or with fifteen pounds apiece. With this aid they could buy a cow, and implements to cultivate a few acres of land; and instead of becoming burdens upon society, which is always the case where children are produced faster than they can be fed, would be put in the way of becoming useful and profitable citizens.

Paine's democracy of small property owners had little room for a permanent class of wage earners, much less for a dependent class of paupers maintained at public expense.

Paine can be called a liberal only in the same way that he can be called a republican—by stretching the terms completely out of shape. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberals worked out an elaborate ideology of progress based on the division of labor, unprecedented gains in productivity, the upgrading of tastes, and the expansion of consumer demand. Paine took a far more limited view of the good life. "Every man wishes to pursue his occupation, and to enjoy the fruits of his labours and the produce of his property in peace and safety, and with the least possible expense." In spite of his enthusiasm for commerce, he had serious doubts about the reality of progress. "Whether that state that is proudly, perhaps erroneously, called civilization, has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man, is a question that may be strongly contested." The contrast between affluence and misery, "splendid appearances" and shocking "extremes of wretchedness," made it impossible for Paine to side wholeheartedly with the advocates of improvement. The "great mass of the poor" had become a "hereditary race," and "this mass increases in all countries that are called civilized."

Paine is best understood, it would appear, neither as a republican nor as a "vintage liberal" but as one of the founders of a populist tradition that drew on republicanism and liberalism alike but mixed these ingredients into something new. The portions varied from one writer to another. In Paine's recipe, liberal ingredients predominated; but this should suggest not that his bourgeois sympathies prevented him from becoming a modern social democrat but that liberalism, in the mind of Paine and his followers, did not yet stand for progress, large-scale production, and the proliferation of consumer goods. Only when it did come to stand unambiguously for these things did the underlying opposition between populism and liberalism become unmistakable.

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