|
PAINE,
THOMAS / BRIDGE DESIGN
I will begin with the subject of your bridge,
in which I feel myself interested; and it is with great pleasure
that I learn, by your favor of the 16th, that the execution of the
arch of experiment exceeds your expectations. In your former letter,
you mention, that instead of arranging your tubes and bolts as
ordinates to the cord of the arch, you had reverted to your first
idea, of arranging them in the direction of the radii. I am sure it
will gain, both in beauty and strength. It is true that the
divergence of those radii recurs as a difficulty, in getting the
rails on upon the bolts; but I thought this fully removed by the
answer you first gave me, when I suggested that difficulty, to wit,
that you should place the rails first, and drive the bolts through
them, and not, as I had imagined, place the bolts first, and put the
rails on them. I must doubt whether what you now suggest, will be as
good as your first idea; to wit, to have every rail split into two
pieces longitudinally, so that there shall be but the halves of the
holes in each, and then to clamp the two halves together. The
solidity of this method cannot be equal to that of the solid rail,
and it increases the suspicions part of the whole machine, which, in
a first experiment, ought to be rendered as few as possible. But of
all this, the practical iron men are much better judges than we
theorists. |
Thomas
Paine
23 Dec 1788 |
PAINE,
THOMAS / BRITAIN'S CONSTITUTION
I am much indebted for your kind letter of
February the 29th, and for your valuable volume on the English
constitution. I have read this with pleasure and much approbation,
and think it has deduced the constitution of the English nation from
its rightful root, the Anglo-Saxon. It is really wonderful, that so
many able and learned men should have failed in their attempts to
define it with correctness. No wonder, then, that Paine, who thought
more than he read, should have credited the great authorities who
have declared, that the will of parliament is the constitution of
England. So Marbois, before the French Revolution, observed to me,
that the Almanac Royal was the constitution of France. Your
derivation of it from the Anglo-Saxons, seems to be made on
legitimate principles. …And although this constitution was
violated and set at naught by Norman force, yet force cannot change
right. …It has ever appeared to me, that the difference between
the Whig and the Tory of England is, that the Whig deduces his
rights from the Anglo-Saxon source, and the Tory from the Norman.
|
John
Cartwright
5 Jun 1824 |
PAINE,
THOMAS / COMMUNICATIONS FROM
Mr. Jay will, of course, communicate to you
some ciphered letters lately written, and one of this date. My
public letter to him contains all the interesting public details. I
enclose with the present, some extracts of a letter from Mr. Paine,
which he desired me to communicate; your knowledge of the writer
will justify my giving you the trouble of these communications,
which their interesting nature and his respectability, will jointly
recommend to notice. |
George
Washington
10 May 1789 |
PAINE,
THOMAS / OPINION OF
You ask my opinion of Lord Bolingbroke and
Thomas Paine. They were alike in making bitter enemies of the
priests and pharisees of their day. Both were honest men; both
advocates for human liberty. Paine wrote for a country which
permitted him to push his reasoning to whatever length it would go.
Lord Bolingbroke in one restrained by a constitution, and by public
opinion. He was called indeed a tory; but his writings prove him a
stronger advocate for liberty than any of his countrymen, the Whigs
of the present day. Irritated by his exile, he committed one act
unworthy of him, in connecting himself momentarily with a prince
rejected by his country. But he redeemed that single act by his
establishment of the principles which proved it to be wrong. These
two persons differed remarkably in the style of their writing, each
leaving a model of what is most perfect in both extremes of the
simple and the sublime. No writer has exceeded Paine in ease and
familiarity of style, in perspicuity of expression, happiness of
elucidation, and in simple and unassuming language. In this he may
be compared with Doctor Franklin; and indeed his Common Sense
was, for a while, believed to have been written by Doctor Franklin,
and published under the borrowed name of Paine, who had come over
with him from England. Lord Bolingbroke's, on the other hand, is a
style of the highest order. The lofty, rhythmical, full-flowing
eloquence of Cicero. Periods of just measure, their members
proportioned, their close full and round. His conceptions, too, are
bold and strong, his diction copious, polished and commanding as his
subject. His writings are certainly the finest samples in the
English language, of the eloquence proper for the Senate. His
political tracts are safe reading for the most timid religionist,
his philosophical, for those who are not afraid to trust their
reason with discussions of right and wrong.
You have asked my opinion of these persons, and, to you, I
have given it freely. But, remember, that I am old, that I wish not
to make new enemies, nor to give offense to those who would consider
a difference of opinion as sufficient ground for unfriendly
dispositions. |
Francis
Eppes
19 Jan 1821 |
PAINE,
THOMAS / PAMPHLET RECEIVED
Your letters of October the 1st, 4th, 6th, and
16th, came duly to hand, and the papers which they covered were,
according to your permission, published in the newspapers and in a
pamphlet, and under your own name. These papers contain precisely
our principles, and I hope they will be generally recognized here.
Determined as we are to avoid, if possible, wasting the energies of
our people in war and destruction, we shall avoid implicating
ourselves with the powers of Europe, even in support of principles
which we mean to pursue. They have so many other interests different
from ours, that we must avoid being entangled in them. We believe we
can enforce those principles, as to ourselves, by peaceable means,
now that we are likely to have our public councils detached from
foreign views. The return of our citizens from the phrenzy into
which they had been wrought, partly by ill conduct in France, partly
by artifices practised on them, is almost entire, and will, I
believe, become quite so. . . . I am in hopes you will find us
returned generally to sentiments worthy of former times. In these it
will be your glory to have steadily labored, and with as much effect
as any man living. |
Thomas
Paine
18 Mar 1801 |
PAINE,
THOMAS / REPORTS ON BRITAIN
It is true that I received, very long ago, your
favors of September the 9th and 15th, and that I have been in daily
intention of answering them, fully and confidentially; but you know,
such a correspondence between you and me cannot pass through the
post, nor even by the couriers of ambassadors. The French packet
boats being discontinued, I am now obliged to watch opportunities by
Americans going to London, to write my letters to America. Hence it
has happened, that these, the sole opportunities by which I can
write to you without fear, have been lost, by the multitude of
American letters I had to write. I now determine, without foreseeing
any such conveyance, to begin my letter to you, so that when a
conveyance occurs, I shall only have to add recent occurrences.
Notwithstanding the interval of my answer which has taken place, I
must beg a continuance of your correspondence; because I have great
confidence in your communications, and since Mr. Adams' departure, I
am in need of authentic information from that country. |
Thomas
Paine
23 Dec 1788 |
PAINE,
THOMAS / RIGHT OF MAN
The President is not yet arrived, but we expect
him the day after tomorrow. He has probably protracted his journey
so as to avoid the ceremonies of to-morrow. We expect daily to hear
the events of the expedition under General Scott into the Indian
country. Perhaps you will hear it sooner than we shall. Having
nothing to communicate in the line of public news I will state
something personal. You will observe by the enclosed and preceding
papers that I am mentioned on the subject of Paine's pamphlet on the
Rights of Man; and you will have seen a note of mine prefixed to
that pamphlet whence it has been inferred that I furnished the
pamphlet to the printer and procured its publication. This is not
true. The fact was this: Mr. Beckley had the only copy of that
pamphlet in town. He lent it to Mr. Madison, who lent it to me under
the injunction to return it to Mr. Beckley within the day. Beckley
came for it before I had finished reading it and desired as soon as
I had done I would send it to a Mr. Jonathan B. Smith whose brother
was to reprint it. Being an utter stranger to Mr. J. B. Smith I
explained to him in a note that I sent the pamphlet to him by order
of Mr. Beckley, and to take off somewhat of the dryness of the note
I added that I was glad to find it was to he reprinted here, etc.,
as you have seen in the printed note. I thought so little of this
note that I did not even retain a copy of it; and without the least
information or suspicion that it would be published, out it comes
the next week at the head of the pamphlet. I knew immediately that
it would give displeasure to some gentlemen just by the chair of
government who were in sentiment with Burke and as much opposed to
the sentiments of Paine.
I could not disavow my note, because I had written it. I could not
disavow my approbation of the pamphlet, because I was fully in
sentiment with it, and it would have been trifling to have disavowed
merely the publication of the note approving at the same time of the
pamphlet. I determined, therefore, to be utterly silent except so
far as verbal explanations could be made. |
T.
M. Randolph
3 Jul 1791 |
PAINE,
THOMAS / RIGHTS OF MAN
I received with great pleasure the present of
your pamphlets, as well for the thing itself as that it was a
testimony of your recollection. Would you believe it possible that
in this country there should be high and important characters who
need your lessons in republicanism, and who do not heed them? It is
but too true that we have a sect preaching up and pouting after an
English constitution of king, lords and commons, and whose heads are
itching for crowns, coronets and mitres. But our people, my good
friend, are firm and unanimous in their principles of republicanism
and there is no better proof of it than that they love what you
write and read it with delight. The printers season every newspaper
with extracts from your last, as they did before from your first
part of the Rights of Man. They have both served here to separate
the wheat from the chaff, and to prove that though the latter
appears on the surface, it is on the surface only. The bulk below is
sound and pure. Go on then in doing with your pen what in other
times was done with the sword: show that reformation is more
practicable by operating on the mind than on the body of man, and be
assured that it has not a more sincere votary nor you a more ardent
well-wisher than ... |
Thomas
Paine
19 Jun 1792 |
PAINE,
THOMAS / RIGHTS OF MAN
The papers which I send Mr. Randolph weekly,
and which I presume you see, will have shown you what a dust Paine's
pamphlet has kicked up here. My last to Mr. Randolph will have given
an explanation as to myself, which I had not time to give when I
sent you the pamphlet. A writer, under the name of Publicola, in
attacking all Paine's principles, is very desirous of involving me
in the same censure with the author. I certainly merit the same, for
I profess the same principles; but it is equally certain I never
meant to have entered as a volunteer into the cause. My occupations
do not permit it. |
James
Monroe
10 Jul 1791 |
PAINE,
THOMAS / RETIREMENT TO NEW YORK FARM
I congratulate you on your retirement to your
farm, and still more that it is of a character so worthy of your
attention. I much doubt whether the open room on your second story
will answer your expectations. There will be a few days in the year
in which it will be delightful, but not many. Nothing but trees, or
Venetian blinds, can protect it from the sun. The semi-cylindrical
roof you propose will have advantages. You know it has been
practised on the cloth market at Paris. De Lorme, the inventor,
shows many forms of roofs in his book to which it is applicable. I
have used it at home for a dome, being one hundred and twenty
degrees of an oblong octagon, and in the capitol we unite two
quadrants of a sphere by a semi-cylinder; all framed in De Lorme's
manner. How has your planing machine answered? Has it been tried and
persevered in by any workmen?
It seems very difficult to find out what turns things are to take
in Europe. I suppose it depends on Austria, which, knowing it is to
stand in the way of receiving the first hard blows, is cautious of
entering into a coalition. As to France and England we can have but
one wish, that they may disable one another from injuring others.
|
Thomas
Paine
5 Jun 1805 |
PARLIAMENTARY
CORRUPTION
…But the dignity of Parliament, it seems,
can brook no opposition to its power. Strange, that a set of men,
who have made sale of their virtue to the Minister, should yet talk
of retaining dignity! |
William
Small
(Doctor)
7 May 1775 |
PATRIOTISM
/ AND MERCHANTS
I join in your reprobation of our merchants,
priests, and lawyers, for their adherence to England and monarchy,
in preference to their own country and its Constitution. But
merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not
constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw
their gains. In every country and in every age, the priest has been
hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot,
abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is
easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by
deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest
religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon,
unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for
their purposes. With the lawyers it is a new thing. They have, in
the Mother country, been generally the firmest supporters of the
free principles of their constitution. But there too they have
changed. |
Horatio
G. Spafford
17 Mar 1814 |
PERSONAL
AFFAIRS
When I first entered on the stage of public
life (now twenty-four years ago), I came to a resolution never to
engage while in public office in any kind of enterprise for the
improvement of my fortune, nor to wear any other character than that
of a farmer. I have never departed from it in a single instance; and
I have in multiplied instances found myself happy in being able to
decide and to act as a public servant, clear of all interest, in the
multiform questions that have arisen, wherein I have seen others
embarrassed and biased by having got themselves into a more
interested situation. |
Unknown
Addressee
18 Mar 1793 |
PERSONAL
CHARACTER / SLANDER AGAINST
Your favor of July the 19th has been received,
and received with the tribute of respect due to a person, who,
unurged by motives of personal friendship or acquaintance, and
unaided by particular information, will so far exercise his justice
as to advert to the proofs of approbation given a public character
by his own State and by the United States, and weigh them in the
scale against the fatherless calumnies he hears uttered against him.
These public acts are known even to those who know nothing of my
private life, and surely are better evidence to a mind disposed to
truth, than slanders which no man will affirm on his own knowledge,
or ever saw one who would. From the moment that a portion of my
fellow citizens looked towards me with a view to one of their
highest offices, the floodgates of calumny have been opened upon me;
not where I am personally known, where their slanders would be
instantly judged and suppressed, from a general sense of their
falsehood; but in the remote parts of the union, where the means of
detection are not at hand, and the trouble of an inquiry is greater
than would suit the hearers to undertake. I know that I might have
filled the courts of the United States with actions for these
slanders, and have ruined perhaps many persons who are not innocent.
But this would be no equivalent to the loss of character. I leave
them, therefore, to the reproof of their own consciences. If these
do not condemn them, there will yet come a day when the false
witness will meet a judge who has not slept over his slanders. If
the Reverend Cotton Mather Smith of Shena believed this as firmly as
I do, he would surely never have affirmed that "I had obtained
my property by fraud and robbery; that in one instance, I had
defrauded and robbed a widow and fatherless children of an estate to
which I was executor, of ten thousand pounds sterling, by keeping
the property and paying them in money at the nominal rate, when it
was worth no more than forty for one; and that all this could be
proved." Every tittle of it is fable; there not having existed
a single circumstance of my life to which any part of it can hang. I
never was executor but in two instances, both of which having taken
place about the beginning of the Revolution, which withdrew me
immediately from all private pursuits, I never meddled in either
executorship. In one of the cases only, were there a widow and
children. She was my sister. She retained and managed the estate in
her own hands, and no part of it was ever in mine. In the other, I
was a copartner, and only received on a division the equal portion
allotted me. To neither of these executorships, therefore, could Mr.
Smith refer. Again, my property is all patrimonial, except about
seven or eight hundred pounds' worth of lands, purchased by myself
and paid for, not to widows and orphans, but to the very gentleman
from whom I purchased. If Mr. Smith, therefore, thinks the precepts
of the gospel intended for those who preach them as well as for
others, he will doubtless some day feel the duties of repentance,
and of acknowledgment in such forms as to correct the wrong he has
done. Perhaps he will have to wait till the passions of the moment
have passed away. All this is left to his own conscience.
|
Uriah
McGregory
13 Aug 1800 |
PERSONAL
HABITS
A letter from you calls up recollections very
dear to my mind. It carries me back to the times when, beset with
difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause,
struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of
self-government. Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave
ever ahead, threatening to overwhelm us. …In your day, French
depredations; in mine, English, and the Berlin and Milan decrees;
now, the English orders of council, and the piracies they authorize.
When these shall be over, it will be the impressment of our seamen
or something else; and so we have gone on, and so we shall go on,
puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of man. And I
do believe we shall continue to growl, to multiply and prosper until
we exhibit an association, powerful, wise and happy, beyond what has
yet been seen by men. As for France and England, with all their
preeminence in science, the one is a den of robbers, and the other
of pirates. And if science produces no better fruits than tyranny,
murder, rapine and destitution of national morality, I would rather
wish our country to be ignorant, honest and estimable, as our
neighboring savages are. But whither is senile garrulity leading me?
Into politics, of which I have taken final leave. I think little of
them and say less. I have given up newspapers in exchange for
Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself
much the happier. Sometimes, indeed, I look back to former
occurrences, in remembrance of our old friends and fellow laborers,
who have fallen before us. Of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence, I see now living not more than half a dozen on your
side of the Potomac, and on this side, myself alone. You and I have
been wonderfully spared, and myself with remarkable health, and a
considerable activity of body and mind. I am on horseback three or
four hours of every day; visit three or four times a year a
possession I have ninety miles distant, performing the winter
journey on horseback. |
John
Adams
21 Jan 1812 |
PERSONAL
HABITS
Your letter of February the 18th came to hand
on the 1st instant; and the request of the history of my physical
habits would have puzzled me not a little, had it not been for the
model with which you accompanied it, of Doctor Rush's answer to a
similar inquiry. I live so much like other people, that I might
refer to ordinary life as the history of my own. Like my friend the
Doctor, I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and
that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables,
which constitute my principal diet. I double however, the Doctor's
glass and a half of wine, and even treble it with a friend; but
halve its effects by drinking the weak wines only. The ardent wines
I cannot drink, nor do I use ardent spirits in any form. Malt
liquors and cider are my table drinks, and my breakfast, like that
also of my friend, is of tea and coffee. I have been blest with
organs of digestion which accept and concoct, without ever
murmuring, whatever the palate chooses to consign to them, and I
have not yet lost a tooth by age. I was a hard student until I
entered on the business of life, the duties of which leave no idle
time to those disposed to fulfil them; and now, retired, and at the
age of seventy-six, I am again a hard student. Indeed, my fondness
for reading and study revolts me from the drudgery of
letter-writing. And a stiff wrist, the consequence of an early
dislocation, makes writing both slow and painful. I am not so
regular in my sleep as the Doctor says he was, devoting to it from
five to eight hours, according as my company or the book I am
reading interests me; and I never go to bed without an hour, or half
hour's previous reading of something moral, whereon to ruminate in
the intervals of sleep. But whether I retire to bed early or late, I
rise with the sun. I use spectacles at night, but not necessarily in
the day, unless in reading small print. My hearing is distinct in
particular conversation, but confused when several voices cross each
other. …I enjoy good health; too feeble, indeed, to walk much,
but riding without fatigue six or eight miles a day, and sometimes
thirty or forty. I may end these egotisms, therefore, as I began, by
saying that my life has been so much like that of other people, that
I might say with Horace, to every one "nomine mutato,
narratur fabula de te." |
Vine
Utley
(Doctor)
21 Mar 1819 |
PERSONAL
VALUES / MARRIAGE
…When we see ourselves in a situation
which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our
minds to it, meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it
in the best way practicable. This lessens the evil, while fretting
and fuming only serves to increase our own torments. The errors and
misfortunes of others should be a school for our own instruction.
Harmony in the married state is the very first object to be aimed
at. Nothing can preserve affections uninterrupted but a firm
resolution never to differ in will, and a determination in each to
consider the love of the other as of more value than any object
whatever on which a wish had been fixed. How light, in fact, is the
sacrifice of any other wish, when weighed against the affections of
one with whom we are to pass our whole life. And though opposition,
in a single instance, will hardly of itself produce alienation, yet
every one has their pouch into which all these little oppositions
are put: while that is filling, the alienation is insensibly going
on, and when filled it is complete. It would puzzle either to say
why; because no one difference of opinion has been marked enough to
produce a serious effect by itself. But he finds his affections
wearied out by a constant stream of little checks and obstacles.
Other sources of discontent, very common indeed, are the little
cross purposes of husband and wife, in common conversation, a
disposition in either to criticize and question whatever the other
says, a desire always to demonstrate and make him feel himself in
the wrong, and especially in company. Nothing is so goading. Much
better, therefore, if our companion views a thing in a light
different from what we do, to leave him in quiet possession of his
view. What is the use of rectifying him, if the thing be
unimportant; and if important, let it pass for the present, and wait
a softer moment and more conciliatory occasion of revising the
subject together. It is wonderful how many persons are rendered
unhappy by inattention to these little rules of prudence. |
Maria
Jefferson Eppes
7 Jan 1798 |
PHYSIOCRATS
/ TURGOT
Everybody here is trying their hand at forming
declarations of rights. As something of that kind is going on with
you also, I send you two specimens from hence. The one is by our
friend of whom I have just spoken. You will see that it contains the
essential principles of ours, accommodated as much as could be, to
the actual state of things here. The other is from a very sensible
man,. a pure theorist, of the sect called the economists, of which
Turgot was considered as the head. The former is adapted to the
existing abuses, the latter goes to those possible, as well as to
those existing. |
James
Madison
12 Jan 1789 |
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