Doing nothing more than make war and give away positions, they were paid ‘eight hundred thousand sterling a year and worshipped into the bargain’. They were useless and unproductive: ‘of more worth is one honest man to society… than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived’.12

After kings, the nonsense of aristocracy was next to go. Is there anything more absurd than the hereditary principle, Paine asked in The Rights of Man, ‘as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wiseman, and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet laureate’? What mattered was not a man’s pedigree but his productivity. Society should be led by men of ‘talents and abilities’, yet its offices of privilege and power were filled by a nobility that, according to Paine, really meant ‘no-ability’. Paine, like Wat Tyler, could scan ‘all the vocabulary of Adam’ and find there ‘not such an animal as a duke or a count’. The great of the world could shout leveller at such Jacobin sentiments, and proud citizen Tom Paine would reply, ‘France has not levelled, it has exalted. It has put down the dwarf, to set up the man.’ Monarchs and aristocrats were unproductive idlers, parasites and ‘drones… who neither collect the honey, nor form the hive, but exist only for lazy enjoyment’.

Behind the power of these drones lay the deception that government and society were mysterious and arcane realms where secrets possessed only by some enabled the few to lead, to govern, to oppress. For Paine, ‘the age of fiction and political superstition, and of craft, and mystery is passing away’. The ‘craft of courts’is banished from popular government. ‘There is no place for mystery, no where for it to begin’ when the people govern themselves.13 Such a government was simple and uncomplicated. Defenders of balanced or separated powers, like John Adams, were criticized for their glorification of complexity – which Paine insisted was merely a return to the fiction, crafts and mystery of the pre-democratic age.

In the age of mystery and ‘chivalric nonsense’, the poor fared worst of all. To their defence, in moving and bitter language, sprang Paine, the former staymaker, in terms no less meaningful two centuries later. ‘The present state of civilization’, he wrote in Agrarian Justice,

is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye is like dead and living bodies chained together.

There is nothing wrong with riches, he adds, ‘provided that none be miserable in consequence of it’. In Part Two of The Rights of Man, he laments that nations are ‘governed like animals, for the pleasure of their riders’. ‘When… we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows’ in a civilized country, he adds, ‘something must be wrong in the system of government’. Why is it ‘that scarcely any are executed but the poor’? Youth should be instructed, and the aged supported; instead, Paine fumes, ‘the resources of a country are lavished upon kings, upon courts, upon hirelings’. What pathetic irony that the poor themselves ‘are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them’. Paine calculated that

the millions that are superfluously wasted upon government are more than sufficient to reform those evils… were an estimation to be made of die charge of aristocracy to a nation, it will be found nearly equal to that of supporting die poor. The Duke of Richmond alone (and there are cases similar to this) takes away as much for himself as would maintain two diousand poor and aged persons.

Paine’s solution was for the authorities to grant the poor four pounds a year for children under fourteen, and to require that the children be schooled. For the elderly there would be, at age fifty, six pounds per year, and ten pounds after sixty. ‘It is painful’, Paine writes, ‘to see old age working itself to death, in what are called civilized countries, for daily bread.’ He calculated how much the poor pay in taxes over a lifetime, and notes, in anticipation of modern social security, ‘the money he shall receive after fifty years, is but little more than the legal interest of the net money he has paid’. Is it more civilized, he asks, to render comfortable the old age of 140,000 people, ‘or that a million a year of public money be expended on any one individual, and him often of the most worthless or insignificant character’?

Public education could be provided for all, according to Paine, at the cost of ten shillings a year for 400,000 children. Women would receive twenty shillings immediately after the birth of a child, and couples twenty shillings upon marriage. Paine insisted that this was not the Christian philanthropy of traditional paternalist attitudes to the poor. In striking anticipation of a doctrine that even two hundred years later is unacceptable to many, he is certain in The Rights of Man that ‘this support, as already remarked, is not of the nature of a charity, but of a right’. No one else in that age of revolution, none of the ‘sober and cautious’ democrats who were America’s founders, proclaimed as Paine did:

When it shall be said in any country in die world, my poor are happy, neidler ignorance nor distress is to be found among diem; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; die aged are not in want, die taxes are not oppressive… when these diings can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government.

Such sentiments endeared Paine to democratic working men. He was applauded by the artisans of Philadelphia and by the members of the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s. His writings would be quoted by the Chartists and the early trade unionists in the nineteenth century.