Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
We are already greater than the King wishes us to be, and will he
not hereafter endeavour to make us less? To bring the matter to one
point, Is the power who is jealous of our prosperity, a proper
power to govern us? Whoever says _No_, to this question, is an
Independent, for independency means no more than this, whether we
shall make our own laws, or, whether the King, the greatest enemy
this continent hath, or can have, shall tell us _there shall be no
laws but such as I like_.
America would have flourished as much, and probably much more,
had no European power taken any notice of her. The commerce by
which she hath enriched herself are the necessaries of life, and
will always have a market while eating is the custom of Europe.
As Europe is our market for trade we ought to form no partial
connection with any part of it. It is the true interest of America
to steer clear of European contentions, which she never can do
while by her dependence on Britain she is made the makeweight in
the scale of British politics.
Our corn will fetch its price in any market in Europe, and our
imported goods must be paid for buy them where we will.... ’Tis as
great folly to pay a Bunker-hill price for law as for land.
But Paine well knew that self-interest may be so clouded by prejudice
as not to see the way its nose is pointing. Though the colonial
talked of his grievances, he remained colonial in psychology, held
in unconscious subjection to English traditions. He was in the
clutch of outworn loyalties--loyalty to the crown and loyalty to the
British constitution; and to this difficult problem Paine addressed
himself with great skill. To a republican, as Paine seems to have
been from his landing in America, the odium which George III had
incurred was a heaven-sent opportunity. In order to strike at the
monarchical principle, it was only necessary to point out that the
folly of the King was the best commentary upon the foolishness of
hereditary monarchy. The boldness and audacity of Paine’s attack
on the king-principle must have added greatly to the popularity of
_Common Sense_ along the frontier. It was the first clear, far-carrying
appeal for republicanism addressed to American ears. How successful
it was, how ruthlessly it stripped away the divinity that doth hedge
a king, laying bare the stupidity of the king-cult, is suggested by
the remarkable change in the American attitude towards monarchy that
a few months brought about. After the appearance of _Common Sense_,
middle and lower class Americans shed their colonial loyalties like a
last year’s garment, and thenceforth they regarded the pretentions of
kings as little better than flummery. King George’s disgraced exciseman
had his revenge; he had thrust his royal master out of the colonial
affection and destroyed the monarchical principle in America.
A more difficult task remained, that of instituting “an inquiry into
the _constitutional errors_ of the English form of government,” in
order to prove what gains would result if America took herself out of
the English system. Here Paine faced, single-handed, a solid phalanx
of lawyers. He was the first pamphleteer to question the excellence of
a constitution that was proclaimed by American Tories as the wonder of
the world and the envy of other nations. In the acrimonious disputes
between 1765 and 1775, this was the single point on which all professed
to agree. A vast deal of laudation had been uttered; innumerable legal
pamphlets had been written; and no colonial had had the temerity to
question the adequacy of the British constitution to colonial needs.
And now came this republican, with penetrating comment on its origin
and working, to disturb the common complacency by pointing out how ill
fitted it was to answer the needs of America. It was a telling attack,
made with skill and shrewd insight; and it had a great part in arousing
a bitter antagonism to the English system in the minds of the American
yeomanry.
Paine was not a constitutional historian, but he had a keen eye for
realities. The fundamental fallacy of the English system, he asserted,
lay in the so-called “mixt aristocracy,” which was presumed to gather
the wisdom of the realm in council with the king, but which was no
more than a convenient arrangement for dividing the spoils. The House
of Commons had grown out of the struggles of feudal barons against
the king. It presumed to speak for the common people, but the rights
of the people were thus recognized only to be thwarted by the old
tyrannies. The “Republican materials, in the persons of the Commons,
on whose virtue depends the freedom of England,” were held in check by
the “remains of aristocratical tyranny in the person of the Peers,”
and further restrained by the “remains of Monarchical tyranny in the
person of the King.” From the play of these elements arose the system
of checks and balances which placed control in the hands of landed
property. It was based on the assumption that “the King is not to
be trusted without being looked after,” and that “the Commons, by
being appointed for that purpose, are either wiser or more worthy of
confidence than the Crown.” But in spite of the supposed balance “the
provision is unequal to the task,” for the Crown, as the dispenser of
places and pensions, is more than a match for Commons in the game of
politics.
The will of the king; is as much the law of the land in Britain
as in France, with this difference, that instead of proceeding
directly from his mouth, it is handed to the people under the
formidable shape of an act of parliament. For the fate of Charles
the First hath only made kings more subtle--not more just.
This was but the beginning of a long assault on the British
constitution which was to engage him much in after life. _Common Sense_
was a pronouncement of the new philosophy of republicanism that was
taking firm hold of the American mind, and which the French Revolution
was to spread so widely. It was a notable contribution, of which Paine
to the end of his life was justly proud.
As he came to America almost casually, with no conscious revolutionary
intent, so in the critical year 1787 he returned to Europe with the
peaceful intention of perfecting an iron bridge on which he was
engaged. True to his Quaker breeding he was more interested in the
arts of peace than of war, but again circumstance was too much for
him. Before he had completed his bridge, delegates from France came to
invite him to a seat in the National Assembly. A new day was rising
there; the constitution of a freer order was being constructed, and so
competent a workman could not be spared. In the thick of that eager
world of constitution-making, Paine finally clarified his political
philosophy and gave it wide currency. He became the pamphleteer of
revolution to the English-speaking world, to Philadelphia and New York
equally with London. Yet he was never an extremist; he was a Girondist
rather than a Jacobin, and when the Girondists were overthrown and a
dictatorship set up, he remained a constitutionalist. By the Jacobin
radicals he came to be regarded as a reactionary from his willingness
to retain monarchy in France; but Paine was a practical Englishman with
a shrewd judgment of what was politically possible, and he refused to
outrun reasonable expectations of accomplishment.
It was the simplicity and clarity of his political philosophy that
made its appeal so widely effective. His thinking turned on the two
fundamental questions, the source of government and the purpose for
which it is instituted among men; and the major premise on which
he reared his logic was the thesis that sovereignty inheres in the
majority will. At the basis of his philosophy was the natural-rights
theory, but given a fresh significance and vitality by the assertion
of the doctrine of continuous reaffirmation of the social compact.
Instead of deriving the sovereign state from a fictitious compact,
presumably entered into in a remote past, he derived it--as Roger
Williams had done a century and half before--from a continuous compact
reaffirmed by each generation. With the birth of each individual appear
fresh rights which no pre-contract can justly circumscribe or nullify;
ancestral arrangements are valid only to the extent that they are
acceptable to the living. Hence it follows, first, that the general
body of the people may at any time remake the fundamental law, and
bring it into accord with present desire; and second, that there can be
no law superior to this popular will expressed through the majority.
His most celebrated dictum--“That which a nation chuses to do it has a
right to do”--a dictum that aroused a bitterer hostility than any other
of his pronouncements--was the logical expression of his republicanism
that differentiated between the sovereign people and their agency, the
government; and this in turn he justified by a celebrated saying out
of Swift, “Government is a plain thing, and fitted to the capacity of
many heads.” Like Jefferson, he would not have government kept from the
people, the agent domineer over the principal.
The purpose of government Paine discovered in the Benthamite principle
of expediency. If a diffused well-being results from the policies
of government, such government is justified; but if the tax-levies
are wasted in unsocial ways, if unjust impositions are levied, if
exploitation or tyranny results, such government is not justified.
The agent has cheated the principal, and must be called to account.
The final test of every government Paine found in its concern for
the “_res publica_, the public affairs, or the public good”; any
government that “does not make the _res publica_ its whole and sole
object, is not a good government.” In its most obvious phase, concern
for the _res publica_ means concern for the national economy, and this
in turn conditions the taxes that shall be levied and the ends for
which they shall be spent--whether upon the arts of peace or war. A
beneficent government has no need of standing armies and navies, or an
inquisitorial police; it is established in the hearts of the people
and rests securely on the common good will. It is the injustice of
government that creates armies to defend the earnings of injustice.
But every wise government will respect its limitations. As a child of
the eighteenth century, Paine hated the leviathan state as a monster
created by a minority to serve the ends of tyranny. The political
state he accepted as a present necessity, but he would not have its
prestige magnified and the temptation to tyranny increased by the cult
of nationalism. “Government is no farther necessary,” he believed,
“than to supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not
conveniently competent.” At best it is an artificial thing.
Formal government makes but a small part of civilized life; and
when even the best that human wisdom can devise is established, it
is a thing more in name and idea than in fact.... The more perfect
civilization is, the less occasion has it for government, because
the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself....
All the great laws of society are laws of nature.[345]
The maturest elaboration of Paine’s political philosophy is found in
_The Rights of Man_. This extraordinary work, the most influential
English contribution to the revolutionary movement, was an examination
of the English constitution in the light of what Paine held were the
true source and ends of government. It is a brilliant reply to Burke,
who rested his interpretation of the English constitution on the
legal ground of the common law of contract. Following the Revolution
of 1688, Burke had argued, the English people through their legal