James A. Edgerton, A. M.: "Thomas Paine first suggested American Independence. He first suggested the Federal Union of the States. He first proposed the abolition of negro slavery. He first suggested [in Christendom] protection for dumb animals. He first suggested equal rights for women. He first proposed old age pensions. He first suggested the education of poor children at public expense. He first proposed arbitration and international peace. He suggested a great republic of all the nations of the world."
To the claims made in behalf of Paine by Mr. Edgerton and others the following may be added: He was one of the founders, if not the real founder, of modern journalism. He labored to provide better facilities for the education of young women. His contributions to hygienic science were invaluable. His knowledge of astronomy was profound; he affirmed the belief that the fixed stars were suns twenty years before Herschel. His views regarding taxation were wise and just. He was an advocate of land reform. He was recognized as the ablest authority of his time on paper money. He was one of the framers of the Constitution of Pennsylvania.
Not only was Paine the real founder of our Republic; he was largely instrumental in securing for it the greatest of its subsequent acquisitions of territory. He shares with Jefferson the honor of being the first to propose the purchase from Napoleon of the province of Louisiana, an empire in extent—reaching from Florida to the Pacific and to what is now British Columbia, a distance of three thousand miles—a territory three times as large as the original United States of America and from which have been formed, wholly or in part, eighteen of the most important states in the Union.
Nearly half a century before Comte, Paine taught the Religion of Humanity.
"In 1778 he wrote his sublime sentence about the 'Religion of Humanity.'"—Dr. Conway.
"I have discovered that Paine not only wrote those words, 'the Religion of Humanity,'... but he was the real author by this discovery of all laws of social science which is called sociology, now the queen of the sciences.... If Paine was the real leader in that discovery he stands by the side of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Comte, Spencer and Ward, and the beneficent results and glory of this discovery, and its discoverer, are beyond the words of any mind at present to describe."—Prof. T. B. Wakeman.
"That his Religion of Humanity took the deistical form was an evolutionary necessity."—Dr. Conway.
"The prophet of the Religion of Humanity and the precursor of our modern Monism."—Prof. Ernst Haeckel.
"How few there are who realize that Thomas Paine anticipated Spencer's thought [equal liberty] by many decades, that, more briefly and graphically, he formulated the only principle that can weave enduring order and peace into the fabric of society."—Edwin C. Walker.
Leonard Abbott: "Paine's mind was germinal: in it were the seeds of all modern religious, economical, and political movements."