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courts as a restraint on the executive. Paine did not see the
necessity of separating the legislature and the judiciary, and
professed to believe that there was only one important divi-
sion - 'that of legislating or enacting laws, and that of execut-
ing or administering them'. (As we have seen, he was to
rapidly alter this opinion when confronted with majoritarian
bullying in the French Assembly.)
Paine also opposed the concept of two 'houses' for the
passage of legislation, and favoured a unicameral parliament.
(He had made the same recommendation in Common Sense
during the American revolution, to the great ire of John
Adams, who never forgave him for it.) Of the bicameral
system it could not be 'proved', he said, 'on the principles of
just representation, that either should be wiser or better than
the other.' That may well have been true, and could still be
true, but the principle is the same - that no sudden rush of
passion or prejudice should overwhelm the legislature
without the chance of a review or a reconsideration. Paine
seemed to concede this very point, when he proposed a divi-
sion by lot of the single house into three segments that would
individually debate any proposed bill before reuniting for a
final and deciding vote. Along with his proposal for triannual
elections and the replacement of one third of parliament's
membership every year, this quasi-utopian scheme seems
also to have been subjected to revision in his mind after his
experience in France. It survives to this day, in the effort to
discipline or restrain elected representatives by means of 're-
selection' in Britain or 'term limitation' in the United States.
R I G H T S OF M A N I 1 1 8
(It also affords, if one ignores the limited electorate of the time
and the existence of a hereditary house of peers, an almost
perfect contrast with Edmund Burke's Letter to the electors of
Bristol, which insists that a member is not a delegate.)
The next stage of Part Two of Rights of Man shows Paine to be
an early supporter of free enterprise and social democracy, as
well as a bit of a utilitarian. He proposes, in words that Adam
Smith could have approved, that empire is foolish because 'the
expense of maintaining dominion more than absorbs the profit
of any trade'. He points out, in terms that John Maynard Keynes
could also have approved, that war and conquest in Europe
were likewise futile, since the ruin of another country will
inevitably help to bankrupt one's own. 'When the ability in any
nation to buy is destroyed, it equally involves the seller.' That
phrase might encapsulate Keynes's Economic Consequences of the
Peace. Finally, Paine insists in straight Benthamite terms that
'Whatever the form or constitution of government might be, it
ought to have no other object than the general happiness'.
In his exaltation of commerce and free trade over feudalism,
he not only seconded Adam Smith and anticipated the later
classical school, but also anticipated Karl Marx, who viewed
capitalism as a revolutionary force that would tear traditional
obedience and hierarchy to shreds. In a celebrated piece of
what we might call ancient English deference, Burke had
written stirringly of the great estates and their proprietors, and
their claim to be the guarantors of 'manly, moral, regulated
liberty'. As opposed to this rural grandeur, what were the radi-
cals but a noisome pest?
119 ' R I G H T S OF M A N , P A R T T W O
Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the
field ring with their importunate chink, while thousands of
great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak,
chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those
who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field... or
that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled,
meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of
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the hour.
Paine had nothing but impatience with this sneering
assertion of rustic stability, of the sort which used to be a
centrepiece of the Tory imagery of 'the shires', and he had an
insect metaphor of his own. It was absurd for Burke to speak
of 'the pillar of the landed interest':
Were that pillar to sink into the earth, the same landed prop-
erty would continue, and the same ploughing, sowing and
reaping would go on. The aristocracy are not the farmers
who work the land, and raise the produce, but are the mere
consumers of the rent; and when compared with the active
world are the drones, a seraglio of males, who neither
collect the honey nor form the hive, but exist only for lazy
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enjoyment.
This took up the traditional cry of the English radical,
which was to endure from Wat Tyler to the days of Lloyd
George, that the land could self-evidently not be the product
of any one class's genius or otherwise, but was instead the
R I G H T S OF M A N I 1 2 0
common means by which all could make a living. It was noto-
rious that hardship and poverty were widespread in rural
areas, where the means to feed and clothe and nurture many
people already existed. Rebecca West once observed that one
of the great failures of human civilization has been its refusal
to pay proper attention, or a proper wage, to those who
perform the hard but essential primary task of growing our
food. Paine did not propose anything on the order of national-
ization or collectivization, but he did advance a plan for the
amelioration of poverty and want.
Painstaking, charted and laid out in statistical tables, it
showed that his time as an excise-man had not been wasted.
But, these pages are now rather tedious to read, because they
take the then-current estimates of population, and because
they calculate government taxes and revenues and outgoings
in the monetary values that then obtained. All we need to
know is that Paine proposed the abolition of the existing Poor
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