Benjamin Franklin – We Have an Old Mother

We Have An Old Mother By Benjamin Franklin We have an old mother that Peevish is grown She snubs us like children that Scare walk alone She forgets we're grown up and Have sense of our own Which nobody can deny, deny Which nobody can deny. If we don't obey orders, Whatever the case; She frowns, and she chides And she loses all patience And sometimes she hits us A slap in the fact Which nobody can deny, deny Which nobody can deny. Her orders so odd are, We often suspect That age has impaired Her sound intellect But still an old mother Should have some respect Which nobody can deny, deny Which nobody can deny. We'll join in her lawsuits To baffle all those Who, to get wheat she has, Will be often her foes; But we know it must all be Our own, when she goes. Which nobody can deny, deny Which nobody can deny....
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Common Sense by Thomas Paine

Introduction to the Third Edition Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; 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 never 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 usurpation of either. In the following sheets,...
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