COMMON SENSE
BY THOMAS PAINE




INTRODUCTION



Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages,
are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour;
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 (and in Matters too which
might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated
into the inquiry) and as the King of England hath 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 hath studiously avoided every
thing 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; and those whose sentiments