* Professor John Fiske (whose "American Revolution" suffers from ignorance of Paine's papers) appreciates the effect of Paine's "Common Sense" but not its cause. He praises the pamphlet highly, but proves that he has only glanced at it by his exception: "The pamphlet is full of scurrilous abuse of the English people; and resorts to such stupid arguments as the denial of the English origin of the Americans" (i., p. 174). Starting with the principle that the cause of America is "the cause of all mankind," Paine abuses no people, but only their oppressors. As to Paine's argument, it might have appeared less "stupid" to Professor Fiske had he realized that in Paine's mind negroes were the equals of whites. However, Paine does not particularly mention negroes; his argument was meant to carry its point, and it might have been imprudent for him, in that connection, to have classed the slaves with the Germans, who formed a majority in Pennsylvania, and with the Dutch of New York. In replying to the "Mother-Country" argument it appears to me far from stupid to point out that Europe is our parent country, and that if English descent made men Englishmen, the descendants of William the Conqueror and half the peers of England were Frenchmen, and, if the logic held, should be governed by France. General Greene in a gossipy letter to his wife (November 2d) says: "Common Sense (Thomas Paine) and Colonel Snarl, or Cornwell, are perpetually wrangling about mathematical problems." On November 20th came the surprise of Fort Lee; the boiling kettles and baking ovens of a dinner to be devoured by the British were abandoned, with three hundred tents, for a retreat made the more miserable by hunger and cold. By November 22d the whole army had retreated to Newark, where Paine began writing his famous first _Crisis_.* * Sec Almon's Remembrancer, 1777, p. 28, for Paine's graphic journal of this retreat, quoted from the Pennsylvania Journal. In reply to those who censured the retreat as pusillanimous, he states that "our army was at one time less than a thousand effective men and never more than 4,000," the pursuers being "8,000 exclusive of their artillery and light horse"; he declares that posterity will call the retreat "glorious--and the names of Washington and Fabius will run paralell to eternity." In the Pennsylvania Packet (March 20, 1779) Paine says: "I had begun the first number of the Crisis while on the retreat, at Newark, with a design of publishing it in the Jersies, as it was General Washington's intention to have made a stand at Newark, could he have been timely reenforced; instead of which nearly half the army left him at that place, or soon after, their time being out."