The services of Thomas Paine to the American cause cannot, at this distance of time, be estimated by any records of them, nor by his printed works. They are best measured in the value set on them by the great leaders most cognizant of them,--by Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Robert Morris, Chancellor Livingston, R. H. Lee, Colonel Laurens, General Greene, Dickinson. Had there been anything dishonorable or mercenary in Paine's career, these are the men who would have known it; but their letters are searched in vain for even the faintest hint of anything disparaging to his patriotic self-devotion during those eight weary years. Their letters, however, already quoted in these pages, and others omitted, show plainly that they believed that all the States owed Paine large "returns (as Madison wrote to Washington) of gratitude for voluntary services," and that these services were not merely literary. Such was the verdict of the men most competent to pass judgment on the author, the soldier, the secretary. It can never be reversed. To the radical of to-day, however, Paine will seem to have fared pretty well for a free lance; and he could now beat all his lances into bridge iron, without sparing any for the wolf that had haunted his door. {1785} CHAPTER XV. PONTIFICAL AND POLITICAL INVENTIONS Paine was the literary lion in New York--where Congress sat in 1785--and was especially intimate with the Nicholsons, whose house was the social _salon_ of leading republicans.* One may easily read between the lines of the following note to Franklin that the writer is having "a good time" in New York, where it was written September 23d: * "Commodore Nicholson was an active republican politician in the city of New York, and his house was a headquarters for the men of his way of thinking. The young ladies' letters are full of allusions to the New York society of that day, and to calls from Aaron Burr, the Livingstons, the Clintons, and many others.... An other man still more famous in some respects was a frequent visitor at their house. It is now almost forgotten that Thomas Paine, down to the time of his departure for Europe in 1787, was a fashionable member of society, admired and courted as the greatest literary genius of his day.... Here is a little autograph, found among the papers of Mrs. Gallatin [née Nicholson]; its address is to: 'Miss Hannah N., at the Lord knows where.--You Mistress Hannah if you don't come home, I 'll come and fetch you. T. Paine.'"--Adams' "Life of Gallatin."