A very important part of Paine's answer was that which related to the United States. Burke, the most famous defender of American revolutionists, was anxious to separate their movement from that in France. Paine, with ample knowledge, proved how largely the uprising in France was due to the training of Lafayette and other French officers in America, and to the influence of Franklin, who was "not the diplomatist of a court, but of man." He also drew attention to the effect of the American State Constitutions, which were a grammar of liberty.* He points out that under this transatlantic influence French liberalism had deviated from the line of its forerunners,--from Montesquieu, "obliged to divide himself between principle and prudence"; Voltaire, "both the flatterer and satirist of despotism"; Rousseau, leaving "the mind in love with an object without describing the means of possessing it"; Turgot, whose maxims are directed to "reform the administration of government rather than the government itself." To these high praise is awarded, but they all had to be filtered through America. * Dr. Franklin had these constitutions translated, and presented them in a finely bound volume to the King. According to Paine, who must have heard it from Franklin, Vergennes resisted their publication, but was obliged to give way to public demand. Paine could not allude to the effect of his own work, "Common Sense," which may have been the more effective because its argument against monarchy was omitted from the translation. But his enemies did not fail to credit his pen with the catastrophes in France. John Adams declares that the Constitution of Pennsylvania was ascribed wrongly to Franklin; it was written by Paine and three others; Turgot, Condorcet, and the Duke de la Rochefoucauld were enamored of it, and two of them "owed their final and fatal catastrophe to this blind love" (Letter to S. Perley, June 19, 1809). Whence Cheetham. dwelling on the enormity of the "single representative assembly," queries: "May not Paine's constitution of Pennsylvania have been the cause of the tyranny of Robespierre?" And it goes without saying that it was not the reactionary America with which John Adams and Gouverneur Morris had familiarized Burke. "The Rights of Man" was the first exposition of the republicanism of Jefferson, Madison, and Edmund Randolph that ever appeared. And as this republicanism was just then in deadly struggle with reaction, the first storm raised by Paine's book occurred in America. It was known in America that Paine was about to beard the British lion in his den, and to expectant ears the roar was heard before its utterance.