Consistency is not only the bugbear of little minds; it is also the trade-mark of them.  Paine also detested monarchies.  “Some talent is required to be a simple workman,” he wrote; “to be a king there is need to have only the human shape.”  Of Burke, he said:  “Mr. Burke’s mind is above the homely sorrows of the vulgar.  He can feel only for a king or a queen....  He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.”

Yet when he was a member of that French Assembly that voted King Louis to death, he fought the others fiercely,—­even though unable to speak French,—­persistently opposing them, with a passionate determination and courage which came near to costing him his life.  For, as Brailsford says, “The Terror made mercy a traitor.”

Are these things truly paradoxes, or are they rather manifestations of that God-given reason which can clearly see things as they are as well as things as they should be, and see both to good and helpful purpose?

In 1802 Paine returned to America, just sixty-five years old.  He had suffered terribly, had rendered great services and it was at least reasonable that he should expect a welcome.  What happened is tersely told by Rufus Rockwell Wilson: 

“When, at the age of sixty-five, he came again to the nation he had helped to create, he was met by the new faces of a generation that knew him not, and by the cold shoulders, instead of the outstretched hands, of old friends.  This was the bitter fruit of his ‘Age of Reason,’ which remains of all epoch-making books the one most persistently misquoted and misunderstood; for even now there are those who rate it as scoffing and scurrilous, whereas its tone throughout is noble and reverent, and some of the doctrines which it teaches are now recognised as not inimical to religion.”

Brailsford, of a more picturesque turn of phrase, says that “slave-owners, ex-royalists, and the fanatics of orthodoxy” were against him, and adds: 

“...  The grandsons of the Puritan Colonists who had flogged Quaker women as witches denied him a place on the stage-coach, lest an offended God should strike it with lightning.”

The state of New York, in a really surprising burst of generosity, presented him a farm in New Rochelle, and then, lest he imagine the Government too grateful, took away his right to vote there.  They offered the flimsy excuse that he was a French citizen,—­which, of course, he wasn’t,—­but it was all part of the persecution inspired by organised bigotry and the resentful conservative interests which he had so long and so unflaggingly attacked.

And so at last to Greenwich Village!  Though I cannot engage that we shall not step out of it before we are through.

Thomas Paine was old and weary with his arduous and honourable years when he came to live in the little frame house on Herring Street, kept by one Mrs. Ryder.

John Randel, Jr., engineer to the Commissioners who were at work re-cutting New York, has given us this picture of Paine: