Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
representatives, entered into a solemn contract, binding “themselves,
their heirs, and posterities forever,” to certain express terms; and
neither in law nor in equity were they, of whatever generation, free
to change those terms except by the consent of both parties to the
contract. This was an elaboration of the theory of government tacitly
held by the Old Whigs, which derived government from a perpetual civil
contract as opposed to the radical doctrine of a revocable social
contract; and in attacking it Paine allied himself with such thinkers
as Price, Priestley, Franklin and Rousseau.[346] He pointed out the
absurdity of carrying over the law of private property into the high
realm of political principle--to seek to impose the dead past upon the
living sovereignty. If sovereignty inhered in the English people in
1688, it must inhere in the English people in 1793, unless it had been
violently wrested from them; no parchment terms of another age can bind
that sovereignty other than voluntarily. Over against Burke’s theory of
a single, static contract, Paine set the doctrine of the reaffirmation
of natural rights. Any generation--as the generation of 1688--is
competent to deal with its affairs as it sees fit, but it cannot barter
away the rights of those unborn; such a contract on the face of it is
null and void.
Every age and generation must be free to act for itself _in
all cases_ as the ages and generations which preceded it. The
vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most
ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.... Every generation is,
and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions
require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be
accommodated.[347]
Burke’s defense fares even worse when the argument is examined in the
light of expediency. Illogical as the English system must appear to the
political philosopher, can it plead the justification that it works;
that it does well the things it is paid to do; that it makes the _res
publica_ its main concern? The reply to such questions, Paine believed,
should be sought in the condition of the national economy; more
particularly by an examination of the account-books of the exchequer.
The English people paid annually seventeen millions sterling for the
maintenance of government, and what did they get in return? Nine
millions of the total went to pay interest on old wars, which in the
budget was known as the funded debt; of the remaining eight millions
the larger part was spent in new wars and sinecure pensions; whereas
the real needs of England--the true _res publica_--were shamelessly
neglected. The English people got little for their money except new
debts to justify new taxes. The poor were even taxed for the benefit
of the great. Thus my Lord Onslow, who was particularly zealous in
the business of proscribing Paine as “the common enemy of us all,”
drew four thousand pounds from the royal chest in sinecures, which
made him “the principal pauper of the neighbourhood, and occasioning a
greater expense than the poor, the aged, and the infirm, for ten miles
around.”[348] Government on the hereditary principle of Burke did not
appear to advantage in the light of such facts.
The injustice of aristocratic government, Paine believed, was fast
bringing it to its “rotting time” in England. “The opinions of men with
respect to government are changing fast in all countries; the enormous
expense of governments has provoked the people to think, by making
them feel.” Englishmen must soon throw aside the outworn monarchical
system and set up a republic. Economics was on the side of revolution.
The great work of revising fundamental laws was the pressing business
of the time. If this could be done peacefully, by means of a national
convention, it were well; if not, it would come by means of an uprising
of the people. It was no lawyer’s business to be determined by the
law of private property, but a practical matter of determining the
real will of the nation and putting it into execution. The judgment of
the people must be recorded, and the judgment of the people could be
had only through an adequate system of representation based on free
publicity. “I do not believe that the people of England have ever
been fairly and candidly dealt by,” Paine declared. Henceforth they
must be taken into full confidence. There must be no more _arcana
imperii_--“Nations can have no secrets; and the secrets of courts, like
those of individuals, are always their defects.”[349]
One of the great advantages of the American Revolution has been,
that it has led to a discovery of the principles, and laid open the
imposition of governments. All the revolutions till then had worked
within the atmosphere of a court, and never on the grand floor of
a nation. The parties were always of the class of courtiers.... In
all cases they took care to represent government as a thing made up
of mysteries, which only themselves understood; and they hid from
the understanding of the nation the only thing that was beneficial
to know, namely, _That government is nothing more than a national
association acting on the principles of a society._[350]
For the follies of government the people pay the bill--it was this
elementary lesson in public economics that Paine sought to impress upon
the popular mind; and they would still be cheated and plundered by
gentlemen who prospered in cozening, until they took matters into their
own hands. He had no fear of popular government. He believed in the
essential fairness of men and their capacity to deal wisely with the
problems of society if the necessary information were set before them.
“As far as my experience in public life extends, I have ever observed
that the great mass of people are always just, both in their intentions
and their object; but the true method of attaining such purpose does
not always appear at once,”[351] he argued before the French Assembly;
and the words express his settled conviction. Those who fear the
people usually have very good reasons. Heretofore politics had been
jealously guarded from free discussion; but now that the common people
were coming to understand that government is justified only by its
measure of service, the beginning of a new age was at hand.
The ripest product of Paine’s speculations on the relation of
government to the individual, is _Agrarian Justice_, a work too little
known to modern readers. It is a slender tract, written in the winter
of 1795-96, although not published till a year later; and it was an
answer to a sermon by Watson, Bishop of Llandaff,[352] entitled _The
Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor_. In this
remarkable essay, Paine advanced from political to social theory,
pushing his thought into the unexplored realm of economic justice. The
prime impulse of his speculation is found in the contrast between the
augmenting poverty of Europe and the ideal of equality; a contrast
which in France had lately produced a proletarian revolt under Babeuf,
and which in England was harshly aggravated by the brutal inclosure
movement of the last forty years of the eighteenth century. The
question which he considers lies at the heart of our social problem,
namely, whether civilization is competent to cure the disease of
poverty which everywhere it disseminates?
The question emerged naturally from the development of Paine’s
thinking. It was implied in his major principle of the _res publica_,
and the solution must lie in the problem of the relation of government
to social well-being. But in prescribing means to end, he parted
company from Babeuf.[353] The latter was a Communist who approached
the problem from the point of view of the proletarian who had been
disappointed of the promised equality; whereas Paine, like Jefferson,
was essentially a Physiocratic agrarian. His long residence in America
had confirmed him in the belief that land monopoly was the root of
economic inequality; and his observations of the evictions then going
on in England, uprooting the peasants and sending them to industrial
centers to become wage-workers, strengthened his conviction. The land
problem must be solved if civilization were to be worth its cost, and
the technique of the solution, he believed, must be worked out by the
state. With his usual directness Paine went to the heart of the problem:
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 began, or
had been born among the Indians of North-America at the present
day.[354]
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.[355]... The contrast of affluence and wretchedness ... is like
dead and living bodies chained together.[356]
It is the practice of what has unjustly obtained the name of
civilization ... 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?[357]
The crux of the problem, Paine proceeds to point out, lies in the
principle of private property; whether property rights are sacredly
individual--as Locke had asserted--or are limited by social needs.
In reply to this searching question Paine laid down the principle of
social values, a theory curiously modern and profoundly suggestive,
which makes _Agrarian Justice_ read like a chapter out of _Progress
and Poverty_. The principle is so broad, as Paine states it, that it
applies equally to a capitalistic and an agrarian order.
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....
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 ... 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; and 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 labor 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.[358]
It is the value of the improvement only, and not of the earth
itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor, therefore,
of cultivated land, owes to the community a _ground-rent_ ... for
the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the
fund proposed in this plan is to issue.[359]
Having thus pointed out an equitable source of social income--the
returning to society what society has created--Paine proposed to deal