confirmed fighter for anything and everything he
held right. And his militancy was not merely of action but of the
soul, not only of policy or necessity but of spiritual conviction.
When even Washington was inclined to submit patiently a bit longer, it
was Paine who lashed America into righteous war. He fought for the
freedom of the country, for the abolition of slavery, for the rights
of women; he fought for old-age pensions, for free public schools, for
the protection of dumb animals, for international copyright; for a
hundred and one ideals of equity and humanity which today are
legislature. And he fought with his body and his brain; with his
"flaming eloquence" and also with a gun! Once let him perceive the
cause to be a just one, and--I know of no more magnificently
belligerent a figure in all history.

And yet note here the splendid, the illuminating paradox: Paine
abhorred war. Every truly great fighter has abhorred war, else he were
not truly great. In 1778, in the very thick of the Revolution, he
wrote solemnly:

"If there is a sin superior to every other, it is that of wilful and
offensive war.... He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole
contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death." (A
copy of this, together with the President's recent message, might
advantageously be sent to a certain well-known address on the other
side of the world!) Yet did Paine, with this solemn horror of war,
suggest that the United States stop fighting? No more than he had
suggested that they keep out of trouble in the first place. Paine
hated war in itself; but he held war a proper and righteous means to
noble ends.

Consistency is not only the bugbear of little minds; it is also the
trade-mark of them. Paine also detested monarchies. "Some talent is
required to be a simple workman," he wrote; "to be a king there is
need to have only the human shape." Of Burke, he said: "Mr. Burke's
mind is above the homely sorrows of the vulgar. He can feel only for a
king or a queen.... He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying
bird."

Yet when he was a member of that French Assembly that voted King
Louis to death, he fought the others fiercely,--even though unable to
speak French,--persistently opposing them, with a passionate
determination and courage which came near to costing him his life.
For, as Brailsford says, "The Terror made mercy a traitor."

Are these things truly paradoxes, or are they rather ma