as this evil. The only remedy was to tie ropes to the French prisoners, and push them forward amid the dead and dying, to remove the bodies, and bring them away for interment. Even for this necessary office there was no truce, and it would have been certain death to the Aragonese who should have attempted to perform it; but the prisoners were in general secured by the pity of their own soldiers, and in this manner the evil was, in some degree, diminished.

A council of war was held by the Spaniards on the 8th, not for the purpose which is too usual in such councils, but that their heroic resolution might be communicated with authority to the people. It was, that in those quarters of the city where the Aragonese still maintained their ground, they should continue to defend themselves with the same firmness: should the enemy at last prevail, they were then to retire over the Ebro into the suburbs, break down the bridge, and defend the suburbs till they perished. When this resolution was made public, it was received with the loudest acclamations. But in every conflict the citizens now gained ground upon the soldiers, winning it inch by inch, till the space occupied by the enemy, which on the day of their entrance was nearly half the city, was gradually reduced to about an eighth part. Meantime, intelligence of the events in other parts of Spain was received by the French,—all tending to dishearten them; the surrender of Dupont, the failure of Moncey before Valencia, and the news that the Junta of that province had dispatched six thousand men to join the levies in Aragon, which were destined to relieve Zaragoza. During the night of the 13th, their fire was particularly fierce and destructive; after their batteries had ceased, flames burst out in many parts of the buildings which they had won; their last act was to blow up the church of St. Engracia;

the powder was placed in the subterranean church,and this remarkable place,—this monument of fraud and credulity,—the splendid theatre wherein so many feelings of deep devotion had been excited,—which so many thousands had visited in faith, and from which unquestionably many had departed with their imaginations elevated, their principles ennobled, and their hearts strengthened, was laid in ruins. In the morning the French columns, to the great surprise of the Spaniards, were seen at a distance, retreating over the plain, on the road to Pamplona.

The history of a battle, however skilfully narrated, is necessarily uninteresting to all except military men; but in the detail of a siege, when time has destroyed those considerations, which prejudice or pervert our natural sense of right and wrong, every reader sympathizes with the besieged, and nothing, even in fictitious narratives, excites so deep and animating an interest. There is not, either in the annals of ancient or of modern times, a single event recorded more worthy to be held in admiration, now and for evermore, than the siege of Zaragoza. Will it be said that this devoted people obtained for themselves, by all this heroism and all these sacrifices, nothing more than a short respite from their fate? Woe be to the slavish heart that conceives the thought, and shame to the base tongue that gives it utterance! They purchased for themselves an everlasting remembrance upon earth,-a place in the memory and love of all good men in all ages that are yet to come. They performed their duty; they redeemed their souls from the yoke; they left an example to their country, never to be forgotten, never to be out of mind, and sure to contribute to and hasten its deliverance. History of the Peninsular War, ch. IX.

THOMAS PAINE

FEW patriots have deserved so well of posterity as Tom Paine; yet he is remembered almost in dishonor in the country which he helped to free. One popular president, a man of some pretensions as an historian, even has characterized him as a "dirty little atheist" and suffered no rebuke. Paine's services to the Colonial cause in the American Revolution would be precisely what they were, invaluable, had he been Christian or atheist, Mohammedan or fire-worshipper. It so happens, however, that he was not an atheist but a deist, a believer in God and in immortality. Today he would be thought of as a liberal Christian. The epithet "atheist" fastened upon him was expressive of the opprobrium in which he was held by his political enemies. Paine was a radical, Paine was a revolutionist; anticipating the ways of modern thought he studied his Bible as a work of historical, ethical, and literary significance. Blackest of his sins, he was in his last days, which he passed in the United States, an abolitionist. In 1800 an abolitionist was more execrated than a Bolshevist today. Paine's services to his adopted country were forgotten and he died repudiated by his contemporaries. Times changed: it was no longer infamous to be an abolitionist; a liberal Christianity such as his became the faith of millions. But the old defamations clung and still cling to his name.

If not a

Paine was hated because he was feared. great writer in the narrow sense, he was at least a great propagandist, one who did more than any other one man to popularize French revolutionary ideas among English

readers. His Rights of Man, proscribed by the English government, had a vast surreptitious circulation among the working classes and fostered the radicalism which found later expression in the Chartist movement. Today one reads it with surprise, finding in it nothing wild or hare-brained. It is a calm clear statement of democratic political doctrine; it is temperate and free from bombast and sentimentality. One sentence at least is widely and deservedly known. Burke, indifferent to the fate of peasants, had lamented the sufferings and death of Marie Antoinette. Paine wrote, "he pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird."

Paine was no irresponsible revolutionist but a constructive critic of political and social institutions. The practical program of his reforms as outlined in the second part of the Rights of Man makes interesting reading in the light of one hundred years of halting progress. He advocates among other innovations these: the limitation of armaments by agreement with rival nations; the establishment of a steeply graduated income tax to prevent the concentration of vast fortunes in a few hands; the adoption of a system of universal popular education; the provision by the state of work for the unemployed on roads and other public enterprises; the provision from the taxes of old age pensions. In terms that should have given his proposals weight with any far-seeing prime-minister or chancellor he demonstrated a feasible redistribution of the national income to these ends. But few prime ministers and chancellors have ever been so genuinely concerned for the welfare of the common man as was Tom Paine. Though some of his proposals have since been realized and others are now the theme of political debate, it is the common man himself whose political enfranchisement has made them possible.

FROM THE RIGHTS OF MAN

I AM not contending for nor against any form of Government, nor for nor against any party, here or elsewhere. That which a whole Nation chooses to do, it has a right to do. Mr. Burke says, No. Where, then, does the right exist? I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controuled and contracted for, by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead; and Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living. There was a time when Kings disposed of their Crowns by will upon their deathbeds, and consigned the people, like beasts of the field, to whatever successor they appointed. This is now so exploded as scarcely to be remembered, and so monstrous as hardly to be believed; but the Parliamentary clauses upon which Mr. Burke builds his political church are of the same nature.

The laws of every country must be analogous to some common principle. In England no parent or master, nor all the authority of Parliament, omnipotent as it has called itself, can bind or controul the personal freedom even of an individual beyond the age of twenty-one years. On what ground of right, then, could the Parliament of 1688, or any other Parliament, bind all posterity for ever?

Those who have quitted the world, and those who are not yet arrived at it, are as remote from each other as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive. What possible obligation, then, can exist between them; what rule or principle can be laid down that of two non-entities, the one out of existence and the other not in, and who never can meet in this world, the one should controul the other to the end of time?