neither councils can prevail on her to think, nor
sufferings awaken her to reason, she must e'en go on, till the honor of
England becomes a proverb of contempt, and Europe dub her the Land of
Fools.

I am, Sir, with every wish for an honorable peace,

Your friend, enemy, and countryman,

COMMON SENSE.

TO THE INHABITANTS OF AMERICA.

WITH all the pleasure with which a man exchanges bad company for good,
I take my leave of Sir William and return to you. It is now nearly three
years since the tyranny of Britain received its first repulse by the
arms of America. A period which has given birth to a new world, and
erected a monument to the folly of the old.

I cannot help being sometimes surprised at the complimentary references
which I have seen and heard made to ancient histories and transactions.
The wisdom, civil governments, and sense of honor of the states of
Greece and Rome, are frequently held up as objects of excellence and
imitation. Mankind have lived to very little purpose, if, at this period
of the world, they must go two or three thousand years back for lessons
and examples. We do great injustice to ourselves by placing them in such
a superior line. We have no just authority for it, neither can we tell
why it is that we should suppose ourselves inferior.

Could the mist of antiquity be cleared away, and men and things be
viewed as they really were, it is more than probable that they would
admire us, rather than we them. America has surmounted a greater variety
and combination of difficulties, than, I believe, ever fell to the share
of any one people, in the same space of time, and has replenished the
world with more useful knowledge and sounder maxims of civil government
than were ever produced in any age before. Had it not been for America,
there had been no such thing as freedom left throughout the whole
universe. England has lost hers in a long chain of right reasoning from
wrong principles, and it is from this country, now, that she must learn
the resolution to redress herself, and the wisdom how to accomplish it.

The Grecians and Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty
but not the principle, for at the time that they were determined not to
be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave the rest of
mankind. But this distinguished era is blotted by no one misanthropical
vice. In short, if the prin