n in the efficacy of
argument, and experience had proved his power. As Carlyle, in his
whimsical dramatic fashion, said of him, "He can and will free all this
world; perhaps even the other." Godwin, as became the philosopher of the
movement, set his hopes on the slower working of education: to make men
wise was to make them free. Paine was the pamphleteer of the human camp.
He saw mankind as an embattled legion and believed, true man of action
that he was, that freedom could be won like victory by the impetus of a
resolute charge. He quotes the epigram of his fellow-soldier, Lafayette,
"For a nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and
to be free it is sufficient that she wills it." Godwin would have sent
men to school to liberty; Paine called them to her unfurled standard.
It is easy to understand the success of Paine's book, which appeared in
March, 1791. It was theory and practice in one; it was the armed logic
which had driven King George's regiments from America, the edged
argument which had razed the Bastille. It was bold reasoning, and it was
also inspired writing. Holcroft and Godwin helped to bring out _The
Rights of Man_, threatened with suppression or mutilation by the
publishers, and a panting incoherent shout of joy in a note from
Holcroft to Godwin is typical of the excitement which it caused:--

"I have got it--if this do not cure my cough it is a damned perverse
mule of a cough. The pamphlet--from the row--But mum--we don't sell
it--oh, no--ears and eggs--verbatim, except the addition of a short
preface, which as you have not seen, I send you my copy.--Not a single
castration (Laud be unto God and J. S. Jordan!) can I discover--Hey, for
the new Jerusalem! The Millennium! And peace and eternal beatitude be
unto the soul of Thomas Paine."

The usual prosecutions of booksellers followed; but everywhere the new
societies of reform were circulating the book, and if it helped to send
some good men to Botany Bay, copies enough were sold to earn a sum of a
thousand pounds for the author, which, with his usual disinterestedness,
he promptly gave to the Corresponding Society. A second part appeared in
1792; and at length Pitt adopted Burke's opinion that criminal justice
was the proper argument with which to refute Tom Paine. Acting on a hint
from William Blake, who, in a vision more prosaic and veridical than was
usual with him, had seen the constables searching for his friend, Paine
escaped