International arbitration, family allowances, maternity benefits, free education, prison reform, full employment; much of the future later offered by the British Labour Party was previously on offer, in better English, from Thomas Paine. Note how true these single syllables ring with the triumphant organ note of the last final word: ‘It is wrong to say God made rich and poor; He made only male and female; and He gave them the earth for their inheritance.’

Despite, or perhaps because of, much of this legacy, Paine has had more than his fair share of troubles at the hand of later generations. He proved too radical for the bourgeoisie of the Anglo-American world as that class triumphed and took the reigns of power. The egalitarianism of his message and its assault on privilege and rank seemed subversive when the middle class itself assumed the posture of a privileged class against challenges from the left. Another element was the reaction against freethinking that characterized post-En-lightenment England and America; Paine was doubly cursed, for he was also the Antichrist of The Age of Reason.

Paine has begun slowly to receive his due in the twentieth century. His books have been republished, and his reputation has been rehabilitated. After 120 years of biographies emphasizing subversion, atheism and drunkenness, one finds biographies detailing his amazingly productive life, and monographs dealing with the intricacies of his thought.

Nowadays, Paine societies abound in America and England. The statue of Paine was erected in Thetford in 1964, and, according to the Guardian, the Tory deputy mayor ‘failed in an attempt to have details of Paine’s trial and conviction as a traitor engraved under the statue’. Political passion runs long and deep for sons of Thetford. On the other hand, a pub called the Rights of Man was built on the Thetford motorway in 1968, complete with a Tom Paine Lounge, its walls decorated with posters of early Paine editions. Paine might have liked this tribute. In America his face was put on a postage stamp in 1968 (he might have liked the symbolism of that, too), and his farmhouse in New Rochelle has been restored for the edification of tourists and schoolchildren.

Somehow Paine rarely loses his topicality, and when his reputation in this respect is in peril other figures on the political stage, small and large, come to the rescue. During a recent debate (12 May 1986) on televising the House of Lords, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton opposed the proposition on the grounds that the inquisitive cameras threatened the blend of intimacy, ceremony and mystery ‘which made the Lords what it was’. Paine would have been eager to reply. Apart from favouring the full-scale abolition of the Lords, he held extremely strong views on those who sought to present politics in general as something the common people could not be expected to understand: ‘In all cases’, he wrote in The Rights of Man,

the people’s enemies take care to represent government as a thing made up of mysteries, which only themselves understood; and they hid from the understanding of the nation, the only thing that was beneficial to know, namely, that government is nothing more than a national association acting on the principles of society.

Again, in his Dissertation on First Principles of Government, Paine wrote:

Notwithstanding the mystery with which the science of government has been enveloped, for the purpose of enslaving, plundering and imposing upon mankind, it is of all things the least mysterious and most easy to be understood. The meanest capacity cannot be at a loss, if it begins its inquiries at the right point.

Lord Thomas might not have known how he was inviting Paine’s eloquence on his head. President Reagan – or his speech writers – should have known better. ‘We have in our power’, the President said, quoting Paine’s words soon after his first arrival in America, ‘to begin the world over again’. But he was referring to the SDI (Star Wars) programme, and he must have forgotten, or never knew, that Paine, one of the first opponents of imperial power, insisted that no nation, not even the United States, had the right to impose its will on another, that the supreme cause of peace would require international action on an imaginative scale which national states could scarcely conceive. Both English peers and American Presidents should have learned to treat Thomas Paine with greater care. He had long since taken the measure of both.

PAINE’S WRITINGS

[1] THE CASE OF THE OFFICERS
OF EXCISE

(1772)

Paine was asked by his fellow collectors of excise in 1772 to make their case to Parliament on how overworked and underpaid they were. Paine’s effort produced his first important writing, and as with so much he was to write its basic approach was a plea for social justice. Some four thousand copies of the pamphlet were printed in 1773. Paine’s moving case for higher wages and his personal efforts lobbying Members of Parliament were rewarded by his dismissal from HM Excise Service.

THE INTRODUCTION

As a design among the excise officers throughout the kingdom is on foot for a humble application to Parliament next session, to have the state of their salaries taken into consideration; it has been judged not only expedient, but highly necessary, to present a state of their case, previous to the presentation of their petition.

There are some cases so singularly reasonable, that the more they are considered, the more weight they obtain. It is a strong evidence both of simplicity and honest confidence, when petitioners in any case ground their hopes of relief on having their case fully and perfectly known and understood.

Simple as this subject may appear at first, it is a matter, in my humble opinion, not unworthy of Parliamentary attention. ’Tis a subject interwoven with a variety of reasons from different causes. New matter will arise on every thought. If the poverty of the officers of excise, if the temptations arising from their poverty, if the qualifications of persons to be admitted into employment, if the security of the revenue itself, are matters of any weight, then I am conscious that my voluntary services in this business, will produce some good effect or other, either to the better security of the revenue, the relief of the officers, or both.

THE STATE OF THE SALARY OF THE
OFFICERS OF EXCISE

When a year’s salary is mentioned in the gross, it acquires a degree of consequence from its sound, which it would not have if separated into daily payments, and if the charges attending the receiving and other unavoidable expenses were considered with it. Fifty pounds a year, and one shilling and ninepence farthing a day, carry as different degrees of significancy with them, as My Lord’s steward, and the steward’s labourer; and yet an outride officer in the excise, under the name of fifty pounds a year, receives for himself no more than one shilling and ninepence farthing a day.

After tax, charity and sitting expenses are deducted there remains very little more than forty-six pounds; and the expenses of horse-keeping in many places cannot be brought under fourteen pounds a year, beside the purchase at first, and the hazard of life, which reduces it to thirty-two pounds per annum, or one shilling and ninepence farthing per day.

I have spoken more particularly of the outrides, as they are by far the most numerous, being in proportion to the footwalks as eight is to five throughout the kingdom. Yet in the latter the same misfortunes exist; the channel of them only is altered.