The Writings of Thomas Paine, Complete: With Index to Volumes I - IVPaine, Thomas
History
The Writings of Thomas Paine, Complete: With Index to Volumes I - IV
Paine, Thomas
Political science
story known, and to inform him, that in case of that natural extinction
to which all mortality is subject, Kings may again be had from Normandy,
on more reasonable terms than William the Conqueror; and consequently,
that the good people of England, at the revolution of 1688, might have
done much better, had such a generous Norman as this known their wants,
and they had known his. The chivalric character which Mr. Burke so much
admires, is certainly much easier to make a bargain with than a hard
dealing Dutchman. But to return to the matters of the constitution: The
French Constitution says, There shall be no titles; and, of consequence,
all that class of equivocal generation which in some countries is called
"aristocracy" and in others "nobility," is done away, and the peer is
exalted into the Man.
Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title. The thing is
perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the
human character, which degrades it. It reduces man into the diminutive
of man in things which are great, and the counterfeit of women in things
which are little. It talks about its fine blue ribbon like a girl, and
shows its new garter like a child. A certain writer, of some antiquity,
says: "When I was a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a
man, I put away childish things."
It is, properly, from the elevated mind of France that the folly of
titles has fallen. It has outgrown the baby clothes of Count and Duke,
and breeched itself in manhood. France has not levelled, it has exalted.
It has put down the dwarf, to set up the man. The punyism of a senseless
word like Duke, Count or Earl has ceased to please. Even those who
possessed them have disowned the gibberish, and as they outgrew the
rickets, have despised the rattle. The genuine mind of man, thirsting
for its native home, society, contemns the gewgaws that separate him
from it. Titles are like circles drawn by the magician's wand, to
contract the sphere of man's felicity. He lives immured within the
Bastille of a word, and surveys at a distance the envied life of man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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