the spirit of eighteenth
century humanity. "Where is not Liberty, there is mine." The answer is
Thomas Paine's. It is the watchword of the knight errant, the marching
music that sent Lafayette to America, and Byron to Greece, the motto of
every man who prizes striving above enjoyment, honours comradeship above
patriotism, and follows an idea that no frontier can arrest. Paine was
indeed of no century, and no formula of classification can confine him.
His writing is of the age of enlightenment; his actions belong to
romance. His clear, manly style, his sturdy commonsense, the rapier play
of his epigrams, the formal, logical architecture of his thoughts, his
complacent limitations, his horror of mystery and Gothic half-lights,
his harsh contempt for all the sacred muddle of priestly traditions and
aristocratic politics, his assurance, his intellectual courage, his
humanity--all that, in its best and its worst, belongs to the century of
Voltaire and the Revolution. In his spirit of adventure, in his passion
for movement and combat, there Paine is romantic. Paine thought in prose
and acted epics. He drew horizons on paper and pursued the infinite in
deeds.

Tom Paine was born, the son of a Quaker stay-maker, in 1737, at
Thetford, in the county of Norfolk. His parents were poor, but he owed
much, he tells us, to a good moral education and picked up "a tolerable
stock of useful learning," though he knew no language but his own. A
"Friend" he was to the end in his independence, his rationalism, and his
humanity, though he laughed when he thought of what a sad-coloured world
the Quakers would have made of the creation, if they had been consulted.
The boy craved adventure, and was prevented at seventeen from enlisting
in the crew of the privateer _Terrible_, Captain Death, only to sail
somewhat later in the _King of Prussia_, Captain Mendez. One cruise
under a licensed pirate was enough for him, and he soon settled in
London, making stays for a living and spending his leisure in the study
of astronomy. He qualified as an exciseman, acquiring in this employment
a grasp of finance and an interest in budgets of which he afterwards
made good use in his writings. Cashiered for negligence, he turned
schoolmaster, and even aspired to ordination in the Church of England.
Reinstated as a "gauger," he was eventually dismissed for writing a
pamphlet in defence of the excisemen's agitation for higher wages. He
was twice married, but his fi