a thing to be settled by convention." Paine's suggestions for social reform were of little immediate importance, and it was a hundred years before the first of them, a graduated death duty, was passed into law. His value in his own day lay, not in his practical proposals, but in his insistence upon the equal value of individuals in the State. What the Whigs had practised partially and obscurely Paine preached universally and with precision. His _Rights of Man_ was the principal textbook of the new school of politicians, who, by basing their politics upon individuality instead of class, eventually transformed the English theory of government. The Reformers found government the profession of a few families of landed proprietors, at the best prevented from active abuse by an imperfect system of representation of classes. They made it a thing of trust and responsibility, for which every man must prove his competence by his readiness to act directly for the benefit of those whom he governed. They found it an incident in the lives of men of leisure. They made it an expression of the life of men of all ranks alike. Omitting the false historical {118} assumption, there is nothing substantially untrue in Paine's contrast of the old spirit with the new. "Government on the old system was an assumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new, a delegation of power for the common benefit of society."[130] These new principles did not appear on the surface of politics until forty years later, and not a single institution was in the interval altered in the direction of Liberalism. The Whig Opposition broke into pieces, and the majority joined the Tories.[131] The Church of England found itself for once allied with the Wesleyans, whose Christianity was as much repelled by Paine's _Age of Reason_ as its own aristocratic temper was repelled by his _Rights of Man_. The governing class was driven into a paroxysm of fear and rage by Paine's triple assault on aristocracy, property, and orthodox religion, and every Conservative instinct was roused in its defence. Every Reformer, moderate and extreme, was involved together in one denunciation. Their opinions admittedly came from France, and every atrocity which had taken place in France was due to those opinions. Voltaire was an atheist. Rousseau was a profligate. The French aristocracy had been massacred. The French Church had been stripped of its possessions. The French landed proprietors had been spoiled. All this had been done in the name of the rights of man. The English Reformers believed in the rights of man. These had been proved by events in France to be incompatible with law, order, religion, and morality. All who valued these must unite in their defence against the deadly opinions. Belief in the rights of man marked an Englishman like a contagious disease. Atheists, Theists, and Christians, Trinitarians and Unitarians, Churchmen and Dissenters, Reformers, Radicals,