He fought for the freedom of the country, for the abolition of slavery, for the rights of women; he fought for old-age pensions, for free public schools, for the protection of dumb animals, for international copyright; for a hundred and one ideals of equity and humanity which today are legislature.

And he fought with his body and his brain; with his "flaming eloquence" and also with a gun! Once let him perceive the cause to be a just one, and--I know of no more magnificently belligerent a figure in all history.
And yet note here the splendid, the illuminating paradox: Paine abhorred war.

Every truly great fighter has abhorred war, else he were not truly great.

In 1778, in the very thick of the Revolution, he wrote solemnly: "If there is a sin superior to every other, it is that of wilful and offensive war....

He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death." (A copy of this, together with the President's recent message, might advantageously be sent to a certain well-known address on the other side of the world!) Yet did Paine, with this solemn horror of war, suggest that the United States stop fighting?
No more than he had suggested that they keep out of trouble in the first place.