第34章

I am, Sir, with every wish for an honorable peace, Your friend, enemy, and countryman, COMMON SENSE.To The Inhabitants Of America - Thomas Paine To The Inhabitants Of America TO THE INHABITANTS OF AMERICA.WITH all the pleasure with which a man exchanges bad company for good, I take my leave of Sir William and return to you.It is now nearly three years since the tyranny of Britain received its first repulse by the arms of America.A period which has given birth to a new world, and erected a monument to the folly of the old.

I cannot help being sometimes surprised at the complimentary references which I have seen and heard made to ancient histories and transactions.The wisdom, civil governments, and sense of honor of the states of Greece and Rome, are frequently held up as objects of excellence and imitation.Mankind have lived to very little purpose, if, at this period of the world, they must go two or three thousand years back for lessons and examples.We do great injustice to ourselves by placing them in such a superior line.We have no just authority for it, neither can we tell why it is that we should suppose ourselves inferior.

Could the mist of antiquity be cleared away, and men and things be viewed as they really were, it is more than probable that they would admire us, rather than we them.America has surmounted a greater variety and combination of difficulties, than, I believe, ever fell to the share of any one people, in the same space of time, and has replenished the world with more useful knowledge and sounder maxims of civil government than were ever produced in any age before.Had it not been for America, there had been no such thing as freedom left throughout the whole universe.England has lost hers in a long chain of right reasoning from wrong principles, and it is from this country, now, that she must learn the resolution to redress herself, and the wisdom how to accomplish it.

The Grecians and Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty but not the principle, for at the time that they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave the rest of mankind.But this distinguished era is blotted by no one misanthropical vice.In short, if the principle on which the cause is founded, the universal blessings that are to arise from it, the difficulties that accompanied it, the wisdom with which it has been debated, the fortitude by which it has been supported, the strength of the power which we had to oppose, and the condition in which we undertook it, be all taken in one view, we may justly style it the most virtuous and illustrious revolution that ever graced the history of mankind.

A good opinion of ourselves is exceedingly necessary in private life, but absolutely necessary in public life, and of the utmost importance in supporting national character.I have no notion of yielding the palm of the United States to any Grecians or Romans that were ever born.We have equalled the bravest in times of danger, and excelled the wisest in construction of civil governments.

From this agreeable eminence let us take a review of present affairs.The spirit of corruption is so inseparably interwoven with British politics, that their ministry suppose all mankind are governed by the same motives.They have no idea of a people submitting even to temporary inconvenience from an attachment to rights and privileges.Their plans of business are calculated by the hour and for the hour, and are uniform in nothing but the corruption which gives them birth.They never had, neither have they at this time, any regular plan for the conquest of America by arms.They know not how to go about it, neither have they power to effect it if they did know.

The thing is not within the compass of human practicability, for America is too extensive either to be fully conquered or passively defended.But she may be actively defended by defeating or making prisoners of the army that invades her.And this is the only system of defence that can be effectual in a large country.

There is something in a war carried on by invasion which makes it differ in circumstances from any other mode of war, because he who conducts it cannot tell whether the ground he gains be for him, or against him, when he first obtains it.In the winter of 1776, General Howe marched with an air of victory through the Jerseys, the consequence of which was his defeat; and General Burgoyne at Saratoga experienced the same fate from the same cause.The Spaniards, about two years ago, were defeated by the Algerines in the same manner, that is, their first triumphs became a trap in which they were totally routed.And whoever will attend to the circumstances and events of a war carried on by invasion, will find, that any invader, in order to be finally conquered must first begin to conquer.

I confess myself one of those who believe the loss of Philadelphia to be attended with more advantages than injuries.The case stood thus: The enemy imagined Philadelphia to be of more importance to us than it really was; for we all know that it had long ceased to be a port: not a cargo of goods had been brought into it for near a twelvemonth, nor any fixed manufactories, nor even ship-building, carried on in it; yet as the enemy believed the conquest of it to be practicable, and to that belief added the absurd idea that the soul of all America was centred there, and would be conquered there, it naturally follows that their possession of it, by not answering the end proposed, must break up the plans they had so foolishly gone upon, and either oblige them to form a new one, for which their present strength is not sufficient, or to give over the attempt.

We never had so small an army to fight against, nor so fair an opportunity of final success as now.The death wound is already given.