But who reads it now?  On the other hand, no one who has studied Paine’s career can deny his honesty and his disinterestedness; and every unprejudiced reader of his works must admit not merely his great ability in urging his opinions, but that he sincerely believed all he wrote.  Let us, then, try to forget the carbuncled nose, the snuffy waistcoat, the unorthodox sneer.  We should wipe out his later years, cut his life short at 1796, and take Paine when he wrote “Common Sense,” Paine when he lounged at the White Bear in Piccadilly, talking over with Horne Tooke the answer to Mr. Burke’s “Reflections,” and Paine, when, as “foreign benefactor of the species,” he took his seat in the famous French Convention.

It would repay some capable author to dig him up, wash him, and show him to the world as he was.  A biography of him would embrace the history of the struggle which established the new theory of politics in government.  He is the representative man of Democracy in both hemispheres,—­a good subject in the hands of a competent artist; and the time has arrived, we think, when justice may be done him.  As a general rule, it is yet too soon to write the History of the United States since 1784.  Half a century has not been sufficient to wear out the bitter feeling excited by the long struggle of Democrats and Federalists.  Respectable gentlemen, who, more pious than Aeneas, have undertaken to carry their grandfathers’ remains from the ruins of the past into the present era, seem to be possessed with the same demon of discord that agitated the deceased ancestors.  The quarrels of the first twenty years of the Constitution have become chronic ink-feuds in certain families.  A literary vendetta is carried on to this day, and a stab with the steel pen, or a shot from behind the safe cover of a periodical, is certain to be received by any one of them who offers to his enemy the glorious opportunity of a book.  Where so much temper exists, impartial history is out of the question.

Our authors, too, as a general rule, have inherited the political jargon of the last century, and abound in “destiny of humanity,” “inalienable rights,” “virtue of the sovereign people,” “base and bloody despots,” and all that sort of phrase, earnest and real enough once, but little better than cant and twaddle now.  They seem to take it for granted that the question is settled, the rights of man accurately defined, the true and only theory of government found,—­and that he who doubts is blinded by aristocratic prejudice or is a fool.  We must say, nevertheless, that Father Time has not yet had years enough to answer the great question of governing which was proposed to him in 1789.  Some of the developments of our day may well make us doubt whether the last and perfect form, or even theory, is the one we have chosen. “Les monarchies absolues avaient deshonore le despotisme:  prenons garde que les republiques democratiques ne le rehabilitent.”  But Paine’s