=The Growth of Public Sentiment in Favor of Independence.=—­Events were bearing the Americans away from their old position under the British constitution toward a final separation.  Slowly and against their desires, prudent and honorable men, who cherished the ties that united them to the old order and dreaded with genuine horror all thought of revolution, were drawn into the path that led to the great decision.  In all parts of the country and among all classes, the question of the hour was being debated.  “American independence,” as the historian Bancroft says, “was not an act of sudden passion nor the work of one man or one assembly.  It had been discussed in every part of the country by farmers and merchants, by mechanics and planters, by the fishermen along the coast and the backwoodsmen of the West; in town meetings and from the pulpit; at social gatherings and around the camp fires; in county conventions and conferences or committees; in colonial congresses and assemblies.”

[Illustration:  From an old print

THOMAS PAINE]

=Paine’s “Commonsense."=—­In the midst of this ferment of American opinion, a bold and eloquent pamphleteer broke in upon the hesitating public with a program for absolute independence, without fears and without apologies.  In the early days of 1776, Thomas Paine issued the first of his famous tracts, “Commonsense,” a passionate attack upon the British monarchy and an equally passionate plea for American liberty.  Casting aside the language of petition with which Americans had hitherto addressed George III, Paine went to the other extreme and assailed him with many a violent epithet.  He condemned monarchy itself as a system which had laid the world “in blood and ashes.”  Instead of praising the British constitution under which colonists had been claiming their rights, he brushed it aside as ridiculous, protesting that it was “owing to the constitution of the people, not to the constitution of the government, that the Crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey.”

Having thus summarily swept away the grounds of allegiance to the old order, Paine proceeded relentlessly to an argument for immediate separation from Great Britain.  There was nothing in the sphere of practical interest, he insisted, which should bind the colonies to the mother country.  Allegiance to her had been responsible for the many wars in which they had been involved.  Reasons of trade were not less weighty in behalf of independence.  “Our corn will fetch its price in any market in Europe and our imported goods must be paid for, buy them where we will.”  As to matters of government, “it is not in the power of Britain to do this continent justice; the business of it will soon be too weighty and intricate to be managed with any tolerable degree of convenience by a power so distant from us and so very ignorant of us.”