worthless, inasmuch as for many years past, the electors have always been so completely pledged before their election that they might as well be dispensed with altogether. It was hardly just to regard the civil war as proof of the failure of the Constitution. It could hardly have been foreseen. The Constitution no doubt did leave unsolved the great question as to the right of secession. The question whether or not, under the Constitution, construed as a legal document, the States had a right to secede, is about as ingenious a puzzle as any other question as to the meaning of a studiously ambiguous document. There are some things in it which look as if the States had such a right, and others which look as if they had not. The Federalist does not discuss the question at all. It once alludes to it in connection with the old Confederacy, the infirmities of which it ascribes in great measure to the want of any ratification by the people. The old Confederacy was ratified only by the State Legislatures, and this, says Hamilton, 'has in some instances given birth to the enormous doctrine of a right of legislative repeal. Owing its ratification to the law of a State, it has been contended that the same authority might repeal the law by which it was ratified. However gross a heresy it may be to maintain that a party to a compact has a right to revoke that compact, the doctrine itself has respectable advocates,' etc. This is the only reference contained in the Federalist to the great question which has since convulsed the whole Union. It must, in all probability, have occurred to the authors of the Constitution. Probably they did not deal with it because they felt, that to give or withhold the right in question would be inconsistent with the whole character of their plan. To withhold it expressly would have been equivalent to destroying all chance of the ratification of the Constitution by the States. To give it expressly would have been to put the Union at the mercy of every one of thirteen bodies, all liable to caprice. They therefore took their chance, and left the question outstanding, in the hope that it might never be necessary to solve it. The result ought not to be charged upon them too heavily. If there had been no Constitution there would, it is true, have been no civil war; but it is very doubtful whether Europe would ever have been relieved of the pressure of a starving population, and whether America would have been cultivated as it has been, for a century to come. Who can strike the balance of such an account? ΧΙ TOM PAINE1 TOM PAINE is one of those writers who have been, as it were, gibbeted by a not very remote posterity. Probably hardly any one opens his works; no one takes the trouble to know much about his life; he survives in the memory of men as a kind of disreputable ghost, who, having ignominiously failed in an assault, as hopeless as it was wicked, on all that men hold most sacred, does not deserve even that slight amount of respect which would be implied in calling him Thomas. He is, and always will be, Tom-the wretched uneducated plebeian who dared to attack Church and State. In our days, indeed, he is chiefly an awful example. The ribaldry of Voltaire, the polished sneer of Gibbon, and the coarse brutality of Tom Paine, usually swing at one end of the see-saw, the other end of which supports Locke, Boyle, and Newton, weighted also with appropriate epithets. Paine, however, once attracted great attention, and was a real live monster whom it was thought 1 The Theological and Political Works of Thomas Paine. creditable to kill. Lady Hester Stanhope, if we are not mistaken, says that her uncle Pitt used to speak of him as being both very able and perfectly consistent; and he himself boasts, in the second part of the Rights of Man, that between forty and fifty thousand copies of the first part had been sold in the United Kingdom. His works have therefore something of an historical interest, and it is worth the while of those who care for the history of past controversies to look a little into them. Paine's reputation, such as it is, rests upon three performances-Common Sense, published in 1776; the Rights of Man, in two parts, published respectively in 1791 and 1792; and the Age of Reason, in three parts, published in 1793, 1795, and 1807. Besides these, he published a variety of other pamphlets of much inferior interest, relating principally to the American politics of the day. His most considerable performances by far are those which we have named. Perhaps the most characteristic passage in the whole of his works, and certainly the one which throws the greatest light on their nature, is to be found in the first part of the Age of Reason. That strange performance was written under the solemn sanction of imminent danger to life; for Paine, whilst he was writing it, expected to be guillotined, and he was actually arrested within six hours after its conclusion. Towards the end of it he gives an account of his life and of the growth of his opinions, and this enables us to understand clearly enough what sort of man he was. 'My father,' he says, 'being of the Quaker profession, it was my good fortune to have an exceeding good moral education and a tolerable stock of useful learning.' He was sent to a grammar-school at Thetford, but learnt no Latin, 'because of the objection the Quakers have against the books in which that language is taught.' He adds, "The natural bent of my mind was to science. I had some turn, and I believe some talent, for poetry.' He gives, by the way, a singular specimen of his poetical gifts in a note to another part of the Age of Reason, which contains an elaborate argument to prove that the Hebrew prophets wrote poetry. 'To show that these writings are composed in poetical numbers, I will take ten syllables as they stand in the book, and make a line of the same number of syllables (heroic measure) that shall rhyme with the last word. It will then be seen that the composition of these books is poetical measure.' It does not seem to have occurred to him that any one could see it without his help. The instance I shall produce is from Isaiah— 6 Hear, O ye heavens, and give ear O earth, It does not appear to have struck him that 'The Age of Reason written by Tom Paine' is a very good heroic line, or that 'An outride officer in the Excise, under |