Citizen Tom Paine Read Online Free

of a year that would change the destiny of mankind, yet it was such a January as we often have in the midlands, rain sometimes, snow sometimes, sleet sometimes, and sometimes a clear warm day that might very well be June. It was the beginning of a year that was the beginning of an era, and Christ himself might have walked on earth to raise so fierce yet so gentle a voice from long speechless mankind. Yet men for the most part didn’t know and didn’t care, what with one and a hundred things to be done, buying and selling and providing, loving and hating, profiting and losing.
    In Philadelphia, it promised to be a good year. The town was rapidly becoming a city, and situated as a keystone among the nations of America, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and the rest, the city gave promise of being one of the great urban centers of the earth. Through its streets, its centers of commerce, which were the coffee houses, its warehouses and its wharves, teemed the trade of all the English colonies in America and of several European nations. It is true that already in the past year a somewhat incoherent body called the First Continental Congress had met in Philadelphia, but they had accomplished nothing, and solid citizens did not believe that the Congress was any menace to the security and prosperity of the colonies. There were disturbances and mutterings, in Boston for the most part and in other Yankee towns to the north; but when was there a time without disturbances? There was unrest in the back counties of the South, but what more could you expect of wild woodsmen who tramped around free as Huns with their six-foot-long rifles?
    On the other hand, there was more than adequate compensation. In the highlands, the beavers were thick as rabbits, and shepherded by lean Scotsmen and black-bearded Jews a steady stream of glossy pelts poured into the city. The Tidewater tobacco crop was better than good; the Jerseys were bursting with food; and raft after raft of good white pine floated down the Delaware. Never had the pigs in the German counties been so fat and never had the sheep, grazing in the rolling pastures north of the city, been so heavy with wool. In the wild woods, the Allegheny reaches, the lake country and the Fincastle Highlands, the deer ran thick as flies; venison in Philadelphia sold for fourpence a pound and bear meat could hardly be given away. The deer hides by the thousands piled up in stinking bales on the wharves, ready to change men’s fashions in all of Europe. Master carpenters were fighting the fad for Chippendale and Sheraton and other English cabinet makers; with a loop, a claw, and a turn, a slim back, a graceful leg, they were not merely imitating but creating a truly American furniture. The working men of the city were strong and their hands itched to make. Houses were going up, and sometimes the bricks were native as well as the cement.
    There were stirrings and murmurings, but there was also an abundance of good things. There was discontent, yet there was enough content. War was in the air, albeit vaguely, but people did not want war; freedom was in the air, too, but most people didn’t give two damns about freedom.
    The city was a good one, carefully laid out, bought by Perm, not plundered from the red men, full of rich Quakers and poor Quakers, and rich and poor who were not Quakers; but altogether with such a determined air of middle-class prosperity as you would not find in any European city. The houses were solid structures, mostly brick, some half-timber, some frame. Many of the streets were cobbled, named not for men in an ungodly fashion, but for trees, or descriptively, or numbered. There was a good fire department, a good guard, a good library. There was a philosopher, Ben Franklin, come out of the city. There was more good glass, linen, silver, and furniture than anywhere else in America; and after a fashion there was more freedom of religion and thought.