In the letter to Washington, partially unjust as it is in view of the fact that Gouverneur Morris and not Washington was responsible for the failure to save Paine from prison in France, as we now know, thanks to Moncure Conway, but which Paine did _not_ know,--in this letter, I say, will be found the most terrible arraignment of the constitution ever penned. We who are Anarchists are called traitors for much calmer talk. Yet here was the man "whose pen had done more for the revolution than Washington's sword," as his bitterest enemy declared; who believed heart and soul in the republic, who had given his money and his substance and taken the chances of his life in battle for it; the man whose devotion to America could not be gainsaid; this man declared that the American constitution was the mirror of the most vicious features of the British constitution, a fecund soil for monopolies with all their ills. It is we who experience those ills, we who know what a gigantic tool of oppression the constitution and the cumbersome machinery of the lawmaking power have become. Yet probably even we do not feel so keenly as he the fatal blunder; for while we know how it grinds us in our flesh and souls, rears its prisons and scaffolds for us, we have had the yoke about our necks always,--while he _had once seen_ the country free. He had been through all the battle, had fought his fight and won his victory, only to see it lost through cowardice of thought. That was indeed bitter; and it is that bitter outcry against this sacrifice which marks Paine out among most of his time for influence on future history. The fact that he was the initiator of the direct movement for political independence in America, in the famous meeting where Adams, Franklin and Washington all shrank from uttering the thought heavy upon their souls, is a matter of past history. The fact that he was the one man in America to write the right thing at the right time, his voice the wind to sweep the scattering flames of insubordination and revolt into the conflagration of revolution; the fact that he proposed and headed with the whole contents of his purse the subscription to save the army when even Washington was in despair at the prospect of mutiny and desertion among the soldiers; the fact that he raised all the feeling possible against the fiction of divine rights and so got himself hunted out of England; the fact that he took the most active part possible in aiding the work of the French revolutionists, which he believed would be the beginning of the breakdown of monarchy throughout Europe and the building up either of one universal continental republic or a confederation of sister republics; the fact that he was the one man in the convention who dared to stand for the life of Louis the XVI, and thereby got himself suspected, thrown into prison, and condemned to death--all these facts are of import in reading the character of the man, and in comprehending