Ella Wheeler Wilcox: "Paine was not only a great author and statesman, but he was distinctly a pioneer, an originator, an inventor and creator. To him we are indebted for many of the world's greatest ideas and reforms." Winwood Reade: "One of Thomas Paine's first productions was an article against slavery." Universal Cyclopedia: "Published in Bradford's _Pennsylvania Journal [Magazine]_ in March, 1775, an article entitled 'African Slavery in America,' which probably hastened the first American Anti-Slavery Society, April 14, 1775." Referring to this article Dr. Conway, one of the apostles of anti-slavery, says: "It is a most remarkable article. Every argument and appeal, moral, religious, military, economic, familiar in our subsequent anti-slavery struggle is here found stated with eloquence and clearness." In the very month that Paine lay down in his last illness there was born the man who was to complete the work he had begun. On the first of January, 1863, Abraham Lincoln pronounced the doom of slavery. In this essay of Paine and in the Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln we have the beginning and the end--the prologue and the epilogue--of the Anti-Slavery drama in America. "It is a significant fact that a paragraph in favor of the abolition of slavery in America, which is surmised to haye been inserted through Paine's influence, in the Declaration of Independence was struck out.... Had Paine's humane suggestion been adopted the United States would have been saved the agony and bloody sweat of the Civil. War."--_Hector Macpherson, Scotland_. "In sorrow and bitterness and bloodshed Lincoln wrought the cure for the evil which Paine tried peacefully to prevent."--_Mrs. Bradlaugh-Bonner, England_. George W. Foote: "In America the first to publicly demand the liberation of the slaves was Thomas Paine. Paine also partly drafted and signed the Act of Pennsylvania abolishing slavery--the first of its kind in the whole of Christendom." Paine was not only the first to advocate the abolition of domestic slavery in America, he was also a pioneer in the movement which secured the abolition of the slave trade in America and Great Britain. When Louisiana demanded statehood with "the right to continue the importation of slaves," from Paine came this stinging rebuke: "Dare you put up a petition to Heaven for such power, without fearing to be struck from the earth by its justice? Why, then, do you ask it of man against man? Do you want to renew in Louisiana the horrors of Domingo?" Alfred E. Fletcher: "Paine was the first man in America to demand freedom for the slave, to urge international arbitration, justice for women and more rational ideas as to marriage and divorce." "In his August (1775) number _[Pennsylvania Magazine]_ is found the earliest American plea for woman."--_Dr. Conway_. "His pen is unmistakable in 'Reflections on Unhappy Marriages' (June 1775)."--_Ibid_.