2/27/2024 0 Comments Wordor a common sense idea"I have never met with a man, either in England or America, who hath not confessed his opinion, that a separation between the countries, would take place one time or other." And that time had come. As Paine saw it, both Americans and the British knew it was inevitable that the colonies would break free. America had a rare opportunity to create a new nation based on self-rule."Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still." ![]() "This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe," Paine proclaimed. Besides, he argued, America’s real connection was to people everywhere who yearned to escape oppression. “Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families,” he wrote. ![]() Paine refuted the notion that Americans should be loyal to a mother country that he considered a bad parent. "A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived." "In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places, which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears," Paine wrote. He ridiculed the very idea of having a hereditary monarch at all. Paine didn't just find fault with British rule of the colonies. “The constitution of England is so exceedingly complex, that the nation may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the fault lies, some will say in one and some in another, and every political physician will advise a different medicine,” Paine wrote. The British system, Paine argued, failed at that, because it gave the monarchy and nobles in Parliament too much power to thwart the people’s elected representatives. But to do that, it had to be responsive to people’s needs. Paine described government as a “necessary evil,” which existed to give people a structure so they could work together to solve problems and prosper. Government's purpose was to serve the people.Kaye, author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. “Paine witnessed it all, and thought, these people are ripe for a revolution,” explains Harvey J. When Paine arrived in America in 1774 and found work as a journalist in Philadelphia, the colonies already were in tumult over opposition to Britain’s attempts to impose new taxes and restrict trade. His failed efforts to lobby Parliament left him with a dim view of the British system of government.īereft of prospects at age 37, he convinced Benjamin Franklin, whom he’d met in London, to give him a letter of recommendation, and emigrated to America in hopes of catching a break at last. He managed to land a government job as an excise tax collector but was fired twice, the second time after leading an unsuccessful campaign to get higher wages for him and his colleagues. He did a brief stint as a sailor on a privateer ship at age 20 and tried and failed to start a craftsman business. Born in 1737 in England to a financially struggling family, he had to quit school at age 13 to labor as an apprentice in his father’s corset shop. Paine’s provocative pamphlet was the first real success in his life. ![]() Title page from Thomas Payne's Common Sense pamphlet,
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