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Common Sense

By Thomas Paine

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Introduction

PERHAPS the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor. A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

As a long and violent abuse of power is generally the Means of calling the right of it in question, as the King of England has undertaken in his own Right to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both and equally to reject the usurpation of either.

In the following sheets, the author has studiously avoided everything which is personal among ourselves. Compliments, as well as censure, to individuals make no part thereof. The wise, and the worthy, need not the triumph of a pamphlet. Those whose sentiments are injudicious, or unfriendly, will cease of themselves unless too much pains are bestowed upon their conversion.

The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances has, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected. In the Event of which, their Affections are interested. 

The laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature has given the Power of feeling.

THE AUTHOR

Philadelphia, February 14, 1776