_Thomas Paine._--As the bitter events of 1775 rapidly unfolded themselves, not a few Americans became convinced that there was no true solution of the trouble except in that very independence which they had but a short time before dreaded and denounced. Of such Americans, Thomas Paine was one; and towards the end of the year, through incessant communication with the foremost minds in America, he had filled his own mind with the great decisive elements of the case, and was prepared to utter his thought thereon. Early in January, 1776, he did utter it, in the form of a pamphlet, published at Philadelphia, and entitled _Common Sense_,--the first open and unqualified argument in championship of the doctrine of American independence. During the first ten or twelve years of the Revolution, in just one sentiment all persons, Tories and Whigs, seemed perfectly to agree; namely, in abhorrence of the project of separation from the empire. Suddenly, however, and within a period of less than six months, the majority of the Whigs turned completely around, and openly declared for independence, which, before that time, they had so vehemently repudiated. Among the facts necessary to enable us to account for this almost unrivalled political somersault, is that of the appearance of _Common Sense_. This pamphlet was happily named: it undertook to apply common sense to a technical, complex, but most urgent and feverish, problem of constitutional law. In fact, on any other ground than that of common sense, the author of that pamphlet was incompetent to deal with the problem at all; since of law, of political science, and even of English and American history, he was ludicrously ignorant. But for the effective treatment of any question whatsoever that was capable of being dealt with under the light of the broad and rugged intellectual instincts of mankind,--man’s natural sense of truth, of congruity, of fair-play,--perhaps no other man in America, excepting Franklin, was a match for this ill-taught, heady, and slashing English stranger. From the tribunal of technical law, therefore, he carried the case to the tribunal of common sense; and in his plea before that tribunal, he never for a moment missed his point, or forgot his method. The one thing just then to be done was to convince the average American colonist of the period that it would be ridiculous for him any longer to remain an American colonist; that the time had come for him to be an American citizen; that nothing stood in the way of his being so, but the trash of a few pedants respecting the authority of certain bedizened animals called kings; and that, whether he would or no, the alternative was at last thrust into his face upon the point of a bayonet,--either to declare for national independence, and a wide-spaced and resplendent national destiny, or to accept, along with subserviency to England, the bitterness and the infamy of national annihilation.