became the key to the political opinions of John Randolph. With him Edmund Burke was the great master of political philosophy.

CHAPTER XI.

SMALL BEGINNINGS EDMUND BURKE THOMAS PAINE.

SOON after the adjournment of Congress, the 4th of March, 1791, General Washington left the seat of government, and commenced his tour through the Southern States. The secretaries at the head of the different departments, were left as a kind of committee to conduct affairs in his absence.

About this time the public mind began to be greatly agitated not only by the wonderful events of the French Revolution, but the various speculations on those extraordinary occurrences that daily teemed from our own political press. The two leading productions, that were held up on both sides as setting forth most clearly and fully the views they respectively entertained, proceeded from men who were well and favorably known in America as the friends of liberty.

Edmund Burke had not only defended the colonies, in the British Parliament, against the unjust and oppressive taxation of the ministry, but had nobly vindicated their character and their motives. Throughout America his name was venerated and beloved. Well might he exclaim, "I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any man, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause in the whole course of my public conduct."

Thomas Paine was in America during the struggle of the Colonies for independence, and greatly aided the cause by his spirited and patriotic essays. It was generally conceded that in the darkest hour of the Revolution, when our armies were disbanded, and the hearts of the people despondent, he helped to rally the one, and to animate the other by his bold and patriotic appeals. The first men of the nation forgot his many vices, and cherished his person and his reputation in grateful remembrance of his valuable services.

General Washington was his constant correspondent while abroad, and while in America the house of Jefferson was his home.

In the great struggle for liberty which had now commenced on the other side of the Atlantic, these two champions of the cause took opposite sides. Burke expressed a hearty wish that France might be animated by a spirit of rational liberty, and provide a permanent body in which that spirit might reside, and an effectual organ by which it might act; but, he said, it was his misfortune to entertain great doubts concerning several material points in their late transactions. Paine, on the other hand, had no doubts; inflamed by the spirit of liberty, suddenly burst forth in the hearts of the French people, and dazzled by its brilliant achievements, he threw himself warmly into the popular cause without knowing or caring for the consequences.

The habits, education, social position, and natural temperament of the two men led to this wide difference. Burke had been long trained in the school of experience, Paine was the mere speculative theorist. The one judged of the future by the past, the other projected the future not from the solid ground of experience, but the hopeful theories of his own sanguine imagination. Burke was the cautious statesman, Paine the enthusiastic patriot.

The statesman cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances which with some pass for nothing, give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Burke was guided by this great political maxim, the truth of which he had been taught by long experience. "I must be tolerably sure," said he, "before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well distributed revenue, with

morality and religion, with solidity and property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate insulated private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions, they have little or no experience. Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too coufident a security."

Paine, on the other hand, with all the inexperienced statesmen of France, followed a transcendental idea. He saw a great and powerful nation burst the oppressive and galling fetters of feudal ages, and proclaim themselves a free people. With all the lovers of mankind through the world, he lifted up his hands and clapped for joy. He beheld the event and rejoiced. But how this new power might be used by the new men, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions he had no experience, he did not stop to inquire; he did not consult the maxims of prudence, or the principles of reason, but obeyed the impulses of a warm, enthusiastic and patriotic heart. Dictated by such a spirit, his writings might serve to animate, but not to instruct, to inspire a kindred enthusiasm, but to afford no nourishment to the hungering mind. They have perished with the occasion that gave them birth, while the immortal truths scattered as gems through the writings of Edmund Burke, are set like stars in the firmament for lights and guides to mankind.

Burke wrote his reflections on the Revolution in France in the month of May, 1790; and some short time thereafter gave them to the public. Paine's answer, entitled the Rights of Man, soon followed. The first and only copy of this latter production made its appearance in Philadelphia about the first of May, 1791; it was in the hands of Beckley. He lent the pamphlet to Mr. Jefferson, with a request, that when he should have read it, he would send it to Smith the printer, who wished it for re-publication. As he was a stranger to Smith, Mr. Jefferson, in sending the pamphlet, wrote him a note, stating why he, a stranger, had sent it, namely, that Mr.

Beckley had desired it; and, to take off a little of the dryness of a note, he added, that he was glad to find it was to be reprinted, that something would at length be publicly said against the political heresies which had lately sprung up amongst us, and that he did not doubt our citizens would rally again around the standard of Common Sense. In these allusions, Mr. Jefferson had reference to the Discourses on Davila, which had filled Fenno's paper for a twelvemonth without contradiction. Mr. Adams, the Vice-President, was the reputed author of those Discourses. When the reprint of Paine's pamphlet appeared, it had prefixed to it the note of Mr. Jefferson, which the printer had appended without giving him the slightest intimation of such an intention. In this unexpected way was the leader of the new and rising Democratic Party identified with the political doctrines of Paine, the principles of the French Revolution, and made publicly to avow his hostility to the political heresies which had lately sprung up in our own country. In addition to this, Paine's pamphlet, though without authority, had been dedicated to General Washington. The pamphlet, accompanied with these circumstances, produced a considerable excitement in the political circles of Philadelphia. Major Beckwith, an unofficial British agent, made it a subject of formal complaint to the private secretary of the President. He expressed surprise that the pamphlet should be dedicated to the President of the United States, and averred that it had received the unequivocal official sanction of the Secretary of State, not as Mr. Jefferson, but as the Secretary of State.

On the other hand, Mr. Adams was not slow in declaring his opposition to the sentiments expressed in Paine's pamphlet. In the most pointed manner, he expressed his detestation of the book and its tendency. "I was at the Vice-President's house," says the private secretary, writing to General Washington, "and while there, the Doctor and Mrs. Rush came in. The conversation turned on this book, and Dr. Rush asked the Vice-President what he thought of it. After a little hesitation, he laid his hand upon his breast, and said in a very solemn manner, 'I detest that book and its tendency, from the bottom of my heart.'"

Mr. Jefferson, in writing to the President about the same time, says: "Paine's answer to Burke's pamphlet begins to produce some squibs in our public papers. In Fenno's paper they are Burkites;

in the others, they are Painites. One of Fenno's was evidently from the author of the Discourses on Davila. I am afraid the indiscretion of a printer has committed me with my friend Mr. Adams, for whom, as one of the most honest and disinterested men alive, I have a cordial esteem, increased by long habits of concurrence in opinion in the days of his republicanism; and ever since his apostasy to hereditary monarchy and nobility, though we differ, we differ as friends. should do.

"Mr. Adams will unquestionably take to himself the charge of political heresy, as conscious of his own views of drawing the present government to the form of the English constitution, and, I fear, will consider me as meaning to injure him in the public eye. I certainly never made a secret of my being anti-monarchical, and anti-aristocratical; but I am sincerely mortified to be thus brought foward on the public stage, where to remain, to advance, or to retire, will be equally against my love of silence and quiet, and my abhorrence of dispute."

We have given the minute history of this transaction, not only because of its important bearing on the subject of this memoir, but because it traces up to the fountain head one of the many streams which, flowing together in after times, have conspired to swell the mighty tide of party spirit that now sweeps through the land.

John Randolph was in Philadelphia during this time; participated in the interest and excitement of the occasion; heard the discussions in the various circles into which he was freely admitted; saw people become inflamed with the Anglomania or the Gallomania, and arrange themselves under the banners of their respective champions as Burkites or Painites, according as they were inclined to admire the British Constitution, or the more free and levelling doctrines of the French Revolution, and plainly perceived that that great event was destined to swallow up every minor consideration, and to give character and complexion to the politics of his own country. But while he was a democratic republican, a follower of Jefferson in all that pertained to his political doctrines and interpretation of the Constitution, pre-eminently a disciple of the Mason and Henry school of States' rights, yet he did not become a Painite in the sense that term was used by Mr. Jefferson. In the expressive language of Governor Tazewell, he could not bear Tom Paine; he ad