Either the means in your power are insufficient, or the measures ill planned; either the execution has been bad, or the thing attempted impracticable; or, to speak more emphatically, either you are not able or heaven is not willing.
Paine challenges the British government to account for its lack of success in the American war, presenting a comprehensive list of potential causes for their repeated failures.
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The meaning, then, good people, of all this, is: That government is governed by no principle whatever; that it can make evil good, or good evil, just as it pleases.
The American constitutions were to liberty what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax.
It was a sort of new form of government that insensibly served to put the old one out of sight and to unhinge it from the superstitious authority of antiquity.
Whether robbery shall be banished from courts, and wretchedness from countries?