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.
From the time of William a species of government arose, issuing out of this coalition bill of rights; and more so, since the corruption introduced at the Hanover succession by the agency of Walpole; that can be described by no other name…
Though the parts may embarrass each other, the whole has no bounds; and the only right it acknowledges out of itself, is the right of petitioning.
Election, in this case, becomes separated from representation, and the candidates are candidates for despotism.
I cannot believe that any nation, reasoning on its own rights, would have thought of calling these things a constitution, if the cry of constitution had not been set up by the government.
Almost every case must now be determined by some precedent, be that precedent good or bad, or whether it properly applies or not; and the practice is become so general as to suggest a suspicion, that it proceeds from a deeper policy than…
Since the revolution of America, and more so since that of France, this preaching up the doctrines of precedents, drawn from times and circumstances antecedent to those events, has been the studied practice of the English government.
They are softly leading him to the sepulchre of precedents, to deaden his faculties and call attention from the scene of revolutions.
They feel that he is arriving at knowledge faster than they wish, and their policy of precedents is the barometer of their fears.
The ragged relic and the antiquated precedent, the monk and the monarch, will moulder together.
Government by precedent, without any regard to the principle of the precedent, is one of the vilest systems that can be set up.
How is it that the same persons who would proudly be thought wiser than their predecessors, appear at the same time only as the ghosts of departed wisdom?
Commerce is no other than the traffic of two individuals, multiplied on a scale of numbers; and by the same rule that nature intended for the intercourse of two, she intended that of all.