e
last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing; but government
even in its best state is a necessary evil.... Government, like dress,
is the badge of our lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on
the ruins of the bowers of paradise."

That was the familiar pessimism which led in practical politics to
_laissez faire_, and in speculation to Godwin's philosophic anarchism.
Paine himself seems for a moment to take that road. He enjoys telling us
how well the American colonies managed in the early stages of the war
without any regular form of government. He assures us that "the more
perfect civilisation is, the less occasion has it for government." But
he had served an apprenticeship to life; looking around him at the
streets filled with beggars and the jails crowded with poor men, he
suddenly forgets that the whole purpose of government is to secure the
individual against the invasion of his rights, and straightway bursts
into a new definition:--"Civil government does not consist in
executions; but in making such provision for the instruction of youth
and the support of age as to exclude as much as possible profligacy from
the one and despair from the other. Instead of this the resources of a
country are lavished upon kings ... and the poor themselves are
compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them."

It is amazing how much good Paine can extract from a necessary evil. He
has suddenly conceived of government as the instrument of the social
conscience. He means to use it as a means of securing a better
organisation of society. Paine was a man of action, and no mere logic
could hold him. He proceeds in a breathless chapter to evolve a
programme of social reform which, after the slumbers of a century, his
Radical successors have just begun to realise. Some hints came to him
from Condorcet, but most of these daringly novel ideas sprang from
Paine's own inventive brain, and all of them are presented by the
whilom exciseman, with a wealth of financial detail, as if he were a
Chancellor of the Exchequer addressing the first Republican Parliament
in the year One of Liberty. He would break up the poor laws, "these
instruments of civil torture." He has saved the major part of the cost
of defence by a naval alliance with the other Sea Powers, and the
abolition of capture at sea. Instead of poor relief he would give a
subsidy to the children of the very poor, and pensions to the aged. Four
pounds a year for ev