"The committee have among themselves finally agreed on their report; I saw this morning it will be read in the Academy on Wednesday. The report goes pretty fully to support the principles of the construction, with their reasons for that opinion."
On August 15th, a cheery letter had gone to George Clymer in Philadelphia, in which he says:
"This comes by Mr. Derby, of Massachusetts, who leaves Paris to-day to take shipping at L' [Orient] for Boston. The enclosed for Dr. Franklin is from his friend Mr. Le Roy, of the Academy of Sciences, respecting the bridge, and the causes that have delayed the completing report. An arch of 4 or 5 hundred feet is such an unprecedented thing, and will so much attract notice in the northern part of Europe, that the Academy is cautious in what manner to express their final opinion. It is, I find, their custom to give reasons for their opinion, and this embarrasses them more than the opinion itself. That the model is strong, and that a bridge constructed on the same principles will also be strong, they appear to be well agreed in, but to what particular causes to assign the strength they are not agreed in. The Committee was directed by the Academy to examine all the models and plans for iron bridges that had been proposed in France, and they unanimously gave the preference to our own, as being the simplest, strongest, and lightest. They have likewise agreed on some material points."*
Dr. Robinet says that on this visit (1787) Paine, who had long known the "soul of the people," came into relation with eminent men of all groups, philosophical and political,—Condorcet, Achille Duchâtelet, Cardinal De Brienne, and, he believes, also Danton, who, like the English republican, was a freemason.** This intercourse, adds the same author, enabled him to print in England his remarkable prophecy concerning the change going on in the French mind. Dr. Robinet quotes from a pamphlet presently noticed, partly written in Paris during this summer. Although it was Paine's grievous destiny soon to be once more a revolutionary figure, it is certain that he had returned to Europe as an apostle of peace and good-will. While the engineers were considering his daring scheme of an iron arch of five hundred feet, he was devising with the Cardinal Minister, De Brienne, a bridge of friendship across the Channel.
* For this letter I am indebted to Mr. Curtis Guild, of
Boston. The letter goes on to describe, with drawings, the
famous bridge at Schaffhausen, built by Grubenmann, an
uneducated carpenter, the model being shown Paine by the
King's architect, Perronet. The Academy's committee
presently made its report, which was even more favorable
than Paine had anticipated.
** "Danton Emigré," p. 7. Paine wrote a brief archaeological
treatise on freemasonry, but I have not met with the
statement that he was a freemason except in Dr. Robinet's
volume,—certainly high authority.
He drew up a paper in this sense, on which the Minister wrote and signed his approval. The bridge-model approved by the Academy he sent to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society; the proposal for friendship between France and England, approved by the Cardinal Minister, he carried by his own hand to Edmund Burke.
On his arrival in London Paine gave to the printer a manuscript on which he had been engaged, and straightway went to Thetford.* His father had died the year before.2 His mother, now in her ninety-first year, he found in the comfort his remittances had supplied. The house, with its large garden, stands in Guildhall (then Heathen-man) Street. I was politely shown through it by its present occupant, Mr. Brett Mr. Stephen Old-man, Sr., who went to school in the house, told me that it was identified by "old Jack Whistler," a barber, as the place where he went to shave Paine, in 1787. At this time Paine settled on his mother an allowance of nine shillings per week, which in the Thetford of that period was ample for her comfort. During this autumn with his mother he rarely left her side. As she lived to be ninety-four it may be that he sat beside her in the Quaker meeting-house, to which she had become attached in her latter years.
* The exact time of his arrival in England is doubtful.
Oldys says: "He arrived at the White Bear, Picadilly, on
the 3d of September, 1787, just thirteen years after his
departure for Philadelphia." Writing in 1803 Paine also says
it was in September. But his "Rubicon" pamphlet is dated
"York Street, St. James's Square, 20th August, 1787."
Possibly the manuscript was dated in Paris and forwarded to
the London printer with the address at which he wished to
find proof on his arrival.
** St. Cuthbert's Register: "Burials, 1786. Joseph Payne (a
Quaker) aged 78 years. November 14th."
Eloquent and pathetic must have been the silence around the gray man when, after so many tempests, he sat once more in the little meeting-house where his childhood was nurtured. From this, his spiritual cradle, he had borne away a beautiful theory, in ignorance of the contrasted actuality. Theoretically the Society of Friends is a theocracy; the Spirit alone rules and directs, effacing all distinctions of rank or sex. As a matter of fact, one old Quaker, or the clerk of a meeting, often overrules the "inner lights" of hundreds. Of the practical working of Quaker government Paine had no experience; he had nothing to check his ideal formed in boyhood. His whole political system is explicable only by his theocratic Quakerism. His first essay, the plea for negro emancipation, was brought from Thetford meeting-house. His "Common Sense," a new-world scripture, is a "testimony" against the proud who raised their paltry dignities above the divine presence in the lowliest "But where, say some, is the King of America? I 'll tell you, friend, he reigns above." Paine's love of his adopted country was not mere patriotism; he beheld in it the land of promise for all mankind, seen from afar while on his Thetford Pisgah. Therefore he made so much of the various races in America.
"The mere independence of America, were it to have been followed by a system of government modelled after the corrupt system of the English government, would not have interested me with the unabated ardour that it did. It was to bring forward and establish the representative system of government that was the leading principle with me."