THOMAS PAINE

A PLEA, A PROTEST, AND A PANEGYRIC

 Thus the "Pennsylvania Magazine," in the time that Paine edited it, was a seed-bag from which this sower scattered the seeds of great reforms ripening with the process of civilisation. Through the more popular press he sowed also. Events selected his seeds of American independence, of republican equality, freedom from royal, ecclesiastical, and hereditary privilege, for a swifter and more imposing harvest; but the whole circle of human ideas and principles was recognised by this lone, wayfaring man. The first to urge the extension of the principles of independence to the enslaved negro; the first to arraign monarchy, and to point out the danger of its survival in presidency ; the first to propose articles of a more thorough nationality to the new-born States ; the first to advocate international arbitration; the first to expose the absurdity and criminality of duelling ; the first to suggest more rational ideas of marriage and divorce ; the first to advocate national and international copyright; the first to plead for the animals; the first to demand justice for women : what brilliants would our modern reformers have contributed to a coronet for that man's brow, had he not presently worshipped the God of his fathers after the way that theologians call heresy!  MONCURE D. CONWAY : Life of Thomas Paine.
The man to whom the above splendid tribute does not attribute one tittle more than his due was Thomas Paine. That the name and fame of so good and great a man, whose life was a long labor of love on behalf of humanity should still stand as twin terrors to many millions of men and women, who are now enjoying the blessings of that religious freedom and political liberty of which he was the prophet and pioneer, is the strongest possible testimony to the moral and intellectual power of the man. The senseless slanders and cowardly calumnies of a century ago, which represented Paine as a blasphemous blackguard, an arrogant atheist, an immoral monster, a drunken sot, and a dishonest, dishonorable man, survive among a certain class of so-called educated and cultured people, as well as among a large section of the ignorant and unlettered classes, whose ignorance and illiteracy make them a prey to those twin curses of the Christian religion— bigotry, and superstition. Those who misrepresented and maligned Paine during his lifetime belonged to the same classes as those who found, and still find, their pleasure and profit in perpetuating them for a hundred years, and, in maintaining them to-day. Yet in spite of priest and parson, princes and their political and press pimps, the fame and glory of Paine grew brighter and brighter to a more perfect day.
 Those who know Paine least dread him most. These accept the picture of Paine painted by priestcraft, as a true portrait. This great protagonist of the Rights of Man, whom they regard as a ribald blasphemer, they know nothing much more about than that he was the writer of "The Age of Reason," which pastors and parents have taught them to believe to be a bad book— blasphemous and atheistical. So absurd an opinion of such a book can only be held by those who have not read it, or, having read it, have an interest in misrepresenting its meaning and motive. To the first category of Painphobists belong the superstition-soaked masses; to the second the professional parsonical and political pimps of priestcraft and statecraft. Parsons of the Church as by law established ; politicians whose personal and professional purpose and profit it was to play the part of paid patriots in a misgoverned country, under a mentally and morally mad monarch ; a subsidised and suborned press, which servilely served the putrid purposes of parson, politician, and prince in the fight against freedom; one and all combined to crush one man, the one great and good man, who single-handed and alone had shaken both altar and throne, based as they were on superstition and selfishness. The shock was felt on two continents ; it resuscitated two nations from the torpor of priestly and princely tyranny in the old world ; and called into existence a new nation in the new world. France and America owe their political revolutions primarily to Paine ; to Paine England largely owes her political Redemption.
 Yet, strange to say, it is simply and solely as the maliciously and mendaciously misrepresented author of "The Age of Reason" that Paine has been known to the majority of his countrymen during a hundred years. Though claiming to be more enlightened and liberal than their forefathers were when Paine was fighting the battle of Britain, America, and France—the battle of Humanity— millions of Englishmen to day only know and think of Paine— if they even know him or ever think of him at all— as the "Atheistic" author of "The Age of Reason." They judge him as princes, parsons, and politicians judged and condemned him a century ago, and who would, if they could, have him judged and condemned to-day, as a low-bred, blasphemous writer of a bad book. But although that book, in its character and consequences, constitutes Paine's chief claim to the gratitude of prosperity. "The Age of Reason," great as was the gift to mankind was only a part, a large part truly, of Paine's great work on behalf of human freedom. In a manner, it was his last effort to effect the emancipation of the mind of man— his last legacy to posterity. Long before he wrote "The Age of Reason," and, in doing so, became the precursor of the latter-day Higher Critics— he had written "The Rights of Man," in vindication of the principles of the French Revolution against the venal vituperations of that boodling blackguard Burke, the masked pensioner of that mad monarch George III., whose insane obstinacy lost Britain the best half, the white half, the Anglo-Saxon half, of her Empire. But the French Revolution, which Paine so chivalrously championed against Burke and all the horrid herd of hirelings in the pay of the Crown and the Church of that degenerate day, was only the outcome of the revolt of the North American Colonies and their revolution into the independent United States, a consummation which Paine had been mainly instrumental in promoting and consolidating.
 The Age of Reason was written by Paine in a Parisian Prison during The Terror, while he was lying under sentence of death, the result of his mild and humane character and courageous efforts to save the life of that wretched, worthless King, Louis the Sixteenth. As a member of the French Convention the great and good Paine attached himself to the Girondins, whose courage and tact, however, were not equal to their principles and professions. Paine possessed both courage and conduct, precisely the qualities required for the constitutional crisis in which the Girondists found themselves, but in which they showed themselves lamentably lacking. They brought the King and his family hack to Paris after their futile flight as far as Varennes, voted for his dethronement and degradation in prison, and for his being brought to trial, when they found him guilty of high treason against the French people fighting for their freedom against the coalesced nations of Europe, with whom "citizen" Louis Capet had conspired. The keynote to Paine's conduct during this cruel crisis in the Convention is given in his own memorable words: "Kill the King; but not the Man." With rare courage and consummate ability he spoke and voted in favor of sparing the life of the King.
 This solitary Englishman stood firm when Frenchmen, his Federal friends, the Girondists, faltered and pusillanimously paltered with their principles and promises. They voted for the death of the King; Paine to save his life, in order to banish him to the United States. The Girondins, the party in the Convention to which Paine adhered, "though in a majority," quailed, as Moncure Conway observes, "before the ferocity with which the Jacobins had determined on the King's death." In his life of Paine, Mr. Conway proceeds to point out that—
 M. Taine declares that the victory of the minority in this case was the familiar one of reckless violence over the more civilised— the wild beast over the tame. Louis Blanc denies that the Convention voted, as one of them said, under poignards; but the signs of fear are unmistakable. Vergniaud had declared it an insult for anyone to suppose he would vote for the King's death, but he voted for it. Villette was threatened with death if he did not vote for that of the King. Sieyes, who had attacked Paine for republicanism, voted death. "What," he afterwards said— "what were the tribute of my glass of wine in that torrent of brandy?" But Paine did not withhold his cup of cold water. When his name was called he cried out: "I vote for the detention of Louis till the end of the war, and after that his perpetual banishment." He spoke his well-prepared vote in French, and may have given courage to others. For even under poignards— the most formidable being liability to the charge of royalism—the vote had barely gone in favor of death.
 Such is the sort of man whom Pitt and his pimps, and George the Third with his Burkes, sought to saddle with complicity in the horrors of The Terror. These perfidious perverters of facts have charged Paine with the murderous mistake of sanctioning the execution of a king, whose chief crime was that, being born to a crown, God had not given him brains enough to wear it with wisdom— the common curse of hereditary kings. Paine, as we have soon sought to save the king, and he paid for his merciful magnanimity at the peril of his life. He was arrested, and sent to the Luxembourg prison. There he lay many months, marked for the guillotine, and only owed his life to an accident, and his ultimate release to the counter-revolution of the 9th of Thermidor, led by such bloody butchers as Tallien and Billaud-Varennes, against the milder and more merciful, and much maligned, Robespierre. It was while in prison daily awaiting an ignominious death as the reward for his labors for liberty, that he wrote "The Age of Reason," his latest and greatest work. He had already taught the nations the way to political liberty ; he was now to consummate his life's work by emancipating their minds, not from the rational restraints of a reverence for the Divine Creator and his wonderful works, but from the shackles of degrading superstition. A grander literary legacy no man ever bequeathed to his fellow men. But how came Paine to be in the French Convention ? He was elected there by the French People, as a recognition of his proud position in the world as the pioneer of freedom, political and religious, moral and material. As showing his popularity in France, Paine, along with a number of other distinguished Englishmen and Americans, had conferred upon him the title of French Citizen. A still higher honor awaited him: he was elected to the French Convention by three different Departments— Oise, Puy-de-Dome, and Pas-de-Calais. He elected to sit for Calais, and the Convention named him one of the members of the committee appointed to draft a Constitution, for the new-born French nation that Paine had done so much to call into existence. Why those honors, and to whom, and for what were they paid? They were paid, primarily, to Thomas Paine, the author of "The Rights of Man," and, secondarily, to the pioneer of American Independence, and the preceptor of Frenchmen in the principles of popular liberty.
 It was the much misrepresented and maliciously maligned "Tom" Paine, who had vindicated the French Revolution to Englishmen and Americans in that celebrated constitutional concept of his, entitled "The Rights of Man," against the mercenarily mendacious and malignantly malicious misrepresentations of that Irish renegade and "masked pensioner" Edmund Burke. While his own oppressed country was writhing under the heel of English tyranny, Burke was bawling for boodle by bellowing against the bloody brutalities of the French Revolution ! While the daughters of Erin were being debauched by lecherous English landlords in Ireland, this ignoble Irishman, in an English skin, was shrieking and screaming about the indignities and indecencies to which that wretched, wanton woman, Marie Antoinette — a beautiful bawd— was being subjected by the recently liberated and infuriated French people— whom she had helped to rob and starve, oppress and murder. Paine's "Rights of Man" was a reply to Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution" in France. In it Paine exposed the treason of the Irish turncoat, and the turpitude of the English tool. He exposed the sophistries of the salaried sycophant, and denounced the perversities of the pensioned politician. It was Paine's exposure of Burke as the "masked pensioner" of a corrupt Court that caused the disgrace and downfall of Burke. Paine in his "Letter to the Addressers" thus describes the consequences to Burke of the controversy between them, "And the final event to himself has been that, as he rose like the rocket, he fell like the stick," and, he might have added, "damn'd, to everlasting fame." Of all the bad and corrupt Irishmen who, for filthy lucre, have conspired and served against Irish and British liberty for English gold, Edmund Burke was the basest and most brazen-faced. He was the accomplished pattern and finished specimen of the "Castle hack."
 But Paine's life work had been begun long before "The Rights of Man" was written. By his pen he had already prepared and pioneered the American Revolution to a successful conclusion. His main contributions to this end were "Common Sense," published in 1776; "The Crisis," in serial form, between 1776-1783, besides a host of other contributions on English, American and French Constitutional affairs and financial problems. Those all preceded "The Rights of Man," which was not published till 1792. They gained him a wide and worthy popularity, both in the old and the new worlds. Before he was elected to the French Convention he had visited France, where he was acclaimed as one of the world's liberators, and entrusted by the Lafayette with the key of the demolished Bastille, for presentation to Washington. Most appropriately had this great and good man been described as "A British lion with an American heart." He loved his country; but he loved freedom more. In the cause of freedom, the world, as he declared, was his country ; and his religion was to do good.
 How comes it that this marvellous man — this great and good, this morally clean and politically pure man —who has done so much for Humanity, has been, and to some extent still is, the most misrepresented and maligned among the sons of men ? Pretty much, in the same way, and for the same reasons, that Christ, whom Paine admired and reverenced, was crucified on the cross. Let those who would not play toward Paine the paltering part played by Pilate toward Christ, refuse to submit to the superstitious Sanhedrim of these days, refuse to join the ribald rabble in pelting the memory of Paine with sacerdotal scum or political putridity, and read his books. Let them read "Common Sense," "The Crisis," "The Rights of Man," and "The Age of Reason," and therein learn to know and do, and enjoy their duty and privileges as citizens, and how to reverence truly and to serve best their God, by adoring His works, and doing good to all His creatures. Having done this, they will then be in the position and mood to do justice to the memory of Thomas Paine, remembering the saying of Goethe, that "It is always the individual, not the age, that stands up for the truth" ; and another, but anonymous one, to the effect that, "It is always by adventurers that great deeds are done, and not by the sovereigns of great empires." Such was Paine ; so he did. To Paine may all true Christians and patriots pay, at least, the better part of Wordsworth's tribute to the Christian Warrior, as well as that contained in the following words, from Halleck's eulogy of Marco Bozzaris :

But to the hero, when his sword
Has won the battle for the free,
Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word,
And in its hollow tones are heard
The thanks of millions yet to be.

 JOHN NORTON.
Sydney,
January 18, 1907.

Truth (Brisbane, Qld. : 1900 - 1954), Sunday 27 January 1907, page 9