all its aids, has not been able to reach or to rival." "I possess," he
wrote in the Second Part of the "Rights of Man," "more of what is
called consequence in the world than any one of Mr. Burke's catalogue
of aristocrats." Paine sincerely believed himself to be an adept who
had found in the rights of man the _materia prima_ of politics, by
which error and suffering might be transmuted into happiness and truth.
A second Columbus, but greater than the Genoese! Christopher had
discovered a new world, it is true, but Thomas had discovered the means
of making a new world out of the old. About this time, Dumont, the
Benthamite, travelled with him from Paris to London. Dumont was
irritated with "his incredible _amour-propre_ and his presumptuous
self-conceit." "He was mad with vanity." "The man was a caricature of
the vainest of Frenchmen. He believed that his book on the 'Rights of
Man' might supply the place of all the books that had ever been
written. If it was in his power, he would destroy all the libraries in
the world without hesitation, in order to root out the errors of which
they were the deposit, and so recommence by the 'Rights of Man' a new
chain of ideas and principles." Thus Paine and his wild friends had
reached the point of folly in the reformer's scale, and, like so many
of their class since, made the fatal mistake of supposing that the old
world knew nothing.

When Dumont fell in with Paine, he was returning from a flying visit to
Paris, invigorated by the bracing air of French freedom. He had seen
Pope Pius burned in effigy in the Palais Royal, and the poor King
brought back a prisoner from Varennes,--a cheerful spectacle to the
friend of humanity. He was on his way to be present at a dinner given
in London on the 14th of July, to commemorate the taking of the
Bastille; but the managers of the festivity thought it prudent that he
should not attend. He wrote, soon after, the address read by Horne