Mr. Cheetham wrote the life of Paine to gratify his malice and to support religion. He was prose- cuted for libel--was convicted and fined. Yet the life of Paine written by this man is referred to by the Christian world as the highest authority. As to the personal habits of Mr. Paine, we have the testimony of William Carver, with whom he lived; of Mr. Jarvis, the artist, with whom he lived; of Mr. Staple, with whom he lived; of Mr. Purdy, who was a tenant of Paine's; of Mr. Burger, with whom he was intimate; of Thomas Nixon and Captain Daniel Pelton, both of whom knew him well; of Amasa Woodsworth, who was with him when he died; of John Fellows, who boarded at the same house; of James Wilburn, with whom he boarded; of B. F. Haskin, a lawyer, who was well acquainted with him and called upon him during his last illness; of Walter Morton, a friend; of Clio Rickman, who had known him for many years; of Willet and Elias Hicks, Quakers, who knew him in- timately and well; of Judge Herttell, H. Margary, Elihu Palmer, and many others. All these testified to the fact that Mr. Paine was a temperate man. In those days nearly everybody used spirituous liquors. Paine was not an exception; but he did not drink to excess. Mr. Lovett, who kept the City Hotel where 478 Paine stopped, in a note to Caleb Bingham, declared that Paine drank less than any boarder he had. Against all this evidence you produce the story of Grant Thorburn--the story of the Rev. J. D. Wick- ham that an elder in his church told him that Paine was a drunkard, corroborated by the Rev. Charles Hawley, and an extract from Lossing's history to the same effect. The evidence is overwhelmingly against you. Will you have the fairness to admit it? Your witnesses are merely the repeaters of the false- hoods of James Cheetham, the convicted libeler. After all, drinking is not as bad as lying. An honest drunkard is better than a calumniator of the dead. "A remnant of old mortality, drunk, bloated and half asleep" is better than a perfectly sober defender of human slavery. To become drunk is a virtue compared with steal- ing a babe from the breast of its mother. Drunkenness is one of the beatitudes, compared with editing a religious paper devoted to the defence of slavery upon the ground that it is a divine insti- tution. Do you really think that Paine was a drunken beast when he wrote "Common Sense"--a pamphlet that aroused three millions of people, as people were never aroused by a pamphlet before? Was he a 479 drunken beast when he wrote the "Crisis"? Was it to a drunken beast that the following letter was addressed: Rocky Hill, September 10, 1783.