y useful, partly whimsical, a planing machine, a crane, a smokeless
candle and a gunpowder motor. But his fame as an inventor rests on his
construction of the first iron bridge, made after his models and plans
at Wearmouth. He was received as a leader and teacher in the ardent
circle of reformers grouped round the Revolution Society and the
Corresponding Society. Others were the dreamers and theorists of
liberty. He had been at the making of a Republic, and his American
experience gave the stimulus to English Radicalism which events in
France were presently to repeat. His fame was already European, and at
the fall of the Bastille, it was to Paine that Lafayette confided its
key, when a free France sent that symbol of defeated despotism as a
present to a free America. He seemed the natural link between three
revolutions, the one which had succeeded in the New World, the other
which was transforming France, and the third which was yet to come in
England.

Burke's _Reflections_ rang in his ears like a challenge, and he sat
promptly down in his inn to write his reply. _The Rights of Man_ is an
answer to Burke, but it is much more. The vivid pages of history in
which he explains and defends the French Revolution which Burke had
attacked and misunderstood, are only an illustration to his main
argument. He expounds the right of revolution, and blows away the cobweb
argument of legality by which his antagonist had sought to confine
posterity within the settlement of 1688. Every age and generation must
be free to act for itself. Man has no property in man, and the claim of
one generation to govern beyond the grave is of all tyrannies the most
insolent. Burke had contended for the right of the dead to govern the
living, but that which a whole nation chooses to do, it has a right to
do. The men of 1688, who surrendered their own rights and bound
themselves to obey King William and his heirs, might indeed choose to be
slaves; but that could not lessen the right of their children to be
free. Wrongs cannot have a legal descent. Here was a bold and triumphant
answer to a sophistical argument; but it served Paine only as a preface
to his exposition of the American constitution, which was "to Liberty
what a grammar is to language," and to his plea for the adoption in
England of the French charter of the Rights of Man.

Paine felt that he had made one Republic with a pamphlet, why not
another? He had the unlimited faith of his generatio