,
would not have interested me with the unabated ardor it did. It was to
bring forward and establish a representative system of government. As
the work itself will show, that was the leading principle with me in
writing that work, and all my other works during the progress of the
revolution, and I followed the same principle in writing in English the
'Rights of Man.'

"After the failure of the 5 percent duty recommended by congress to pay
the interest of the loan to be borrowed in Holland, I wrote to
Chancellor Livingston, then minister for foreign affairs, and Robert
Morris, minister of finance, and proposed a method for getting over the
difficulty at once, which was by adding a continental legislature which
should be empowered to make laws for the whole union instead of
recommending them. So the method proposed met with their future
probation. I held myself in reserve to take a step up whenever a
direct occasion occurred.

"In a conversation afterward with Gov. Clinton, of New York, now
vice-president, it was judged that for the purpose of my going fully
into the subject, and to prevent any misconstruction of my motive or
object, it would be best that I received nothing from congress, but to
leave it to the states individually to make the what acknowledgement
they pleased. The State of New York presented me with a farm which
since my return to America, I have found it necessary to sell, and the
State of Pennsylvania voted me L500 of their currency, but none of the
states to the east of New York, or the south of Pennsylvania, have made
me the least acknowledgment. They had received benefits from me which
they accepted, and there the matter ended. This story will not tell
well in history. All the civilized world knows I have been of great
service to the United States, and have generously given away that which
would easily have made me a fortune. I much question if an instance is
to be found in ancient or modern times of a man who had no personal
interest in the case to take up that of the establishment of a
representative government and who sought neither place nor office after
it was established; that pursued the same undeviating principles that I
had for more than thirty years, and that in spite of dangers,
difficulties, and inconveniences of which I have had my share.--Thomas
Paine"

An old man in Pennsylvania told me once that his father hired a old
revolutionary soldier by the name of Thomas Martin to