But Paine knew what he was doing. ‘I never quote; I am always thinking for myself,’ Carlile quoted him as saying.29 The cocksure clarity had more virtues than vices.

Another of his later freethinking disciples, and a very good one, the nineteenth-century American Robert G. Ingersoll, delivered an oration in Paine’s honour in which, at first hearing, the claim for his writing was pushed too high:

In my judgement, Thomas Paine was the best political writer that ever lived. What he wrote was pure nature, and his soul and his pen went together. Ceremony, pageantry, and all the paraphernalia of power had no effect upon him. He examined into the why and wherefore of things. He was perfectly radical in his mode of thought. Nothing short of the bedrock satisfied him.

Naturally enough he became, for ever afterwards, the patron hero of all the freethinking sects in the fields where he had delivered his most frontal challenge. ‘Paine’, wrote Ingersoll, ‘had denied the authority of bibles and creeds; this was his crime, and for this the world shut the door in his face, and emptied its slops upon him from the windows.’30 But this, the Paine of The Age of Reason, was only one strand in his theme; it merged with something larger and deeper. Throughout the century he never lost his hold on a vast, active politically minded readership. The English rebels who raised the ferment which led to the Reform Bill pored over his forbidden pages. ‘Government is for the living, not the dead, ‘had been Paine’s reply to Burke in 1791; forty years later England marched on, in company with France and America, along the road which Paine, not Burke, had mapped out for it.

When the East London Democratic Association was formed in 1837 by Julian Harney and other Chartist leaders, their manifesto declared that its object would be to promote the moral and political condition of the working class ‘by disseminating the principles propagated by that great philosopher and redeemer of mankind, the Immortal Thomas Paine’.31 When Bronterre O’Brien raised afresh with others the need for an attack on the landed monopoly, it was often to Paine’s Agrarian Justice they would turn. But more potent and comprehensive still was Paine’s claim for democracy when that word, in its modern sense, had barely been invented. His Rights of Man, wrote A. J. P. Taylor, just two hundred years after the Declaration of Independence, is ‘the best statement of democratic belief in any language’. The historians, or at least the very greatest of them, return to Paine to renew their own insights. Edward Thompson, in his The Making of the English Working Class (1963), constantly quotes Paine in his double role, as a guiding active hand and inspired recorder of the events he witnessed.

In America Paine’s legacy inspired the leaders of Jeffersonian democracy in the early years of the nineteenth century. At meetings of their societies copies of The Rights of Man were distributed and toasts were drunk to Paine. In the 1830s the first stirrings of the American labour movement saw dinners held by workingmen’s parties to commemorate Paine’s birthday. American land reformers at mid-century drew on Paine’s Agrarian Justice. The great radical poet Walt Whitman gave testimony to Paine’s influence at the end of the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth the socialist and trade-union activist Eugene V. Debs saluted Paine as a founder of the American radical tradition. The French, too, have recognized their debt to Paine; according to Napoleon, Paine deserved a statue in gold in every town.

Enough of achievement for one man, surely: to understand the three great revolutions of his age before they happened, to bring politics home to the common people, to build a bridge of common idealism across the Atlantic and the English Channel (as firm as the iron bridge to which Paine devoted so much of his time and energy). Yet this was not all. Scattered through Paine’s writings we can find hints, often much more than hints, of the other ideas which have given vitality to progressive movements for the past two hundred years.

Almost a century before Lincoln, Paine sought to write into the American Constitution a clause against slavery. He was among the very first of English writers to espouse the cause of Indian freedom. Well ahead of social reformers on both sides of the Atlantic, he had a good plan for old-age pensions. And how men and women in all our modern parties might tremble at his proposals for land nationalization. He wanted new laws for marriage and divorce.