~Basil

Paine’s genius

What accounted for Paine’s enormous influence? Bailyn arrives at this insight:

Paine’s intellectual force lay not in his close argumentation on specific points but in his reversal of the presumptions that underlay the arguments, a reversal that forced thoughtful readers to consider not so much a point here and a conclusion there as a wholly new way of looking at the entire range of problems involved. [My emphasis]

Paine “forced people to think the unthinkable, to ponder the supposedly self-evident, and thus to take the first step in bringing about a radical change.” And what was unthinkable? That colonists’ beloved King George III was really “the royal brute of Great Britain,” the latest edition of the

principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers; and who, by increasing in power and extending his depredations, overawed the quiet and defenseless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions.

Further,

Britain’s supposedly protective nurturance of the colonies had only been a form of selfish economic aggrandizement; she would have nurtured Turkey from exactly the same motivations.

And about the loyalty to the mother country, Paine pointed out:

Not one third of the inhabitants even of this province [Pennsylvania] are of English descent. Wherefore I reprobate the phrase of parent or mother country applied to England only, as being false, selfish, narrow, and ungenerous.

He saw republican government as the solution to the British system, wherein

people would worship not some “hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh” like George III, but law itself and the national constitution, “for as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king.”

Surprisingly, Paine argued that smaller populations had an advantage in war:

large populations bred prosperity and an excessive involvement in business affairs, both of which had destroyed the military power of nations in the past. The City of London, where England’s commerce was centered, was the most cowardly community in the realm: “the rich are in general slaves to fear, and submit to courtly power with the trembling duplicity of a spaniel.” [My emphasis]

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