With all its crudities of thought, its superficiality, and its rashness of assertion, _Common Sense_ is a masterly pamphlet; for in the elements of its strength it was precisely fitted to the hour, to the spot, and to the passions of men. Even its smattering of historical lore, and its cheap display of statistics, and its clumsy attempts at some sort of political philosophy, did not diminish the homage with which it was read by the mass of the community, who were even less learned and less philosophical than Paine, and who, at any rate, cared much more just then for their imperilled rights, than they did either for philosophy or for learning. The immediate practical effects of this pamphlet in America, and the celebrity which it soon acquired in Europe as well as in America, are a significant part of its history as a potential literary document of the period. In every impassioned popular discussion there is likely to spring up a leader, who with pen or voice strikes in, at just the right moment, with just the right word, so skilfully, so powerfully, that thenceforward the intellectual battle seems to be raging and surging around him and around the fiery word which he has sent shrilling through the air. So far as the popular discussion of American independence is concerned, precisely this was the case, between January and July, 1776, with Thomas Paine and his pamphlet _Common Sense_. Within three months from the date of its first issue, at least 120,000 copies of it were sold in America alone. By that time, the pamphlet seemed to be in every one’s hand and the theme of every one’s talk. Noble-minded and important as were the various services rendered by Paine to the American cause, on sea and land, in office and field, they could in no way be compared, as contributions to the success of the Revolution, with the work which he did during those same imperilled years merely as a writer, and especially as the writer of _The Crisis_. Between December, 1776, when the first pamphlet of that series was published, down to December, 1783, when the last one left the printer’s hands, this indomitable man produced no less than sixteen pamphlets under the same general title, adapting his message in each case to the supreme need of the hour, and accomplishing all this literary labour in a condition of actual poverty.