his nature would have chosen the lonely path; the other half, the zealot, the propagandist, would have cried out, they _must_ go with me; I must do something to make them _go with_ me. Now the secret of Paine's success was that he was so thoroughly at one with himself, he believed so utterly what he preached, he had faith, he hoped, and so strongly that others were drawn to believe and to hope. For spite of all intellectual pride this is the man whom we love and admire; this is the man who overcomes us, who gets his way; this man consistent in himself, who has a remedy for the world's wrongs and hopes _everything_ from it! From the point of vantage of 100 years' experience it is seen that Paine's political creed, like his religious one, will no longer fit. But that does not matter. Neither will ours fit in a hundred years, and none of us, no, not one, is great enough to foresee where the misfit will arise. It is not our business to bear the evils of the thrice unborn upon our necks; nor was it Paine's to bear ours. Yet while not claiming for him the prophetic gift, it is still true that he did see the moral patchwork in our constitution, the trouble of 1812 brewing, and the greater trouble of '61-'65. When he first came to this country he wrote a number of contributions to the _Pennsylvania Magazine_, in one of which he pleaded justice for the negro, basing his plea then as always upon the natural equality of man irrespective of color. Afterwards when the constitution was framed, he objected that nothing had been done for the negro, and in his letters to the American people, written after his imprisonment in France, in which the constitution was caustically reviewed, he cries out again for this yoked man not yet to be freed for more than half a hundred years,--foreseeing that nothing good can in the end come from slavery, that every evil must bring a compensating evil. The soldiers' graves in the National cemeteries, the thousands of limping, haggard tatters and rags of white men attest how well Paine foresaw Time's revenges.