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The neglected pioneer of one revolution, the honoured victim of another, brave to the point of folly, and as humane as he was brave, no man in his generation preached republican virtue in better English, nor lived it with a finer disregard of self. Tom Paine is still reviled and still admired. The name of Mary Wollstonecraft is honoured by the growing army of free women.
While the people of Paris sanctioned and approved the murders, it was not the same in the country. In many places the proceedings began with mass, and concluded with a Te Deum. Seventeen bishops were sent to the Convention, and thirty-one priests. Tom Paine, though he could not speak French, was elected in four places. Two-thirds were new members, who had not sat in the previous assemblies.
The memoirs of Bishop Watson illustrate the same sentiment. He lived in his pleasant country house at Windermere, never visiting his diocese, and according to De Quincey, talking Socinianism at his table. He felt himself to be a deeply injured man, because ministers had never found an opportunity for translating him to a richer diocese, although he had written against Paine and Gibbon.
But no such plea is necessary, for Paine was not addicted to drink, but remarkably abstemious. Mr. Fellows, with whom he lived for more than six months, said that he never saw him the worse for drink. Dr. Manley said, "while I attended him he never was inebriated." Colonel Burr said, "he was decidedly temperate." And even Mr.
Do you mean you are going to accept it?" "In a way yes." "In a way? What do you mean by that? I tell you frankly, Paine, if you go to work for me there must be no 'ifs' or 'buts' about it. You'll enter my office and you'll do as I, or the men under me, tell you to do." I was glad he said that, glad that he misunderstood me.
Within the last sixty years, however, the term Girondin has come into use as a label for all those positive political elements in the Convention that attempted a struggle against the Mountain for leadership and against Paris for moderate and national government. Among the Girondins may be noted Brissot, Vergniaud, Condorcet; and the Anglo-American veteran of republicanism, Tom Paine.
Thomas Paine, whose parents were Friends, in "The Crisis," says: "The common phrase of these people is, 'Our principles are peace. To which it may be replied, 'and your practices are the reverse." Another striking instance of this disagreement between principle and practice is seen in Lucretia Mott's behavior.
So long as Cheetham remained in good standing with the Democrats, Paine and he were fast friends; but when he became heretical and schismatic on the Embargo question, some three or four years later, and was formally read out of the party, Paine laid the rod across his back with all his remaining strength.
Paine says: "If an unprincipled bully can not be reformed, he can be punished." Cheetham has been so long in the habit of giving false information, that truth is to him like a foreign language. Mr. Cheetham wrote the life of Mr. Paine to gratify his malice and to support religion. He was prosecuted for libel was convicted and fined.
His indignation finds vent in a letter to his townsman, Timothy Paine, member of the General Court: "No man can reasonably expect that I can with any propriety discharge the duty of a chaplain when I have nothing either to eat or drink, nor any conveniency to write a line other than to sit down upon a stump and put a piece of paper upon my knee. As for Mr.
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