Jan 1, 1791
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.
Thomas Paine
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.
gutenberg.org
Jan 1, 1791
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.
Jan 1, 1791
It means arbitrary power in an individual person; in the exercise of which, himself, and not the res-publica, is the object.
Jan 1, 1791
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.
Jan 1, 1791
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.
Jan 1, 1791
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.
Jan 1, 1791
It is ridiculous that nations are to wait and government be interrupted till boys grow to be men.
Jan 1, 1791
I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open--and the company see what it is…
Jan 1, 1791
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…
Jan 1, 1791
Retaining, then, democracy as the ground, and rejecting the corrupt systems of monarchy and aristocracy, the representative system naturally presents itself; remedying at once the defects of the simple democracy as to form, and the…
Jan 1, 1791
It is inconsistent to pay the one, and accept the service of the other gratis.