth Fructidor

The Recall of Monroe

Prosecution of the Age of Reason

To M. Tallyrand [1797]

Worship and Church Bells

To Thomas Jefferson May 14, 1797

Age of Reason Letters

To James Madison April 27, 1797

To Thomas Jefferson April 1, 1797

To Anonymous March 4, 1797

To Colonel John Fellows January 20, 1797

To M. Tallyrand [September 1797]

1798

To Citizen President Spring 1798

To the Council of the Five Hundred January 28, 1798

1799

Notes On Thomas Muir, 1765-1799  

To General Brune November, 1799

Star in the East

1800

What is Love?

To Thomas Jefferson October 6, 1800

To Thomas Jefferson October 4, 1800

To Thomas Jefferson October 1, 1800 – No. 1

To Thomas Jefferson October 1, 1800 – No. 2

To Thomas Jefferson October 16, 1800

To Anonymous July 1800

To Citizen Skipwith Spring 1800

1801

To Thomas Jefferson November 4, 1801

To Thomas Jefferson June 25, 1801

On the Means of generating Motion for Mechanical Uses

To Thomas Jefferson June 9, 1801

The Existence of God

1802

To Thomas Jefferson Dec 25, 1802

To Madame Bonneville November 15, 1802

To the Citizens of the United States

To Thomas Jefferson November, 1802

To Consul Roth July 8, 1802

An Essay on Dream

To Thomas Jefferson March 17, 1802

To Elihu Palmer February 21, 1802, since the Fable of Christ

1803

To Elisha Babcock 1803-10-10

To Thomas Jefferson September 23, 1803

To James Madison August 6, 1803

To John C. Breckenridge Aug. 2, 1803

To Thomas Jefferson August 2, 1803

To Charles W. Peale July 29th, 1803

Lines, Extempore

To James Monroe July, 1803

The Construction of Iron Bridges

Of Caine And Abel

Of the Old and New Testament

To Thomas Clio Rickman March 8, 1803

Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff

From Mr. Paine to Mr. Jefferson

To Thomas Jefferson January 12, 1803

Examination of the Prophesies

My Private Thoughts on a Future State

To Samuel Adams January 1, 1803

To the Editor of the National Intelligencer January 1, 1803

1804

Connecticut has no Constitution

To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana

Of the Sabbath Day in Connecticut

To the Members of the Society

To Elisha Babcock 1804-08-27

Nonsense from New York

Remarks on Gouverneur Morris’s Funeral Oration on General Hamilton

To the people of Connecticut

To Col. John Fellows July 9, 1804

To Mr. Hyer March 24, 1804

To the People of England on the Invasion of England

To Citizen Skipwith March 1, 1804

Prospect Papers

1805

To Thomas Jefferson September 30, 1805

To the Citizens of Pennsylvania on the Proposal for Calling a Convention

To John Fellows July 31, 1805

Another Callender

To John Fellows July 9, 1805

Remarks on English Affairs

To Elisha Babcock July 2, 1805

On the Origin of Freemasonry

Constitutions, Governments, and Charters

To John Fellows April 22, 1805

To Thomas Jefferson April 20, 1805 – No. 2

To Thomas Jefferson April 20, 1805 – No. 1

To Mr. Hulbert of Sheffield March 12, 1805

To Thomas Jefferson January 25, 1805

To Thomas Jefferson January 1, 1805

1806

Thomas Paine On Yellow Fever 

Remarks on the Political and Military Affairs of Europe

Liberty of the Press

A Challenge to the Federalists

To Andrew Dean, August 15, 1806

The Cause of the Yellow Fever

To William Duane April 23, 1806

To Anonymous March 20, 1806

To John Inskeep February 10, 1806

To Thomas Jefferson January 30, 1806

1807

To James Monroe, December 30, 1807

Cheethem and his Tory Paper

On the Question Will There be War?

Of the Comparative Powers and Expense of Ships of War

To George Clinton May 4, 1807

To Joel Barlow May 4, 1807

To James Madison May 3, 1807

Three Letters to Morgan Lewis

Of Gunboats

Of the English Navy

1808

To Thomas Jefferson July 8, 1808

To the People of New York

To the Honorable Speaker of the House of Representatives, March 7, 1808

To the Honorable Speaker of the House of Representatives, February 28, 1808

To the Honorable Senate of the United States, January 21, 1808

1809

The Will of Thomas Paine

Predestination

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