The Rights of Man

Paine’s purpose in this chapter is to show that there is a difference between constitutions and governments. The American state and federal governments have constitutions because the American people, in their separate state and federal capacities, exercised their sovereign authority by calling conventions, deliberating, and then approving actual documents. Not only did Americans call special conventions to draft their constitutions, but they also called special conventions to ratify them or submitted them to a vote of the people. Either way, the existing governments had no authority whatsoever in the constitution-making process. 

The American constitutional example stands in sharp contrast to the British system, where a constitution exists more in theory than in actual practice. Paine denounces Britain’s “[g]overnment by precedents” (134, emphasis added) as “one of the vilest systems that can be set up” (134) because it operates according to the principle that a constitution exists in Britain through historical precedents and the working of the government system itself. Therefore, Paine argues, whatever the British government does can be construed as constitutional, regardless of whether or not the people would ever voluntarily consent to it.

Much like his description of republican government in Part 2, Chapter 3, Paine’s analysis of constitutional structures does not insist upon precision or uniformity. A proper constitution might have a unicameral or a bicameral legislature, with the American constitutions providing examples of both. For Paine, the key to a republican system is that all authority derives from the sovereign people, however that authority might be distributed across different departments.

Finally, having argued that there is a difference between constitutions and government, Paine hopes to convince the people of Britain that they live under a government without a constitution. Here he returns to the theme of corruption: “What is called the splendour of the throne is no other than the corruption of the state. It is made up of a band of parasites, living in luxurious indolence, out of the public taxes” (140). Paine contrasts the “luxurious indolence” of the monarch and the aristocracy with the condition of those who serve in the American government, where “no one is extravagantly paid” (142). In drawing attention to the luxury of the privileged few within a monarchical system and contrasting it unfavorably with the more modest compensation of American government officials, Paine suggests that republican governments are not just more representative, but also more thrifty, and therefore better value for the tax money of the common man.