The Public Record
Thomas Paine was an English-born American Founding Father, inventor, political philosopher, and statesman. His pamphlets Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783) framed the Patriot argument for independence from Great Britain at the outset of the American Revolution. Paine advanced Enlightenment-era arguments for human rights that shaped revolutionary discourse on both sides of the Atlantic.
Those who have said that a republic is not a form of government calculated for countries of great extent, mistook, in the first place, the business of a government, for a form of government; for the res-publica equally appertains to every…
But the government of America, which is wholly on the system of representation, is the only real Republic, in character and in practice, that now exists.
It is not necessarily connected with any particular form, but it most naturally associates with the representative form, as being best calculated to secure the end for which a nation is at the expense of supporting it.
Republican government is no other than government established and conducted for the interest of the public, as well individually as collectively.
Every government that does not act on the principle of a Republic, or in other words, that does not make the res-publica its whole and sole object, is not a good government.
It means arbitrary power in an individual person; in the exercise of which, himself, and not the res-publica, is the object.
It is a word of a good original, referring to what ought to be the character and business of government; and in this sense it is naturally opposed to the word monarchy, which has a base original signification.
It is wholly characteristical of the purport, matter or object for which government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed, Res-Publica, the public affairs, or the public good; or, literally translated, the public thing.
It has always been the political craft of courtiers and court-governments, to abuse something which they called republicanism; but what republicanism was, or is, they never attempt to explain.
Had the system of representation been then understood, as it now is, there is no reason to believe that those forms of government, now called monarchical or aristocratical, would ever have taken place.
Hereditary succession requires the same obedience to ignorance, as to wisdom; and when once the mind can bring itself to pay this indiscriminate reverence, it descends below the stature of mental manhood.