AS CLEAR AS A RAY OF LIGHT

TOM PAINE'S PATH.

You have been promised Thomas Paine’s Letter to George Washington and it is coming soon. The editing of this work has proven a bit more challenging than first anticipated, so your patience is requested. It is coming. Meanwhile:

When Thomas Paine returned from France to the United States in 1802 after nearly losing his life in the French Revolution, he found matters at home to be - putting it lightly - not as well as hoped. The rot that now penetrates nearly every aspect of American life had already stained the republic; and he knew it. He wrote eight letters To the Citizens of the United States in which he described what he saw and appealed to his fellow citizens to once again awaken to the crisis. Here is just a brief sample from the fourth of those letters - to you - that encapsulates Paine’s style and appeal. THANK YOU for your patience, your kind attention, and comments:


“In my publications, I follow the rule I began with in Common Sense, that is, to consult nobody, nor to let any body see what I write till it appears publicly. Were I to do otherwise, the case would be, that between the timidity of some, who are so afraid of doing wrong that they never do right, the puny judgment of others, and the despicable craft of preferring expedient to right, as if the world was a world of babies in leading strings, I should get forward with nothing. My path is a right line, as straight and clear to me as a ray of light. The boldness (if they will have it to be so) with which I speak on any subject, is a compliment to the judgment of the reader. It is like saying to him, I treat you as a man and not as a child. With respect to any worldly object, as it is impossible to discover any in me, therefore what I do, and my manner of doing it, ought to be ascribed to a good motive.
Thomas Paine to the Citizens of the United States
Letter IV