Citizen Tom Paine Read Online Free PDF

prodding him on. A month later, he ran off to sea, shipping aboard a privateer as a cabin boy. The captain, grinning, said to him, “What do I want with a Quaker?”
    â€œTake me, try me.”
    â€œWill you fight?”
    â€œI’ll fight,” Tom said eagerly. “I’ll fight, I swear I’ll fight.” Here was a vision of freedom broad and dazzling; on the sea, a man was his own master; riches meant freedom, and there were no heights to which a man might not rise. The captain caught him across the ear and flung him full length on the deck.
    â€œCome along, little one, come along,” he smiled.
    The captain was drunk constantly and a beast about it; the mate was drunk only half the time and only half a beast about it; but both of them took it out on the cabin boy, and by the time they had coasted around and into the Thames, Tom Paine was a livid mass of bruises. There was only one relief, and that was to get at the captain’s rum and swill it down. And for that, the beatings were doubled. Anchored outside of London, the boy slipped over the side and swam to shore. For the next two weeks he lived in the hut of a half-witted garbage collector, and in that time he ate what he could pick out of the buckets.
    They had warned him in Thetford that London was a sinful city, but as he wandered wide-eyed among the sewer-like streets, he began to understand the difference between those who sin and those whose life is a sin. The lower-class Londoner of that time, the beast whose forest was a maze of alleyways, lived on cheap gin, cheap sin, and cheap robbery. For the first, the punishment was slow death, for the second horrible death, and for the last death by hanging or stoning or quartering. For a tupenny piece a man could get roaring, crazy drunk, and since drunkenness was the only way for the poor to forget that hell was now and not in the hereafter, gin had during the course of years come to replace almost every other food. Three-year-olds drank gin by the glassful, nursing mothers lived on gin and quieted their babies with it, working men took for their supper a can of gin, old folks hastened death with it, and adolescents made themselves insane with it. In some streets, at certain times of the day, the whole population would be screaming drunk with gin. Prostitutes lost their livelihood when any female from a child to a mother would sell herself for a penny to grind in the gin-mill.
    In this, Tom Paine lived and drank and ran like a rat, and stole and cursed and fought, and slept in alleys and sheds and slimy basements. Until one day he took hold of himself, left Gin Row, and apprenticed himself to a staymaker.
    There was no hope, he knew, no escape, no salvation.
    Sixteen, a staymaker’s assistant, he hadn’t touched gin in over a year. His clothes were clean, if not good, and he read books. Night after night, he read books, all the books he could lay hands on—Swift and Addison and Pope and Defoe and Congreve and Fielding and Richardson, even Spenser, and sometimes Shakespeare; most of what he read he did not understand; Defoe and Fielding were somewhat plain to him, yet he rather resented that they should write of what he knew so well, instead of the dream world he fancied in print. He was a man, making his own way; it took him only a little while to completely expunge the Quaker “thee” from his speech. He swaggered through London, and with a rosy haze before his eyes, he would stand for hours before White’s, the great Tory gambling house, or Brooks’s, the Whig equivalent, and watch the bloods come to lay their thousands and their tens of thousands on the turn of a card. “That for me,” he would say to himself, “that for me, by God!”
    He made two friends, Alec Stivvens, a draper’s assistant, a thin, tubercular boy of fifteen, and Johnny Coot, apprentice chimney sweep, twenty-two, but with the body of a twelve-year-old. The three of