The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 26, December, 1859

"Jam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto,Ac toto surget gens aurea mundo."

As each week brought the news of some stupendous change, a kind of madness seized upon the minds of men. Fanatics were jubilant. "Revolutions," they said, "can do no wrong; all are for the best." Englishmen, hitherto sane, forgot their nationality, and became violent Frenchmen. So strongly did the current set in this direction, that the massacres of September, the execution of the King, the despotism of the Directory and the Consulship could not turn it, until Napoleon united all France under him and all England against him. As late as 1793, such men as James Watt, Jr., and the poet Wordsworth were in Paris, on intimate terms with Robespierre and his Committee.

Before 1789, there was no particular discontent in England. Some talk there had been of reform in the representation, and the usual complaints of the burden of taxation. The Dissenters had been trying to get the Corporation and Test Acts repealed, without much success. But nothing beyond occasional meetings and petitions to Parliament would have occurred, had it not been for the explosion in France, then, as since, the political powder-magazine of Europe. The Whig party had seen with pleasure the beginning of the French reforms. Paine, who had partaken of Mr. Burke's hospitality at Beaconsfield, wrote to him freely from Paris, assuring him that everything was going on right; that little inconveniences, the necessary consequences of pulling down and building up, might arise; but that these were much less than ought to be expected; and that a national convention in England would be the best plan of regenerating the nation. Christie, a foolish Scotchman, and Baron Clootz (soon to become Anacharsis) also wrote to Burke in the same vein. Their communications affected his mind in a way they little expected. Mr. Burke had lost all faith in any good result from the blind, headlong rush of the Revolution, and was appalled at the toleration, or rather, sympathy, shown in England, for the riots, outrages, and murders of the Parisian rabble. He began writing the "Reflections," as a warning to his countrymen. He was led to enlarge the work by some remarks made by Fox and Sheridan in the House of Commons; and more particularly by some passages in a sermon preached at the Old Jewry by Dr. Price. Eleven years before, this scientific divine, by a resolution of the American Congress, had been invited to consider himself an American citizen, and to furnish the rebellious Colonists with his assistance in regulating their finances. He had disregarded this flattering summons. Full of zeal for "humanity," he eagerly accepted the request of the Revolution Society to deliver their anniversary sermon. In this discourse, the Doctor, the fervor of whose sentiments had increased with age, maintained the right of the nation "to cashier the king," choose a new ruler, and frame a government for itself. The sermon and the congratulatory addresses it provoked were published by the society and industriously circulated.

Mr. Burke's well-known "Reflections" appeared in October, 1790. The book was hailed with delight by the conservatives of England. Thirteen thousand copies were sold and disseminated. It was a sowing of the dragon's teeth. Every copy brought out some radical, armed with speech or pamphlet. Among a vulgar and forgotten crowd of declaimers, the harebrained Lord Stanhope, Mary Wolstonecraft, who afterward wrote a "Vindication of the Rights of Women," and the violent Catharine Macaulay came forward to enter the ring against the great Mr. Burke. Dr. Priestley, Unitarian divine, discoverer of oxygen gas, correspondent of Dr. Franklin, afterward mobbed in Birmingham, and self-exiled to Pennsylvania, fiercely backed Dr. Price, and maintained that the French Revolution would result "in the enlargement of liberty, the melioration of society, and the increase of virtue and happiness." The "Vindiciae Gallicae" brought into notice Mr. Mackintosh, an opponent whom Burke did not consider beneath him. But the champion was Thomas Paine. At the White Bear, Piccadilly, Paine's favorite lounge, where Romney, who painted a good portrait of him, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Colonel Oswald, Horne Tooke, and others of that set of clever, impracticable reformers used to meet, there had been talk of the blow Mr. Burke was preparing to strike, and Paine had promised his friends to ward it off and to return it. He set himself to work in the Red-Lion Tavern, at Islington, and in three months, Part the First of the "Rights of Man" was ready for the press. Here a delay occurred. The printer who had undertaken the job came to a stop before certain treasonable passages, and declined proceeding farther. This caused the loss of a month. At last, Jordan, of Fleet Street, brought it out on the 13th of March, 1791. No publication in Great Britain, not Junius nor Wilkes's No. 45, had produced such an effect. All England was divided into those who, like Cruger of Bristol, said "Ditto to Mr. Burke," and those who swore by Thomas Paine. "It is a false, wicked, and seditious libel," shouted loyal gentlemen. "It abounds in unanswerable truths, and principles of the purest morality and benevolence; it has no object in view but the happiness of mankind," answered the reformers. "He is the scavenger of rebellion and infidelity."—"Say, rather, 'the Apostle of Freedom, whose heart is a perpetual bleeding fountain of philanthropy.'" The friends of the government carried Paine in effigy, with a pair of stays under his arms, and burned the figure in the streets. The friends of humanity added a new verse to the national hymn, and sung,—

"God save great Thomas Paine,His Rights of Man proclaimFrom pole to pole!"

This pamphlet, which excited Englishmen of seventy years ago to such a pitch of angry and scornful contention, may be read safely now. Time has taken the sting from it. It is written in that popular style which was Paine's extraordinary gift. He practised the maxim of Aristotle,—although probably he had never heard of it,—"Think like the wise, and speak like the common people." Fox said of the "Rights of Man," "It seems as clear and as simple as the first rule in arithmetic." Therein lay its strength. Paine knew exactly what he wanted to say, and exactly how to say it. His positions may be wrong,—no doubt frequently are wrong,—but so clearly, keenly, and above all so boldly stated, and backed by such shrewd arguments and such apposite illustrations, that it is difficult not to yield to his common-sense view of the question he is discussing. His plain and perspicuous style is often elegant. He may sometimes be coarse and rude, but it is in the thought rather than in the expression. It is true, that, in the heat of conflict, he is apt to lose his temper and break out into the bitter violence of his French associates; but even the scientific and reverend Priestley "called names,"—apostate, renegade, scoundrel. This rough energy added to his popularity with the middle and the lower classes, and made him doubly distasteful to his opponents. Paine, who thought all revolutions alike, and all good, could not understand why Burke, who had upheld the Americans, should exert his whole strength against the French, unless he were "a traitor to human nature." Burke did Paine equal injustice. He thought him unworthy of any refutation but the pillory. In public, he never mentioned his name. But his opinion, and, perhaps, a little soreness of feeling, may be seen in this extract from a letter to Sir William Smith:—

"He [Paine] is utterly incapable of comprehending his subject. He has not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learned the instrumental part of literature, without having ever made a previous preparation of study for the use of it. Paine has nothing more than what a man, whose audacity makes him careless of logical consequences and his total want of honor makes indifferent to political consequences, can very easily write."

The radicals thought otherwise. They drank Mr. Burke's health with "thanks to him for the discussion he had provoked." And the student of history, who may read Paine's opening sketch of the French Revolution, written to refute Burke's narrative of the same events, will not deny Paine's complete success. He will even meet with sentences that Burke might have composed. For instance: Paine ridicules, as Quixotic, the fine passage in the "Reflections on the Decay of Chivalry"; and adds, "Mr. Burke's mind is above the homely sorrows of the vulgar. He can only feel for a king or for a queen. The countless victims of tyranny have no place in his sympathies. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching upon his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird."

The French constitution,—"a fabric of government which time could not destroy and the latest posterity would admire." This was the boast of the National Assembly, echoed by the English clubs. Even Mr. Fox, as late as April, 1791, misled by his own magniloquence, spoke of it as "the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty which had been erected on the foundation of human integrity in any time or country." Paine heartily concurred with him. Such a constitution as this, he said, is needed in England. There is no hope of it from Parliament. Indeed, Parliament, if it desired reforms, could not make them; it has not the legal right. A national convention, fresh from the people, is indispensable. Then, reculant pour mieux sauter, Paine goes back to the origin of man,—a journey often undertaken by the political philosophers of that day. He describes his natural rights,—defines society as a compact,—declares that no generation has a right to bind its successors, (a doctrine which Mr. Jefferson, and some foolish people after him, thought a self-evident truth,)—hence, no family has a right to take possession of a throne. An hereditary rule is as great an absurdity as an hereditary professorship of mathematics,—a place supposed by Dr. Franklin to exist in some German university. Paine grew bolder as he advanced: "If monarchy is a useless thing, why is it kept up anywhere? and if a necessary thing, how can it be dispensed with?" This is a pretty good specimen of one of Paine's dialectical methods. Here is another: The French constitution says, that the right of war and of peace is in the nation. "Where else should it reside, but in those who are to pay the expense? In England, the right is said to reside in a metaphor shown at the Tower for sixpence or a shilling." Dropping the crown, he turned upon the aristocracy and the Church, and tore them. He begged Lafayette's pardon for addressing him as Marquis. Titles are but nicknames. Nobility and no ability are synonymous. "In all the vocabulary of Adam, you will find no such thing as a duke or a count." The French had established universal liberty of conscience, which gave rise to the following Painean statement: "With respect to what are called denominations of religion,—if every one is left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion which is wrong; but if they are to judge of each other's religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right;—and therefore all the world is right or all the world is wrong." The next is better: "Religion is man bringing to his Maker the fruits of his heart; and though these fruits may differ from each other, like the fruits of the earth, the grateful tribute of every one is accepted."

To encounter an antagonist like Burke, and to come off with credit, might stimulate moderate vanity into public self-exposure; but in Paine vanity was the besetting weakness. It was now swollen by success and flattery into magnificent proportions. Franklin says, that, "when we forbear to praise ourselves, we make a sacrifice to the pride or to the envy of others." Paine did not hesitate to mortify both these failings in his fellow-men. He praises himself with the simplicity of an Homeric hero before a fight. He introduces himself, without a misgiving, almost in the words of Pius Aeneas,—

"Sum Thomas Paine,Faunâ, super aethera notus."

"With all the inconveniences of early life against me, I am proud to say, that, with a perseverance undismayed by difficulties, a disinterestedness that compels respect, I have not only contributed to raise a new empire in the world, founded on a new system of government, but I have arrived at an eminence in political literature, the most difficult of all lines to succeed and excel in, which aristocracy, with all its aids, has not been able to reach or to rival." "I possess," he wrote in the Second Part of the "Rights of Man," "more of what is called consequence in the world than any one of Mr. Burke's catalogue of aristocrats." Paine sincerely believed himself to be an adept who had found in the rights of man the materia prima of politics, by which error and suffering might be transmuted into happiness and truth. A second Columbus, but greater than the Genoese! Christopher had discovered a new world, it is true, but Thomas had discovered the means of making a new world out of the old. About this time, Dumont, the Benthamite, travelled with him from Paris to London. Dumont was irritated with "his incredible amour-propre and his presumptuous self-conceit." "He was mad with vanity." "The man was a caricature of the vainest of Frenchmen. He believed that his book on the 'Rights of Man' might supply the place of all the books that had ever been written. If it was in his power, he would destroy all the libraries in the world without hesitation, in order to root out the errors of which they were the deposit, and so recommence by the 'Rights of Man' a new chain of ideas and principles." Thus Paine and his wild friends had reached the point of folly in the reformer's scale, and, like so many of their class since, made the fatal mistake of supposing that the old world knew nothing.

When Dumont fell in with Paine, he was returning from a flying visit to Paris, invigorated by the bracing air of French freedom. He had seen Pope Pius burned in effigy in the Palais Royal, and the poor King brought back a prisoner from Varennes,—a cheerful spectacle to the friend of humanity. He was on his way to be present at a dinner given in London on the 14th of July, to commemorate the taking of the Bastille; but the managers of the festivity thought it prudent that he should not attend. He wrote, soon after, the address read by Horne Tooke to the meeting of the 20th of August, at the Thatched House tavern. So enlightened were the doctrines set forth in this paper, that the innkeeper declined receiving Mr. Tooke and his friends on any subsequent occasion. On the 4th of November, he assisted at the customary celebration of the Fifth by the Revolution Society, and gave, for his toast, "The Revolution of the World."

Meanwhile, Paine had reloaded his piece, and was now ready for another shot at kings, lords, and commons. A thousand guineas were offered for the copyright and refused. He declined to treat as a merchantable commodity principles of such importance to mankind. His plan was, to publish Part the Second on the day of the opening of Parliament; but Chapman, the printer, became frightened, like his predecessor, at a treasonable paragraph, and refused to go on.

A fortnight passed before work was resumed, and the essay did not appear until the 16th of February, 1792. It combined, according to the author, "principles and practice." Part the First was now fully expounded, and enlarged by a scheme for diminishing the taxes and improving the condition of the poor, by making weekly allowances to young children, aged people, travelling workmen, and disbanded soldiers. This project of Paine, stated with the mathematical accuracy which was a characteristic of his mind, sprang from the same source as the thousand Utopianisms which form the ludicrous side of the terrible French Revolution.

Part the First was dedicated to Washington; Part the Second bore the name of Lafayette. It is evident, from the second dedication, that Paine had kept pace with the railway speed of the Revolution, and had far outstripped the Marquis, who was not born to lead, or even to understand the period he attempted to direct. The foremost men of 1792 had no time to wait;—"Mankind are always ripe enough to understand their true interest," said Paine; adding words which seemed to quiet Englishmen of fearful significance:—

"I do not believe that monarchy and aristocracy will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries of Europe."—"When France shall be surrounded with revolutions, she will be in peace and safety."—"From what we can learn, all Europe may form but one great republic, and man be free of the whole."—"It is only a certain service that any man can perform in the state, and the service of any individual in the routine of office can never exceed the value of ten thousand pounds a year."—"I presume that no man in his sober senses will compare the character of any of the kings of Europe with that of George Washington. Yet in France and in England the expenses of the Civil List only for the support of one man are eight times greater than the whole expense of the Federal government of America."—"The time is not very distant when England will laugh at itself for sending to Holland, Hanover, Zell, or Brunswick, for men, at the expense of a million a year, who understand neither her laws, her language, or her interest, and whose capacities would scarcely have fitted them for the office of a parish constable. If government could be trusted to such hands, it must be some easy and simple thing indeed, and materials fit for all the purposes may be found in every town and village in England."

Here is treasonable matter enough, surely; and no wonder that Mr. Chapman judged it prudent to stop his press.

Paine sent fifty copies to Washington; and wrote to him that sixteen thousand had been printed in England, and four editions in Ireland,—the second of ten thousand copies. Thirty thousand copies were distributed by the clubs, at their own expense, among the poor. Six months after the appearance of the Second Part, Paine sent the Society for Constitutional Information a thousand pounds, which he had received from the sale of the book. He then gave up the copyright to the public. The circulation of this tract was prodigious. The original edition had been printed in the same form as Burke's "Reflections," in order that the antidote might be bound up with the bane. The high price preventing many from purchasing, Paine got out a cheap edition which was retailed at sixpence all over England and Scotland. It is said that at least one hundred thousand copies were sold, besides the large number distributed gratuitously. An edition was published in the United States. It was translated into French by Dr. Lanthenas, a member of the National Convention, and into German by C. F. Krämer. Upon English readers of a certain class it retained a hold for many years. In 1820, Carlile, the bookseller, said, that in the preceding three years he had sold five thousand copies of the "Rights of Man." Perhaps Cobbett's resurrection of the bones of the prophet brought the book into fashion again at that time. It may yet be read in England; but in this country, where a citizen feels that his rights are anything he may choose to claim, it is certainly a superfluous publication, and seldom met with.

In England, in 1792, Burke and Paine revived the royalist and republican parties, which had lain dormant since 1688. A new body of men, the manufacturing, entered the political field on the republican side. The contest was embittered not only by the anger of antagonism, but by the feeling of class. A radical of Paine's school was considered by good society as a pestilent blackguard, unworthy of a gentleman's notice,—much as an Abolitionist is looked down upon nowadays by the American "Chivalry." But the strife was confined to meetings, resolutions, and pamphlets. Few riots took place; none of much importance. The gentlemen of England have never wanted the courage or the strength to take care of themselves.

The political clubs were the principal centres of agitation. There were two particularly active on the liberal side: the Revolution Society, originally founded to commemorate the Revolution of 1688, and the Society for Constitutional Information, established for the purpose of bringing about a reform in the representation. But the revolutionary changes in France had quickened their ideas, and had given them a taste for stronger and more rapid measures. They now openly "resolved" that England was "a prey to an arbitrary King, a senile Peerage, a corrupt House of Commons, and a rapacious and intolerant Clergy." A third club, the Corresponding Society, was younger and more violent, with branches and affiliations all over England on the Jacobins' plan, and in active correspondence with that famous institution. The middle and lower classes in manufacturing towns, precursors of the Chartists of 1846, belonged to this society. Their avowed objects were annual parliaments and universal suffrage; but many members were in favor of a national convention and a republic. The tone of all three societies became French; they used a jargon borrowed from the other side of the Channel. They sent deputations to the National Convention, expressing their wish to adopt the republican form in England, and their hope of success. The Corresponding Society even sent addresses of congratulation after the massacres of September. Joel Barlow, the American, a man of the Paine genus, without his talent or honesty of purpose, went as Commissioner of the Society for Constitutional Information to the Convention,– carrying with him an address which reads like a translation from the French, and a thousand pair of shoes, with the promise of a thousand pair a week for six weeks to come.

On the other side there were, of course, numerous Tory associations, counter clubs, as violent as their republican antagonists, whose loyal addresses to the throne were duly published in the Gazette.

The probability of a revolution now became a subject of general discussion. Government, at last convinced that England, in the words of Mr. Burke, "abounded in factious men, who would readily plunge the country into blood and confusion for the sake of establishing the fanciful Systems they were enamored of," determined to act with vigor. A royal proclamation was issued against seditious writings. Paine received notice that he would be prosecuted in the King's Bench. He came immediately to London, and found that Jordan, his publisher, had already been served with a summons, but, having no stomach for a contest with the authorities, had compromised the affair with the Solicitor of the Treasury by agreeing to appear and plead guilty. Such pusillanimity was beneath the mark of Paine's enthusiasm. He wrote to McDonald, the Attorney-General, that he, Paine, had no desire to avoid any prosecution which the authorship of one of the most useful books ever offered to mankind might bring upon him; and that he should do the defence full justice, as well for the sake of the nation as for that of his own reputation. He wound up a long letter by the very ungenerous insinuation, that Mr. Burke, not being able to answer the "Rights of Man," had advised legal proceedings.

The societies, checked for a moment by the blow struck at them, soon renewed their exertions. The sale of the "Rights of Man" became more extended than ever. Paine said that the proclamation served hint for an advertisement. The Manchester and Sheffield branches of the Constitutional Society voted unanimously addresses of thanks to him for his essay, "a work of the highest importance to every nation under heaven." The newspapers were full of speeches, votes, resolutions, on the same subject. Every mail was laden with congratulations to the Jacobins on the coming time,—

"When France shall reign, and laws be all repealed."

To the Radicals, the Genius of Liberty seemed to be hovering over England; and Thomas Paine was the harbinger to prepare his way.

Differences of opinion, when frequently expressed in hard words, commonly lead to hard blows; and the conservative classes of England were not men to hold their hands when they thought the proper time had come to strike. But the party which looked up to Paine as its apostle was not as numerous as it appeared to be from the noise it made. There is never a sufficiently large number of reckless zealots in England to do much mischief,—one of the greatest proofs of the inherent good sense of that people. Dr. Gall's saying, "Tout ce qui est ultrà est bête," is worth his whole phrenological system. Measures and doctrines had now been pushed so far that a numerous and influential body of liberals called a halt,—the prelude of a union with the government forces.