" As indispensable to a
future of prosperity and dignity, he warmly recommends the Union. "I
ever feel myself hurt," he says, "when I hear the Union, that great
Palladium of our liberty and safety, the least irreverently spoken of.
It is the most sacred thing in the Constitution of America, and that
which every man should be most proud and tender of." Thus he
anticipated by seventy-five years our "Union-savers" of 1856, few of
whom dreamed that their pet phrases, or something very like them,
originated with Thomas Paine.
The war left Paine no richer than it found him. He had made fame, but
no money, by his writings. None of the proceeds of large editions had
enriched his purse. He had an exalted ideal of an author's duty when
his work is on political subjects. Louis Blanc has written somewhere,
"_Le journalisme est un sacerdoce._" This seems to have been Paine's
thought, although he may not have expressed it so sonorously,--for
there are no phrase-makers like the French. But Paine went, we suspect,
much farther than Louis Blanc; for he held that the priest ought to
take no pay for his ministrations. And he acted up to this unusual
theory in literary ethics. If he took out a copyright, he gave it away
to some public use.
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