y the hangman. Bishops in their answers mingled grudging
concessions with personal abuse. An agent of Pitt's was hired to write a
scurrilous biography of the Government's most dreaded foe. In America,
the grandsons of the Puritan colonists who had flogged Quaker women as
witches, denied him a place on the stage-coach, lest an offended God
should strike it with lightning.

Paine died, a lonely old man, in 1809. His personal character stands
written in his career; and it is unnecessary to-day even to mention the
libels which his biographer has finally refuted. In a generation of
brave men he was the boldest. He could rouse the passions of men, and he
could brave them. If the Royalist Burke was eloquent for a Queen,
Republican Paine risked his life for a King. No wrong found him
indifferent; and he used his pen not only for the democracy which might
reward him, but for animals, slaves and women. Poverty never left him,
yet he made fortunes with his pen, and gave them to the cause he served.
A naive vanity was his only fault as a man. It was his fate to escape
the gallows in England and the guillotine in France. He deserved them
both; in that age there was no higher praise. A better democrat never
wore the armour of the knight-errant; a better Christian never assailed
Orthodoxy.

Neither by training nor by temperament was Paine a speculative thinker;
but his political writing has none the less an immense significance.
Godwin was a writer removed by his profoundly individual genius from the
average thought of his day. Paine agreed more nearly with the advanced
minds of his generation, and he taught the rest to agree with him. No
one since him or before him has stated the plain democratic case against
monarchy and aristocracy with half his spirit and force. Earlier writers
on these themes were timid; the moderns are bored. Paine is writing of
what he understands, and feels to be of the first importance. He cares
as much about abolishing titles as a modern reformer may feel about
nationalising land. His main theory in politics has a lucid simplicity.
Men are born as God created them, free and equal; that is the assumption
alike of natural and revealed religion. Burke, who "fears God," looks
with "awe to kings," with "duty to magistrates," and with "respect to
nobility," is but erecting a wilderness of turnpike gates between man
and his Maker. Natural rights inhere in man by reason of his existence;
civil rights are founded in