He was a brilliant mathematician and an ingenious inventor.  Brailsford says that his inventions were “partly useful, partly whimsical.”  They would be, of course.  They included a crane, a planing-machine, a smokeless candle and a gunpowder motor—­besides his really big and notable invention of the first iron bridge.

[Illustration:  59, GROVE STREET.  On the site of the house where Thomas Paine died.]

But that came later.  Before leaving England, in addition to his other and varied occupations, he ran a “tobacco mill,” and was twice married.  One wife died, and from the other he was separated.  At all events, at thirty-seven, alone and friendless, with empty pockets and a letter from Benjamin Franklin as his sole asset, he set sail for America in the year 1774.

Of course he went to the Quaker City, and speedily became the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, through the pages of which he cried a new message of liberty and justice to the troubled Colonies.  He, an Englishman, urged America to break away from England; he, of Quaker birth and by heredity and training opposed to fighting, advocated the most stringent steps for the consummation of national freedom.  In that clear-eyed and disinterested band of men who conceived and cradled our Republic, Paine stands a giant even among giants.

Many persons believe that it was he who actually composed and wrote the Declaration of Independence; it is certain that he is more than half responsible for it.  The very soul and fibre and living spirit of the United States was the soul and fibre and living spirit of Thomas Paine, and, in the highest American standards and traditions, remains the same today.

In 1775 he wrote “Common Sense”—­the book which was, as one historian declares, the “clarion call for separation from England,” and which swept the country.  Edmund Randolph drily ascribes American independence first to George III and second to Paine.  Five hundred thousand copies of the pamphlet were sold, and he might easily have grown rich on the proceeds, but he could never find it in his conscience to make money out of patriotism, and he gave every cent to the war fund.

This splendid fire-eating Quaker—­is there anything stauncher than a fighting Quaker?—­proceeded to enlist in the Pennsylvania division of the Flying Camp under General Roberdeau; then he went as aide-de-camp to General Greene.  It was in 1776 that he started his “Crisis,” a series of stirring and patriotic addresses in pamphlet form.  General Washington ordered the first copy read aloud to every regiment in the Continental Army, and its effect is now history.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox has written of this: