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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 48

Splendid Sentiments:

Splendid Sentiments:

"My contempt and hatred for monarchical governments are sufficiently well known, and my compassion for the unfortunate, friends or enemies, is equally profound.

"I have voted to put Louis Capet upon trial because it was necessary to prove to the world the perfidy, the corruption, and the horror of the monarchial system.

"To follow the trade of a king destroys all morality, just as the trade of a jailer deadens all sensibility.

"Make a man a king to-day and to-morrow he will be a brigand.

"Had Louis Capet been a farmer he might have been held in esteem by his neighbours, and his wickedness results from his position rather than from his nature.

"Let the French nation purge its territory of kings without soiling itself with their impure blood.

"Let the United States be the asylum of Louis Capet, where, in spite of the over-shadowering miseries and crimes of a royal life, he will learn by the continual contemplation of the general prosperity that the true system of government is not that of kings, but of the people.

"I am an enemy of kings, but I cannot forget that they belong to the human race.

"It is always delightful to pursue that course where policy and humanity are united.

"As France has been the first of all the nations of Europe to destroy loyalty, let it be the first to abolish the penalty of death.

"As a true republican, I consider kings as more the objects of contempt than of vengeance."

Search the records of the world and you will find but few sublimer acts than that of Thomas Paine voting against the king's death. He, the hater of despotism, the abhorer of monarchy, the champion of the rights of man, the republican, accepting page 5 death to save the life of a deposed tyrant—of a throneless king! This was the last grand act of his political life—the sublime conclusion of his political career.

All his life he had been the disinterested friend of man. He had laboured nor for money, nor for fame, but for the general good. He had aspired to no office. He had no recognition of his services, but had ever been content to labour as a common soldier in the army of progress, confining his efforts to no country, looking upon the world as his field of action. Filled with a genuine love for the right, he found himself imprisoned by the very people he had striven to save.

Had his enemies succeed in bringing him to the block, he would have escaped the calumnies and the hatred of the Christian world. And let me tell you how near they came getting him to the block. He was in prison; there was a door to his cell—it had two doors, a door that opened in and an iron door that opened out. It was a dark passage, and whenever the concluded to cut a man's head off the next day an agent went along and made a chalk-mark upon the door where the poor prisoner was bound. Mr. Barlow, the American minister, happened to be with him and the outer door was shut, that is, open against the wall, and the inner door was shut, and when the man came along whose business it was to mark the door for death he marked this door where Thomas Paine was, but he marked the door that was against the wall, so when it was shut the mark was inside, and