Page 66 - Beers With Our Founding Fathers

Beers with our Founding Fathers

legislating parliament and monarch that enacted the laws. The

concept of the constitutional monarch was that tyranny would be
avoided with the check of the parliament upon the monarchy. Paine

contended that as long as a monarch had any hand in power and
authority, the ability to limit the same would not be possible. He

further questioned why any person opposed to the monarchy would
still wish to include a monarch in such a role in any form of

government. Instead, Paine detailed a form of government that
would give the authority to the people. But first, there needed to be

a declaration of the rights of the people.
Paine presented several arguments describing the oppression by

England and right of the colonies to be free and self-governing –
sovereign. His first was simple – an island, a small one, ruling a

continent. It should be noted that England’s empire was significant
and touched nearly every continent – including North and South

America, Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe; only Antarctica was
without an English colony. Similarly, France and Spain also had

extensive colonial empires. The British Atlantic Colonies were the
most populous of the colonies. Paine further argued that the

colonies were populated by people and cultures from all of Europe,
not just England, and was therefore not a ‘British nation’. Moreover,

with an ocean separating the colonies from England, governing from
such a great distance, was impractical – communication, including

laws and negotiations of laws, took months. With this, he further

argued that if England was the mother country, its actions were
intolerable and no mother would be so brutal to her children.

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