Question

Shall a band of ten or twelve thousand robbers, who are this day fifteen hundred or two thousand men less in strength than they were yesterday, conquer America, or subdue even a single state? The thing cannot be, unless we sit down and suffer them to do it.
In this excerpt, Paine uses a rhetorical device to encourage readers to

Answer 1

Stand up against what is wrong.
The author uses the rhetorical device to tell people that wrong doers can prevail only if others stand by and let them.