ment, I have not only triumphed over, I have not only beaten your society to the ground; but 1 have silenced all the artillery of that mean and base administration of government, that could espouse and identify itself with such a society. I have brought you all, government, and vice society, into such a state of contemptible weakness, as to be a mere set of play things for me. And I have done this solely upon the virtue of my impiety! I could have done a mere nothing as a politician, without an assault upon religion. I saw this, at an early period of my career, and I have undeviatingly acted upon it, amidst the clamour and frowns of pretended or short-sighted friends, and the abuse, .the virulent abuse, of you and other enemies. I feel my triumph to be complete, and I am justified in shewing it. Basely as I have been treated in this Gaol, by some of your brother villains of the Vice Society and its tools, my imprisonment has been a pleasure to me, a real gratification, and though, at the time of writing this, I have not the least prospect of liberation, I shall look forward to the idea of another six years of imprisonment with the same peace of mind, with which I look back upon the past. I have now completed a moral power that is far more powerful than all the physical power in the hands of the government of this country, and in or out of prison, I shall go on to war my moral power, against that physical power, until I, or they who shall succeed me, shall make all moral alike, and see nothing but moral power the boast of the country.

In your third paragraph, you say:-" Paine's works never did any harm to a candid and well instructed mind, but they have often proved incalculably pernicious to persons whose education or abilities have not qualified them to disentangle the sophistries, or to expose the arts of impiety." If an evil' exists here as you say, all you have to do is to educate all alike. I am very willing to put the works of Paine to this trial. I can suppose, that a mind skilled in all the money making intrigues of Church and State is brassed or steeled against the admonitions of Paine; but where no education existed, the fault would be, that they could not understand his instructions so as to compare system with system. The majority of mankind all over the face of the earth are as ignorant as the cattle of the field, and what is worse, they are corrupted both in body and mind by bad habits and bad social institutions. The object of Thomas Paine was to free this majority of mankind from this thraldrom, and to render them more equal with the mi

nority, by equalizing their knowledge. This is my purpose in republishing and imitating his writings: I disavow all others. This is now proceeding in mechanics' institutions, in schools and discussion societies of every kind, and though they are not directly associated with the name of Paine, they have grown out of his assaults upon monarchy and the christian religion: and they will proceed to the overthrow both of monarchy and the christian religion. I am for trusting every system to the best possible education that can be contrived for mankind, so as free discussion, not monarchial or priestly dictation, be its basis.

The conclusion of your preface tells us, that your authorities in sketching a life of Paine are Cheetham and Cobbett, the former in chief. Now, it is a sufficient answer to all your and their slander, to say, that no sooner did Cheetham's book appear in America, than Mrs. Bonneville brought an action against him for lies and slander, and he was convicted by a Jury, a Jury too not over favourable to Mr. Paine; for, in other cases, he could not find justice from an American Jury, such was the prejudice of ignorance and bigotry against his theological writings. And as to Mr Cobett, though he had never the honesty and manliness to state the why and the wherefore that he wrote such an infamous sketch, such a lying sketch of the character of Thomas Paine, we all know, that he has done something towards an expression of sorrow for it, and has since written himself down a wilful liar, and a man unworthy of being considered an authority for the most simple circumstance. You are welcome even to Cobbett as an authority for any thing which you can find to say against Thomas Paine. They who read both Paine and Cobbett cannot be deceived on that ground. Both Cheetham and Cobbett evidently wrote with bad feeling and without honesty or good intention, in their memoirs of Thomas Paine. As ignorant people make gods and devils, Cheetham and Cobbett took Paine for the devil and sketched, as a pure invention, his character accordingly. Mr. Cobbett now knows, that it can be proved by living testimony the most respectable, that Mr. Paine was uniformly a good and benevolent man, and that his actions every where corresponded with his writings. All the stories about his wretched death bed, you have seen falsified by living witnesses. The very persons to whom you, under the authority of Cheetham, refer, in America, to blacken his character, are ever ready to bear testimony to Mr. Paines's worth and to Cheetham's baseness. Even Carver, who ad

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mits, that he so far forgot himself, as to write that scurrilous letter to Paine, even Carver is living, as the testimony of the real worth of the man whom he slandered; and if Cobbett has redeemed his slander by exhumating the bones of one whom he once vilified, Carver has done a similar act in petitioning the trustees of Mr. Paine, that his body, when dead, may be laid in that grave from whence the bones of so great a man have been taken. Not that I admire Carver for this. It is a piece of that vanity which first led him to make Mr. Paine his guest, then to seek to extort an unjust demand of money from him, and, in failing to do this, to abuse him in a printed letter. As Carver was never worthy of the company of Mr. Paine in life, so he is not worthy to be laid in the same grave. The only fault which 1 can trace in Mr. Paine was, the countenance of, and an association with, such men as Carver. It was here he erred; and this opened the way for all that abuse. which has been poured upon him, which a more select company would have warded off in defiance.

William Carver has sent me a very pompous invitation to come to New York and to partake with him of the best of that best of markets. I shall be very wary how I trespass on the thresholds of such men as William Carver. Mr. Paine was enticed, I could almost say seduced, by a similar invitation, and after being told, that to have him for a guest was solicited as a honour, he found himself shabbily treated; and to crown the whole, at separation, was charged the price of the best boarding houses. This was the real cause of the temporary breach between Thomas Paine and William Carver. I am sorry to have to say a word to the disparagement of William Carver, from whom I have received nothing but kindness and the most flattering eulogy. I would not have said it on any other ground, than that I think, to wipe off the smallest accusation from the character of Thomas Paine, is of sufficient importance to justify the sacrifice of the esteem of a thousand William Carvers.

Where you enter into general charges, that Mr. Paine was dishonest and cruel, I can only meet you with a general denial. In the memoirs written by Rickman and Sherwin, you may find anecdotes to prove his general humanity, and the fact that no man ever suffered a loss by him, that he died in no man's debt and with a small property that had been most temperately used, is answer sufficient to all general and false charges of dishonesty. But where you deal in particulars, such as his resignation of the office of Secretary to

the Committee of Congress for Foreign Affairs, and his arrest in England for a Debt, you can be met with particulars, which bespeak the unsullied honour of him whom you would stain.

In the course of his duties, as Secretary to this Committee, he was attentive and honest enough to detect and expose a breach of trust in one Silas Deane, then on an embassy to some part of Europe. Instead of waiting to have the matter duly laid before Congress, Mr. Paine's zeal, honesty and indignation led him to expose Deane through the news papers. This was called a breach of official etiquette, by the Congress; but it could not be construed into a breach of trust. The Congress censured him for this breach of official etiquette, and, refusing to hear him in answer, Mr. Paine resigned his office. There was no dismissal and he might have held on if he had liked. Subsequently, every thing was proved against Silas Deane, that Mr. Paine had charged, and the abuse of his trust was so glaring, that he was obliged to expatriate himself. Every thing connected with this point redounds to the Honour of Mr. Paine.

His arrest for debt in London is as easily and as honourably to be explained. He banked with an American House in London, under the name of Whiteside and Co. This house failed, and the assignees, perhaps, not knowing bis resources, very unceremoniously arrested him. Two other American Merchants, who did know his resources, came forward instantly to his relief. And what is there in this, more than the best of men are liable to? You state his ar rears with the American House to be £700. I do not know that you are correct; but the sum is nothing and was soon covered. You wonder how he became so much in debt. I wonder not, even if it were double that sum. At that moment, the people of the United States of America had brought on themselves a complete catastrophe, by dealing in that paper money in which it delights and profits you to deal. Remittances were with difficulty obtained and all was stagnation. Mr. Paine, on coming to England, first settled an annuity on his mother. This was about his first act in England, after the peace with America, that he could visit it safely; and this says a word or two against a disposition to cruelty, inhumanity and dishonesty. Bad men do not trouble themselves much about mothers, even if they be aged, widowed, and poor. His income was never great, never exceeding four or five hundred pound a year,

so careless was he about accumulating property; for he might have been a rich man, by the power of his pen, if he had chosen even to make the most of it in honourable barter. In London, he mingled in the very best company and was even a guest at the table of one of the ministers, in company with Burke, the proof of which I have seen in Burke's hand writing. In such company, it is expensive even to be a guest. But in addition to this, he incurred a great expence in experimenting upon his first modél of an iron bridge. This is quite enough to account for an arrear of £700. The scale on which he made a model of his bridge would have justified such an arrear, as a speculation, and the man who made, or in a similar case will make it, is entitled to his countrys gratitude. Thomas Paine is the father of the Iron Bridge as well as of the American Republics; and every bridge of the kind will by and by exhibit his monument,

I could dispute every slanderous point in your book with a similar explanation, you impute the horrors of the French revolution to the efforts of such men as Mr. Paine. Nothing was ever more falsely asserted. No man opposed and deplored such excesses more than Mr. Paine, and it is the height of villainy to impute to a man, a participation in that in opposition to which he had nearly sacrificed his life. These excesses of the French Revolution have been elsewhere traced to the associations of Freemasons, and nothing of the kind was meant by those who began to direct that revolution. Why did not similar excesses take place in Ame-rica? Why do they not now daily occur there? That is the country to look at, to know the effects of the principles of Paine. There he guided; but the corruptions of the old French Monarchy had generated too great a storm for a political philosopher to act or to move in. Nothing could be well done, until the storm had spent its fury, and then the allied kings made a military despotism a matter of necessity. Paine saw and wept over this: he protested against it and retired to his beloved America, as early as he could find a safe passage, or at the peace of Amiens. Yet, France has gained, with all the excesses of her revolution; and the corrupt creatures, who now again rule her, are making preparations to lay the foundation of a somewhat similar revolution, they are endeavouring to restore those old abuses, which were the first cause of the excesses of the revolution. If such men will not take warning, why should we