.

I OPENED the door on the other end of the corridor of Fame, and there, peering through the centuries, stood Tom Paine. So this was the fallen idol of three nations! He looked broken and old in his dingy New Rochelle dwelling. Only his eyes were magnificently young; they glowed like coals.

"I am from FRAGMENTS, Mr. Paine," I said. "You were gracious enough to grant us this interview."

"I am glad that I am not completely forgotten," he replied. There was a touch of bitterness in his voice. "Won't you please sit down? It is a long story, and some of your readers may care to know. …"

* * *

When Thomas Paine, approaching forty, reached the shores of America, he left behind him a hostile England. Here it was different. A brave young nation was about to commence its struggle for independence. Into the fight, with the zeal of the crusader that he was, the newly-arrived pamphleteer flung himself. His Common Sense was intellectual dynamite.

"Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil," he began, and shocked the "rich and wellborn." Monarchy was the worst of all. "There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. …How impious is the title of sacred majesty applied to a worm, who, in the midst of his splendor, is crumbling into dust!"

There was, however, such a thing as "good" government, but, just "as a man who is attached to a prostitute is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favor of a rotten constitution or government will disable us from discerning a good one." First, therefore, monarchy, born in conquest, had to be destroyed. Kings were nothing but marauding gangsters. "A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original."

Now that the struggle had begun, there was no end to brilliant propaganda. The Crisis series opened with a ringing call to arms: "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of the country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have the consolation with us that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

War was generally undesirable, but on some occasions, such as the American Revolution, needful. "In a general view, there are few conquests that repay the charge of making them, and mankind are pretty well convinced that it can never be worth their while to go to war for profit's sake. If they are made war upon, their country invaded, or their existence at stake, it is their duty to defend and preserve themselves, but in every other light, and from every other cause, is war inglorious and detestable."

And so he pamphleteered, worked selflessly and nobly, dreaming of the day when, following his own example, humanity would become free and unselfish. But when the day of liberation came, the politicians had no more use for him. Disillusioned and hurt, he sailed back to England.

Here, in his native land, he thought, people would welcome the champion of liberty. He wrote The Rights of Man, in defense of the French Revolution.

To begin with, "if the mere name of antiquity is to govern in the affairs of life, the people who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence, may as well take us for a precedent, as we make a precedent of those who lived a hundred or a thousand years ago. The fact is, that portions of antiquity, by proving everything, establish nothing. It is authority against authority all the way, till we come to the divine origin of the rights of man, at the Creation. Here our inquiries find a resting place, and our reason finds a home."

Interlopers have tried to come between man and his freedom. "It is not among the least of the evils of the present existing governments in all parts of Europe, that man, considered as man, is thrown back to a vast distance from his Maker, and the artificial chasm filled up by a succession of barriers, or a sort of turnpike gates, through which he has to pass."

Man was possessed of inalienable natural rights. "Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence; Of this kind are the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others."

Man, in the exercise of his natural rights, and for self-protection, entered into a social compact with his fellow-men. "The individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other, to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist ... To suppose that any government can be a party in a compact with the whole people, is to suppose it to have existence before it can have a right to exist."

Once established, government was still nothing but a composition of "un-mixable" natural rights. "The power produced from the aggregate of natural rights, imperfect in power in the individual, cannot be applied to invade the natural rights which are retained in the individual, and in which the power to execute is as perfect as the right itself." Government was "nothing more than a national association acting on the principles of society. …Government is no further necessary than to supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not conveniently competent. …The more perfect civilization is, the less occasion has it for government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself; but so contrary is the practice of old governments to the reason of the case, that the expenses of them increase in the proportion they ought to diminish."

Moreover, " … the obscurity in which the origin of all the present old governments is buried, implies the iniquity and disgrace with which they began. …Those bands of robbers, having parcelled out the world and divided it into dominions, began, as is naturally the case, to quarrel with each other. What at first was obtained by violence, was considered by others as lawful to be taken, and a second plunderer succeeded the first. …From such beginnings of governments, what could be expected, but a continual system of war and extortion?"

Government existed only for and by taxation and riots. "Excess and inequality of taxation, however disguised in the means, never fail to appear in their effects. As a great mass of the community are thrown thereby into poverty and discontent, they are constantly on the brink of commotion; and deprived, as they unfortunately are, of the means of information, are easily heated to outrage. Whatever the apparent cause of any riots may be, the real one is always want of happiness. It shows that something is wrong in the system of government that injures the felicity by which society is preserved."

The Rights of Man was a bombshell; its explosion drove Paine out of England, and straight into the heart of the French Revolution.

* * *

Two nations had vilified him for his bold utterings, but here in France, thought Paine, it would be different. An oppressed peasantry fighting for its very existence, definitely could and would adopt the principles of individualism and freedom. He pleaded for an end to chaos, the establishment of "good" government, and a cessation to all slaughter. His courage brought him his reward. He landed in prison.

An exciting stroke of luck saved him from the guillotine. For one whole year, ill nearly to death, he languished in prison. When he emerged, he brought with him his masterpiece against religious bigotry and oppression, The Age of Reason. For this, too, he was duly rewarded -with an opprobrium that has endured through the centuries.

Organized ritual and dogmas, Paine wrote, were the mainstays of statism. How1 terrible it was for the individualistic man to regard "himself as an outlaw, as an outcast, as a beggar, as a mumper, as one thrown, as it were, on a dunghill at an immense distance from his Creator, and who must make his approaches by creeping and cringing to intermediate beings, that he conceives either a contemptuous disregard for everything under the name of religion, or becomes indifferent."

Paine proclaimed his celebrated creed:

"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe and my reasons for not believing them.

"I do not believe the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

France no longer wanted him. He, who fought for freedom throughout the world, had no place therein which he could call his home. Evidently, the earth no longer was available to man for his use. Angrily, Paine wrote his remarkable Agrarian Justice (the essence of which is summarized elsewhere in this issue). The following passage from that book is brilliantly representative of his entire philosophy of life:

"An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot; it will succeed where diplomatic management would fail; it is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the ocean that can arrest its progress; it will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer."

* * *

Tom Paine finished his story. He was again in America, but now thoroughly damned and - most ironic of all fates - called a "foreigner."

"How sad," I ventured, "that you have no country that you may call your own."

His eyes flashed. "The world," he exclaimed, "is my country, mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion!"

The mists of Eternity rapidly began to envelop his vanishing figure. Quickly I asked:

"Is there any final request, Mr. Paine, that you would like to see fulfilled? Is there any 'message' that you would like to leave with our readers?"

His powerful voice shook with emotion, but" his words were barely audible as they stretched through the realms of Time:

"O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind!"