"That the country, which, for more than seven years, has sought our destruction, should now cringe to solicit our protection , is adding the wretchedness of disgrace to the misery of disappointment... For the criminal, who owes his life to the grace and mercy of the injured, is more executed by the living than he who dies....
"We are a people who think not as you think; and what is equally true, you cannot feel as we feel. The situation of our two countries are exceedingly different . We have been the seat of war. You have seen nothing of it. The most wanton destruction has been committed in our sight. The most insolent barbarity was acted on our feelings. We can look around and see the remains of burnt and destroyed homes , once the fair fruit of hard industry, and now the striking monuments of British brutality. We walk over the dead whom we loved, in every part of America, and remember by whom they fell....
"Is the case so strangely altered, that those who once thought we could not live without them, now declare that they cannot exist without us? Will they tell the world, and that from their first Minister of State, that America is their all in all, that it is by her importance only that they can live and move and have a being? Will they who threatened to bring us to their feet, now cast themselves at ours, and own that without us they are not a nation? ...
"The British army in America care not how long the war lasts. They enjoy an easy and indolent life . They fatten on the folly of one country, and the spoils of another; and, between their plunder and their pay, may go home rich. But the case is very different with the laboring farmer, the working tradesman, and the necessitous poor in England, the sweat of whose brow goes day after day to feed, in prodigality and sloth, the army that is robbing both them and us. Removed from the eye of the country that supports them, and distant from the government that employs them, they cut and carve for themselves and there is none to call them to account."
P. 340-342, "To the Earl of Shelburne, October 29, 1782" THOMAS PAINE COLLECTED WRITINGS (1955)

Monday, July 2, 2018
PAINE'S PIQUANCY RESONATES IN 2018
"That the country, which, for more than seven years, has sought our destruction, should now cringe to solicit our protection , is adding the wretchedness of disgrace to the misery of disappointment... For the criminal, who owes his life to the grace and mercy of the injured, is more executed by the living than he who dies....
"We are a people who think not as you think; and what is equally true, you cannot feel as we feel. The situation of our two countries are exceedingly different . We have been the seat of war. You have seen nothing of it. The most wanton destruction has been committed in our sight. The most insolent barbarity was acted on our feelings. We can look around and see the remains of burnt and destroyed homes , once the fair fruit of hard industry, and now the striking monuments of British brutality. We walk over the dead whom we loved, in every part of America, and remember by whom they fell....
"Is the case so strangely altered, that those who once thought we could not live without them, now declare that they cannot exist without us? Will they tell the world, and that from their first Minister of State, that America is their all in all, that it is by her importance only that they can live and move and have a being? Will they who threatened to bring us to their feet, now cast themselves at ours, and own that without us they are not a nation? ...
"The British army in America care not how long the war lasts. They enjoy an easy and indolent life . They fatten on the folly of one country, and the spoils of another; and, between their plunder and their pay, may go home rich. But the case is very different with the laboring farmer, the working tradesman, and the necessitous poor in England, the sweat of whose brow goes day after day to feed, in prodigality and sloth, the army that is robbing both them and us. Removed from the eye of the country that supports them, and distant from the government that employs them, they cut and carve for themselves and there is none to call them to account."
P. 340-342, "To the Earl of Shelburne, October 29, 1782" THOMAS PAINE COLLECTED WRITINGS (1955)

