Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/157

Rh the beginning of the desire for news, the supplying of which in the middle of the next century was to be found so profitable by many editors, but especially by the Greeleys and the Bennetts. This changed attitude on t^ie part of the people was what led Washington—the first general in history to do so—to carry with him a literary assistant. This assistant was Thomas Paine, a born journalist if there ever was one, and his series of essays, called "The Crisis," was read to every corporal's guard.

Thomas Paine arrived in America November 20, 1774, with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin to his son-in-law, Richard Bache. For eighteen months Paine edited the Pennsylvania Magazine or American Museum, and during that time the magazine was "A seed bag from which this sower scattered the seeds of great reforms, ripening with the progress of civilization."

He was for republican equality and against privilege. He was the first to urge an extension of independence to the enslaved negro; the first to arraign monarchy, to denounce dueling, to suggest more radical ideas of marriage and divorce, to call for justice for women and kindliness toward animals, and to advocate national and international copyright.

It was while he was working on the Pennsylvania Magazine that he composed "Common Sense," with an effect "which has rarely been produced by types or paper in any age or country." Leaving the Pennsylvania Magazine, he joined the army "as a sort of itinerant writer, of which his pen was an appendage, almost as necessary and formidable as its cannon." When the spirit of the colonists drooped he revived them with his