clear sense mixed with ignorance and arrogance. He attempted to show
arithmetically that the English funding system could not continue to
the end of Mr. Pitt's life, supposing him to live to the usual age of
man. The calculation is ingenious, but has not proved to be as accurate
as some of Newton's. On the other hand, his remarks on paper money are
excellent, and his sneer at the Sinking Fund, then considered a great
invention in finance, well placed:--"As to Mr. Pitt's project for
paying off the national debt by applying a million a year for that
purpose while he continues adding more than twenty millions a year to
it, it is like setting a man with a wooden leg to run after a
hare;--the longer he runs, the farther he is off." The conclusion is
one of his peculiar flourishes of his own trumpet:--"I have now exposed
the English system of finance to the eyes of all nations,--for this
work will be published in all languages. As an individual citizen of
America, and as far as an individual can go, I have revenged (if I may
use the expression without any immoral meaning) the piratical
depredations committed on the American commerce by the English
government."

From Monroe's departure until the year 1802, little is known of Paine.
He is said to have lived in humble lodgings with one Bonneville, a
printer, editor of the "Bouche de Fer" in the good early days of the
Revolution. He must have kept up some acquaintance with respectable
society; for we find his name on the lists of the _Cercle
Constitutionnel_, a club to which belonged Talleyrand, Benjamin
Constant, and conservatives of that class who were opposed to both the
_bonnet-rouge_ and the _fleur-de-lis_. Occasionally he appears above
the surface with a pamphlet. Politics were his passion, and to write a
necessity of his nature. If public matters interested him, an essay of
some kind made its way into print. When Baboeuf's agrarian conspiracy