Paine Challenges King George (p398-p404)

(Setting:  Thomas Paine confronts King George with a verbal tirade that recounts the history and terpitude of governmental oppression.  He impulsively declares war on Great Britain when he is finished). 

Franklin started to respond, but Thomas Paine placed a forceful arm across his chest and stepped forward to address the King himself. The King felt another twitch in his curdled brain from the Honcho's reflexive reaction to a Freeman look-alike stepping forward to argue with him. Paine’s jutting jaw and blazing eyes drove home his strident words. "There will be no accommodation! For thousands of years, mankind has accommodated the likes of you, and the result, always and everywhere, has been slavery. With the world’s biggest military to enforce her tyranny, Britain has declared that she has a right not only to tax, but to bind the Americans in all cases whatsoever. If that is not slavery, then there is not such a thing as slavery on earth.

"Cowardice, submission, and accommodation thus far have given the Americans a ravaged country, unsafe habitations, corruption everywhere, slavery without hope, homes turned into barracks and bawdy houses for your soldiers, and a future race to provide for whose fathers they shall doubt of. Let history look on this picture and weep over it!

"The Declaratory Act contained the full grown seeds of the most despotic government in the world. It placed Americans in the lowest state of vassalage, demanding unconditional submission in everything! A congress of men wielding such power over a people, from such distance, with so little accountability, will inevitably make that people mere beasts of burden for their enrichment.

"There are two classes of people...those who pay taxes, and those who live upon the taxes. When taxation is carried to excess, as is happening in America, it disunites these two classes. Parliament, an evil and indolent congress of men, is the most prolific taxation machine ever invented. It has created a leviathan of a government, an overblown monster spewing forth spurious jobs and deadly wars. The taxation required to support you as King is sufficient to feed, house, and clothe entire villages!

"Your greedy ministers thrust their hands into every crevice of American industry, grasping at the spoils of those who produce. This enormous expense and intrusiveness has provoked men to think that governments are evil incarnate. They engage in wars abroad and oppress and usurp at home. Their sole capability is to exhaust the property and resources of the productive world. Governments lavish these stolen resources upon kings, courts, parliaments, congressmen, ministers, and a host of other impostors and prostitutes, such that even the poor must support the fraud that oppresses them.

"It doesn’t matter what form the government takes, for when one government goes out, another comes in, and still the same vices, extravagances, and corruptions occur. Who the ministers are is insignificant, because the defect lies in the system, which defines some as vassals and some as masters. When extraordinary power is allotted to any politicians in a government, they attract every kind of corruption. Give to any men access to millions each year, along with the power of disposing the resources and managing the expenses of an entire nation, and the liberties of that nation will no longer be secure. As the old saying goes, 'Make me a king today, and I shall be a robber tomorrow.'

"Government parasites living in luxurious indolence on taxes not only saps our lives, it also leads to our extinction. War is the common harvest of those who suckle on public money. War is the art of conquering at home, because it’s a pretense for increasing government revenue. Taxes aren’t raised to carry on wars; wars are raised to carry on taxes. One fourth of mankind’s labor is annually consumed by barbarous war and defense, promulgated by governments. We are thus compelled to not only finance the indolence of our oppressors, but also to die for them as well, after our labors have sufficiently stocked the war machine. No war in the entire history of the world was started by innocent citizens pursuing the honest objects of their individual lives, except for the one about to erupt in America.

"Don’t look so startled at the mention of a violent insurrection in America. You still wallow in the mysticism that it’s only God's prerogative to anoint kings and governments, for causes known only to Him and his earthly interpreters. The Archbishop tells us that it’s not our business to overturn the government, that our role instead is to worship the king and pray for his ministers. Fortunately for the world, this mythology didn’t cross the Atlantic Ocean. The Americans understand that kings aren’t taken away by miracles, and that changes in government require only enough guns and courage.

"Alas, mankind has long made large sacrifices to ancient superstition. But it’s now clear to us that priests and tyrants are co-conspirators against liberty. We now understand that the mystery clouding the justification for kings and governments was only to cover the incredibility of it all. The age of political and religious superstition is passing away. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, are merely human invention, set up to terrify and enslave mankind by subjugating reason, enabling some men to monopolize power and profit.

"I don’t believe in the creed of the Jewish Church, the Roman Church, the Islamic Church, the Protestant Church, nor any other church. We can all see the absurdity of worshipping Aaron's molten calf, and we laugh at the folly of the Egyptians who put a pebble on a throne and acknowledged it as their king, but yet we are still blinded from the absurdity of worshipping our popes, our kings, and our parliaments, all of equally earthly constitution, and all likely to do us more harm than if we worshipped pebbles or calves instead. Future generations will burst into laughter when they examine our pious fairy tales.

"It is only by blinding man into believing that government is some wonderful mysterious thing that the ignorant are quieted and excessive taxation is foisted upon the world. When priests and kings set up religions and governments repugnant to human comprehension, they invented a word that served as a barrier to all questions and speculation. This word is 'mystery', and it has been used throughout history to ensconce priests and kings into dominant positions. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, because mystery is a fog of human invention. Ignorance and mystery are mirror images of the same thing.

"We have reached the juncture in human evolution where it’s necessary to declare that we no longer fear god, that we no longer look with awe to kings, nor with affection to parliaments, nor with duty to magistrates, nor with reverence to priests, nor with respect to nobility by birth. We must now inquire into the reason why we have a distinction between kings and subjects, and how came a race of men into the world so exalted above the rest as to become nearly a separate and privileged species.

"We must separate church from state, and see if the state can stand on its own. I think we should find, could we take off the dark covering of antiquity, that the first kings were simply the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in conjuring and mysticism obtained for him the title of chief among plunderers. As time unfolded, we were confronted with a plethora of oppressors staking a claim upon us. Between the monarchy, the parliament, the church, the feudal despotism operating locally, and the bureaucratic despotism operating everywhere, oppressors have overrun us, for reasons unknown to us. Kings on their own deathbeds dispose of their crowns by will, and consign their subjects, like beasts of the field, to whatever successor they appoint. This is so monstrous as hardly to be believed, as are the rest of the mysterious powers binding us.

"Monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy are but creatures of imagination, and a thousand such creatures may be contrived, all of them with the same result. Democracy is the most beguiling and confusing of these imaginations. Because a government is elective does not make it less despotic, if the persons elected possess afterward unlimited powers and are subject to no effective restraint. They merely become candidates for despotism, and one is as bad as another. Swamps breed serpents, and governments breed oppressors. History’s annals abound in such hideous wickedness, such horrible cruelties propagated by governments and churches, that only by reading of them can we form any idea of the baseness of which human nature is capable. The pictures that we behold of kings and priests and their ministers are so horrifying that humanity turns away from them with a shudder.

"Louis XIV said, 'If I were to comply with the will of my people, I would no longer be king.' No more universal truth was ever spoken. For myself, I would suffer the misery of devils rather than make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, and brutish tyrant. I cannot condone crowning a man’s head to make him king. Like the Americans, I would instead glorify the rights of individual men. Every man wishes to pursue his occupation and to enjoy the fruits of his labor and the produce of his property in peace, safety, and with the least possible expense. When these things are accomplished, all the reasons why government ought to be established are answered. We shall then find, if we let the American vision manifest itself, that kings and parliaments are dispensable.

"Universal peace, civilization, and commerce can only be accomplished by a complete revolution in the world's system of governments. Do not underestimate Mankind’s ability to accomplish this. We are maturing with each passing century. We are beginning to see with other eyes, to hear with other ears, and to think other thoughts. And what we are seeing, hearing, and thinking is that it is of no significance to enthrone one king or another, or to elect one parliamentarian or another, but to have nothing to do with them all. Everything that is right pleads for separation from our governors. The blood of the slain and the weeping voice of nature cries, 'T'is time to part!'

"There is an old tale about the canton of Berne, Switzerland, in which it was customary, from time immemorial, to keep a bear at the public expense. The people were taught to believe that if they had not a bear, they would all be undone. It happened some years ago that the bear became ill, and died too suddenly to be replaced immediately by another bear. During this interregnum, people discovered that the corn grew, the vintage flourished, the sun and moon rose and set, and everything went on the same as before. Taking courage from these observations, they resolved not to keep any more bears, which are very voracious and expensive animals, and likely to eat you if you aren’t careful to declaw them.

"The stage is set for the world to abandon its royal bears and golden calves. What were called revolutions in the past were little more than a change of persons or of insignificant particulars of governance. These revolutions rose and fell without measurably altering posterity. But the incipient revolution in America is a universal rejection of the whole order of things that have oppressed mankind forever. Our generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world. Governments will fall around the globe, especially where citizens can read and have access to guns.

"Will you now accuse me of insurrection? If, to expose the fraud and imposition of government, to lessen the oppression of taxes, to extirpate the horrid practice of war, to promote commerce, to break the chain of political and religious superstition, and to raise the degraded common man to his proper rank in the order of things, if these things be insurrection, let the name of insurrectionist be engraved on my tomb! I fear not your priests or your ministers or your armies!

"We have the power to begin the world over again. John Locke said, 'In the beginning, all the world was America.' The cause of America is the cause of all mankind, of those who ever lived or ever will live. The sun never shined on a vision of greater measure. T'is not the affair of a city or a state or a country, but of all the continents of the world. T'is not the concern of a day or a year or an age, because all of posterity is involved in this contest, and will be affected to the end of time. We need no longer wait for the right time, because the right time hath found us.

"Your request for accommodation is impossibly late! The Rubicon is passed. There is no turning away from it. If I ask an American if he wants a king, he asks me if I take him for an idiot. You are now an object more of contempt than of hatred, and the Americans jeer at you more as an ass than they dread you as a lion. For them, the debate is over. Arms, as the last resort, will now decide the contest. Your actions leave no choice, so the Americans accept the challenge."