On March 17, 1790, Paine left Paris to see after his Bridge in Yorkshire, now near completion. On the day before, he writes to a friend in Philadelphia how prosperously everything is going on in France, where Lafayette is acting the part of a Washington; how the political reformation is sure to influence England; and how he longs for America.
"I wish most anxiously to see my much loved America. It is the country from whence all reformation must originally spring. I despair of seeing an abolition of the infernal traffic in negroes. We must push that matter further on your side of the water. I wish that a few well-instructed could be sent among their brethren in bondage; for until they are able to take their own part nothing will be done."
* "Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris." Edited by Anne Cary Morris. i., p. 286.
** One cannot help wondering how, in this matter, Paine got along with his friend Jefferson, who, at the very time of his enthusiasm for the French Revolution, had a slave in his house at Challiot. Paine was not of the philanthropic type portrayed in the "Biglow Papers":
"I du believe in Freedom's cause Ez fur away ez Payris is; I love to see her stick her claws In them infarnal Phayrisees.
It's well enough agin a king To dror resolves and triggers, But libbaty 's a kind 'o thing That don't agree with niggers."
On his arrival in London he has the happiness of meeting his old friend General Morris of Morrisania, and his wife. Gouverneur is presently over there, to see his brother; and in the intervals of dancing attendance at the opera on titled ladies--among them Lady Dunmore, whose husband desolated the Virginia coast,--he gets Paine's confidences.* Poor Paine was an easy victim of any show of personal kindness, especially when it seemed like the magnanimity of a political opponent.
The historic sense may recognize a picturesque incident in the selection by Lafayette of Thomas Paine to convey the Key of the Bastille to Washington. In the series of intellectual and moral movements which culminated in the French Revolution, the Bastille was especially the prison of Paine's forerunners, the writers, and the place where their books were burned. "The gates of the Bastille," says Rocquain, "were opened wide for Abbés, savants, brilliant intellects, professors of the University and doctors of the Sorbonne, all accused of writing or reciting verses against the King, casting reflections on the Government, or publishing books in favor of Deism, and contrary to good morals. Diderot was one of the first arrested, and it was during his detention that he conceived the plan of his 'Encyclopedia.'"
**