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      PARAGRAPH STRUCK OUT OF THE DECLARATION.

      "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another."

      THOMAS PAINE.

      "—these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners. By such wicked and inhuman ways the English, etc.... an hight of outrage that seems left by Heathen nations to be practised by pretended Chris Hansr

      "—that barbarous and hellish power which has stirred up the Indians and Negroes to destroy us; the cruelty hath a double guilt—it is dealing brutally by us and treacherously by them."

Thus did Paine try to lay at the corner the stone which the builders rejected, and which afterwards ground their descendants to powder. Jefferson withdrew the clause on the objection of Georgia and South Carolina, which wanted slaves, and of Northerners interested in supplying them. That, however, was not known till all the parties were dead. Paine had no reason to suppose that the Declaration of human freedom and equality, passed July 4th, could fail eventually to include the African slaves. The Declaration embodied every principle he had been asserting, and indeed Cobbett is correct in saying that whoever may have written the Declaration Paine was its author. The world being his country, and America having founded its independence on such universal interests, Paine could not hesitate to become a soldier for mankind.3 His Quaker principles, always humanized, were not such as would applaud a resistance in which he was not prepared to participate. While the signers of the Declaration of Independence were affixing their names—a procedure which reached from August 2d into November—Paine resigned his Pennsylvania Magazine, and marched with his musket to the front. He enlisted in a Pennsylvania division of the Flying Camp of ten thousand men, who were to be sent wherever needed. He was under General Roberdeau, and assigned at first to service at Amboy, afterwards at Bergen. The Flying Camp was enlisted for a brief period, and when that had expired Paine travelled to Fort Lee, on the Hudson, and renewed his enlistment. Fort Lee was under the command of General Nathaniel Greene who, on or about September 19th, appointed Paine a Volunteer Aide-de-camp.

General Greene in a gossipy letter to his wife (November 2d) says: "Common Sense (Thomas Paine) and Colonel Snarl, or Cornwell, are perpetually wrangling about mathematical problems." On November 20th came the surprise of Fort Lee; the boiling kettles and baking ovens of a dinner to be devoured by the British were abandoned, with three hundred tents, for a retreat made the more miserable by hunger and cold. By November 22d the whole army had retreated to Newark, where Paine began writing his famous first Crisis.4

      He could only write at night; during the day there was constant work for every soldier of the little force surrounding Washington. "I am wearied almost to death with the retrogade motion of things," wrote Washington to his brother (November 9th), "and I solemnly protest that a pecuniary reward of twenty thousand pounds a year would not induce me to undergo what I do; and after all, perhaps to lose my character, as it is impossible, under such a variety of distressing circumstances, to conduct matters agreeably to public expectation." On November 27th he writes from Newark to General Lee: "It has been more owing to the badness of the weather that the enemy's progress has been checked, than to any resistance we could make." Even while he wrote the enemy drew near, and the next day (November 28th) entered one end of Newark as Washington left the other. At Brunswick he was joined by General Williamson's militia, and on the Delaware by the Philadelphia militia, and could muster five thousand against Howe's whole army. "I tremble for Philadelphia," writes Washington to Lund Washington (December 10th). "Nothing in my opinion, but General Lee's speedy arrival, who has been long expected, though still at a distance (with about three thousand men), can save it." On December 13th Lee was a prisoner, and on the 17th Washington writes to the same relative:

      "Your imagination can scarce extend to a situation more distressing than mine. Our only dependence now is upon the speedy enlistment of a new army. If this fails, I think the game will be pretty well up, as from disaffection and want of spirit and fortitude, the inhabitants, instead of resistance, are offering submission and taking protection from Gen. Howe in Jersey."

      The day before, he had written to the President of Congress that the situation was critical, and the distresses of his soldiers "extremely great, many of 'em being entirely naked and most so thinly clad as to be unfit for service." On December 18th he writes to his brother:

      "You can form no idea of the perplexity of my situation. No man, I believe, ever had a greater choice of difficulties, and less means to extricate himself from them. However, under a full persuasion of the justice of our cause, I cannot entertain an Idea that it will finally sink, tho' it may remain for some time under a cloud."

Under that cloud, by Washington's side,

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