lican theory, and made them too eager to hand over those duties to a new class of professional politicians. Paine had little use for politicians—for government in general—but he did not draw the connection between their growing importance and the growth of commerce. ^* On the contrary, he proclaimed himself a "friend of commerce," which he referred to as a "pacific system, operating to cordialize mankind, by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other." Republicans took no such benign view of commerce, nor did they share Paine's enthusiasm for cosmopolitan citizenship. Civic humanism implied citizenship in a particular city or state, whereas Paine called himself a citizen of the world and defended commerce on the grounds, reminiscent of Hume and Adam Smith, that it would "extirpate the system of war" and produce a "universal civilization."

These opinions set Paine at odds with classical republicans, but they did not necessarily make him an exponent of "bourgeois liberalism," as Isaac Kramnick calls him. The commercial society he favored was a democracy of small shopkeepers and artisans, and it was shopkeepers and artisans who kept Paine's memory alive in the nineteenth century, idolizing him as the champion of the "producing classes" in their struggle against the parasites. This distinction, the very essence of popular radicalism in the nineteenth century, appealed to those who condemned the machinery of modern credit as exploitive and unproductive. Paine may have defended the Bank of North America against its critics in the I780s, but he seems to have thought of banks essentially as repositories for shop-

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In Common Sense, however, he did observe that commerce sapped the "spirit both of patriotism and military defence." The American colonists, he argued, should not be deterred from declaring their independence by their sparse population and undeveloped economy. "The more a country is peopled, the smaller their armies are. In military numbers, the ancients far exceeded the moderns: and the reason is evident, for trade being the consequence of population, men become too much absorbed thereby to attend to anything else.... The bravest achievements were always accomplished in the nonage of a nation. With the increase of commerce, England hath lost its spirit. The city of London, notwithstanding its numbers, submits to continued insults with the patience of a coward. The more men have to lose, the less willing are they to venture." This is pure republicanism—one of the few unadulterated expressions of republican ideology in Paine's writings.

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