It is with confederated states as with individuals in society; something must be yielded up to make the whole secure.
Thomas Paine: “It is with confederated states as with individuals in society; something must be yielded up to make the whole secure.”
Editor's note · Context
In "The American Crisis," Paine draws an analogy between individuals in society and confederated states, arguing that some individual autonomy must be surrendered for the collective security of the whole.
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The object, in all such preliminary proceedings, is to find out what the general sense of a nation is, and to be governed by it.
The insulted German and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole, are beginning to think.
With how much more glory, and advantage to itself, does a nation act, when it exerts its powers to rescue the world from bondage, and to create itself friends, than when it employs those powers to increase ruin, desolation, and misery.
Reason and discussion, persuasion and conviction, become the weapons in the contest, and it is only when those are attempted to be suppressed that recourse is had to violence.