ns that ever
lived."

Paine was in England in 1787, busy with scientific inventions, popular in
Whig circles and respected. The fall of the Bastille won his applause, as
it did the applause of Fox and the Whigs, but it was not till the
publication of Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France," in 1790,
that Paine again took up his pen on behalf of democracy.

Burke had been the hero of Paine and the Americans in the War of
Independence, and his speeches and writings had justified the republic. And
now it was the political philosophy of Hobbes that Burke seemed to be
contending for when he insisted that the English people were bound for ever
to royalty by the act of allegiance to William III.

Paine replied to Burke the following year with the "Rights of Man" which he
wrote in a country inn, the "Angel," at Islington. It was not so much to
demolish Burke as to give the English nation a constitution that Paine
desired; for it seemed to the author of "Common Sense" that, America having
renounced monarchy and set up a republican form of government, safely
guarded by a written constitution, England must be anxious to do the same
thing, and was only in need of a constitution.

The flamboyant rhetoric of the American Declaration of Independence--"We
hold these truths to be self-evident--that all men are created equal; that
they are endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights; that among these
are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"--was not the sort of
language that appealed to English Whigs (America itself cheerfully admitted
the falseness of the statement by keeping the negro in slavery), and the
glittering generalities of the "Rights of Man" made no impression on the
Whig leaders in Parliament. Paine was back in the old regions of a social
contract, and of a popular sovereignty antecedent to government. It was all
beside the mark, this talk of a popular right inherent in the nation, a
right that gave the power to make constitutional changes not _through_
elected representatives in Parliament, but by a general convention.
Parliament in the sight of the Whigs was the sovereign assembly holding its
authority from the people, and only by a majority in the House of Commons
could the people express its will. What made the "Rights of Man" popular
with the English democrats of the "Constitutional Society" and the
sympathisers with the French Revolution was not so much the old
pre-historic popular "sovereignty"