Thomas Paine was born in England, on January twenty-ninth, 1737, the son of a poor Quaker, farmer and corset maker. He attended a local school for a short amount of time at a basic education level, at the age of thirteen, he was forced to withdraw in order to start working. At first he started as an apprentice for his father and worked for him for a short time, but he could not accept his job so he decide to look elsewhere. He went to sea for a short while at, lived in a variety of places, and he tried vast number of different jobs. In just a few years he served as an excise man in Lincolnshire, followed by a stint as a school teacher in London, he then again settled down in 1768 as an excise officer in Lewes in East Sussex. He also managed a small shop for a few years. He married his first wife, then she died only after a year of marriage. In 1771 he married again. The marriage only lasted about three years after he got legally separated. He had no children in either of his marriages, and the marriages never brought him any happiness. He was also active in local affairs, serving on the town council and establishing a debating club at a local tavern. He tried working also as a shopkeeper, however, in that he was a failure. In April 1774, he was discharged from his duties for having absented himself from his post without leave. He settled in Philadelphia where he started his career as a journalist. He wrote many articles, one of which was a short pamphlet, Common Sense. Thomas pains experiences in England helped him with his rhetorical task, because of the constitution being so complex and out of order. He says,(in page 5 of Common Sense), “But the constitution of England is so exceedingly complex, that the nation may suffer for years together without being able to discover in which part the fault lies, some will say in one and some in other, and every political physician will advise a different medicine.” Shifting from England to the American colonies must have been a good change, and must have been what prepared him for the producing of his task. Thomas Paine thinks it is America’s best interest to be free from Great Britain because he does not agree with the way of their constitution, or the way they are governed so he thinks it is in their best interest to stay away from Great Britain. He believes in a good strength of the government and the happiness of the people. In (page 5 of the pamphlet) he says, “they will mutually and naturally support each other (not on the meaning of the king) depends the strength of the government, and the happiness of the governed. In page five of the pamphlet he is talking about how England has no union checking each other and how it contributes nothing towards the freedom of the state, in (page 5) he says, “To say that the constitution of England is a union of three powers reciprocally checking each other, is farcically, either the words have no meaning, or they are flat contradictions.” He continues on by comparing sovereignty to Satan saying that they are both parallels. In (page 14) he says, “as in the one all mankind were subjected to Satan, and in the other to sovereignty; as our innocence was lost in the first, and our authority in the last; and as both disable us from reassuming some former state and privilege, it unanswerably follow that original sin and hereditary succession are parallels.” In Thomas Paine’s defense of independence there are some weaknesses, for example he does not provide sufficient evidence for his defense. There are only few reliable claims he makes during his process of conversation including in his defense of independence. For people who have continued loyalty to the British crown, one can argue (according to Thomas Paine’s perspective) that they are men who cannot be trusted, weak men, and men who cannot see. In page twenty three of Common Sense he states, “All those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation, may be included within the following descriptions. Interested men, who are not to be trusted, weak men, who cannot see; prejudiced men, who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the Europeans world than it deserves;”