part of the
Revolution enabled him to frame a crushing retort to Burke's
"Reflections." The result was Part I of the "Rights of Man," which he
flung off at the "Angel" in Islington in February 1791.[28]

The general aims of the pamphlet are now as little open to question as
the famous Declaration which he sought to vindicate. Paine trenchantly
attacked Burke's claim that no people, not even our own, had an inherent
right to choose its own ruler, and that the Revolution Settlement of
1688 was binding for ever. Paine, on the contrary, asserted that "every
age and generation must be as free to act for itself _in all cases_ as
the ages and generations that preceded it. The vanity and presumption of
governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all
tyrannies." Further, on the general question at issue, Paine remarked:
"That men should take up arms, and spend their lives and fortunes, _not_
to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have _not_ rights, is an
entirely new species of discovery and suited to the paradoxical genius
of Mr. Burke." In reply to the noble passage: "The age of chivalry is
gone ...," Paine shrewdly says: "In the rhapsody of his imagination he
has discovered a world of windmills, and his sorrows are that there are
no Quixotes to attack them."

After thus exposing the weak points of the royalist case, Paine
proceeded to defend the mob, firstly, because the aristocratic plots
against the French Revolution were really formidable (a very disputable
thesis), and secondly, because the mob in all old countries is the
outcome of their unfair and brutal system of government. "It is by
distortedly exalting some men," he says, "that others are distortedly
debased, till the whole is out of nature. A vast mass of mankind are
degradedly thrown into the background of the human picture, to bring
forward with greater glare the puppet show of State and aristocracy."
Here was obviously the Junius of democracy, for whom the only effective
answer was the gag and gyve. Indeed, Burke in his "Appeal from the New
to the Old Whigs" suggested that the proper refutation was by means of
"criminal justice."[29]

Pitt's opinions at this time on French and English democracy tend
towards a moderate and reforming royalism--witness his comment on
Burke's "Reflections," that the writer would have done well to extol the
English constitution rather than to attack the French.[30] In this
remark we may detect his pre