Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep.

So find a comfortable spot, adjust your volume. Take a nice deep breath in. Let it out slowly and off we go.

Tonight let's relax with a book from the founding of America, just idea for the 4th of July and oddly enough the book

that kicked off the very idea for this podcast some years ago. Let's relax with common sense by Thomas Payne, first

published in 1776. Let's begin.

Introduction

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right and

raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom, but the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more

converts than reason.

As a long and violent abuse of power

is generally the means of calling the right of it in question,

and in matters too which might not have been thought of had not the sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry.

And as the King of England hath undertaken in his own right to support the Parliament in what he calls theirs.

And as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination. They have an undoubted privilege to inquire into

the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpations of either.

In the following sheets,

the author has studiously avoided everything

which is personal among ourselves.

Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof.

The wise and the worthy need not the triumph of a pamphlet, and those whose sentiments are

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