Each of the fifty-six signers was a modern Moses in himself, and to-day their heroic statues, in imperishable bronze, should stand aloft on the shining marble copings of the National Capitol.
The glowing features and earnest, eloquent tones of
HANCOCK, JEFFERSON, FRANKLIN, AND ADAMS
come back to me now, in the sunlight and zenith of republican glory; and as the old bell in the tower rang out Liberty to all the people of the land, the city of Brotherly Love took up the acclaim, while on the wings of the wind it echoed and reached from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi, and from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, sounding across the seas, and reverberating among the sparkling halls of royalty, shivering the idols of "Divine Right," and forcing the plain, common people of the world into their long-neglected heritage of Freedom!
And there, side by side with Franklin and Jefferson, sat one of the Secretaries of the Continental Congress,
TOM PAINE,
the great deist, patriot and philosopher; whose elementary proclamations, "The Crisis," "Rights of Man," "Common Sense," and "Age of Reason," did more for the promulgation of freedom during and after the American and French revolutions than any other utterance of man.
The logic and philosophy of the great deist and agnostic was worth more to the Colonies, and did more injury to King George and his murdering minions, than all the purblind, bigoted, saphead pulpit thumpers who ever preached for ready cash.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced no nobler or better man than the brave Tom Paine, the personal and political compeer and friend of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Adams.
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