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LITERARY NOTICES.
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exaggerating the ill in the men upon whose conduct he was called to comment, and in the institutions he aimed to overturn." Dr. Denslow makes out a specious case for Paine as the author of the "Letters of Junius"; but Mr. Ingersoll interposes to protect the great freethinker against this scandalous imputation, and protests that Paine "was neither a coward, a calumniator, nor a sneak," and he gives a few reasons that are weighty against the hypothesis that Paine was the author of these celebrated letters.
Dr. Denslow maintains, with more show of reason, that he wrote the "Declaration of Independence," and Mr. Ingersoll is inclined to think that this claim is well founded. Decisive reasons are given why Jefferson could not have been its author, and there is much forcible evidence that Paine was the only man who could have done it. The following passages will afford a good illustration of our author's manner of dealing with his topics, and also sum up his estimate of Mr. Paine:
But, enough! The Declaration of Independence must hereafter be construed as a fabric whose warp and woof were Thomas Paine's. It was admirably adapted, as a revolutionary pronunciamiento, to fire the colonial heart to a war for separation which, though placed on utterly inadequate and untenable grounds by that Declaration, yet had good grounds which are not mentioned in it. Those were, simply, that not having any of the materials for an aristocracy in this country, we could not coalesce into one government with Great Britain, whose government was aristocratic. If we had been permitted to elect members to her House of Commons, what should we have sent to her House of Lords? The alleged grievance of taxation to reimburse the British Treasury for expenses incurred in our defense was in no sense a money grievance. The money having been expended for our benefit, it was our duty to pay it. There could surely be no duty resting on Londoners or Yorkshiremen to pay the expenses of Montgomery's march to Quebec or Braddock's to Pittsburgh. The real difficulty was, that we needed a sovereign government, and could not be admitted into the British one, because that was aristocratic and we had no aristocracy. This was not a grievance, but it was a good cause for national separation. The Declaration, like many popular documents, substituted sentiment for sense, passion for wisdom, fiction and rhetoric for history and fact, concealed the double merits of the case and helped on the war, in the same way that the stupidity of George III did.
We may now fairly estimate Thomas Paine in his two most marked characters, as a master of rhetorical invective and as a revolutionist; for, after attributing to him the authorship both of "Junius" and of the Declaration of Independence, as well as "Common Sense," "The Crisis," and "The Rights of Man," he still subsides into the category of brilliant sensational agitators endowed with a considerable force of prophetic insight, who fell far short of the qualifications essential to a statesman, or even of the appreciation of what statesmanship is. There can be no statesmanship without cool-headed candor, judicial calmness, capacity for guarded, just, and moderate statement, which will bear the test of time, perfect fairness toward adversaries, gratitude toward supporters, and a capacity for harmonizing adverse or conflicting elements by practicing, in non-essentials, unity, and in essentials, charity. Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Hamilton, Madison, Washington, and Franklin possessed these qualities, but Paine, the scathing and withering accuser, lacked them all. If it be a galling and unbearable tyranny for a conscientious man, with a tongue that has an infinite capacity for accusation, and none for pardon, to go about, like a section of the day of judgment, applying to every one who stands in his way such exacting and ideal tests and standards of virtue that human nature, which seems very tolerable to those who are looking at it without the blasting motive, is foredoomed by it to certain damnation and infamy, then Paine was a species of moral tyrant, always demanding the impossible of others. Notwithstanding his profession and belief that he was an apostle of freedom, Paine's fundamental belief in politics was that the government was always wrong, that it was inherently an evil; that the less there was of it the better, but that, however reduced in dimensions, whatever should be left of it would still be bad by reason of its being government. It was as wrong when vested in Washington as in George III, and he had good reason to know that it was as wrong when wielded by Robespierre as when presided over by Louis XVI. On the contrary, Paine imagined that the aggregated ignorance and incapacity of all the vast unskilled millions who had been pushed out of the work of government by the superior force and cunning of those in power were the actual repository of political wisdom and purity. The iceberg needed only turning over. He began with the creed, which he retained to his death, that government was not an affair of skill, but merely of honesty; not a problem of difficulty, but merely of good intentions. Holding these views, it followed that if it could in some way be got out of the hands of the skilled and interested few who were educated to it, and had made a profit out of it, into the hands of the unskilled and disinterested masses, who were not educated to it. and who, he assumed, would not seek to make a profit out of it, then good government would be perfectly secured. The inverted iceberg would bloom into an enchanted island, melodious with the songs of birds and mellifluous with the scent of flowers. It did not occur to him that the hereditary principle in government might sup-
