natural rights and are designed to secure
and guarantee them. He gives an individual twist to the doctrine of the
social compact. Some governments arise out of the people, others over
the people. The latter are based on conquest or priestcraft, and the
former on reason. Government will be firmly based on the social compact
only when nations deliberately sit down as the Americans have done, and
the French are doing, to frame a constitution on the basis of the Rights
of Man.

As for the English Government, it clearly arose in conquest; and to
speak of a British Constitution is playing with words. Parliament,
imperfectly and capriciously elected, is supposed to hold the common
purse in trust; but the men who vote the supplies are also those who
receive them. The national purse is the common hack on which each party
mounts in turn, in the countryman's fashion of "ride and tie." They
order these things better in France. As for our system of conducting
wars, it is all done over the heads of the people. War is with us the
art of conquering at home. Taxes are not raised to carry on wars, but
wars raised to carry on taxes. The shrewd hard-hitting blows range over
the whole surface of existing institutions. Godwin from his intellectual
eminence saw in all the follies and crimes of mankind nothing worse than
the effects of "prejudice" and the consequences of fallacious reasoning.
Paine saw more self-interest in the world than prejudice. When he came
to preach the abolition of war, first through an alliance of Britain,
America and France, and then through "a confederation of nations" and a
European Congress, he saw the obstacle in the egoism of courts and
courtiers which appear to quarrel but agree to plunder. Another seven
years, he wrote in 1792, would see the end of monarchy and aristocracy
in Europe. While they continue, with war as their trade, peace has not
the security of a day.

Paine's writing gains rather than loses in theoretic interest, because
the warmth of his sympathies melts, as he proceeds, the icy logic of his
eighteenth century individualism. He starts where all his school
started, with a sharp antithesis between society and government.

"Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the
former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections; the
latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages
intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, th